If your kids are heading back to school in the next week or two, I know there's a good chance that you're counting backwards from the first day and thinking about what you need to do to prepare. There's an instinct to get it all organized - bedtimes, screens, wake-ups, chores, etc.

I'm actually here to talk you out of that way of thinking today. Now don't get me wrong, I love routines. But the week before school starts is not the time to force it.

I’m making the case for joy over stress in the final days of summer.

You'll Learn:

• Why you might be craving routine at this point in the summer
• What back-to-school and jet lag have in common
• Why forcing school routines early isn't worth it
• How to savor the last days of summer
• My favorite back-to-school tradition (do we have a picture of this I can use in the post?)

Read the full show notes here.

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✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Toolkit here

Connect With Darlynn:

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• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlynn Childress. I'm a

life and parenting coach. And it is the

6th of August if you're listening to this as it comes out. And

I bet there's a bunch of you that are looking at your calendar

anticipating school starting next week. You're counting

backwards from the first day of school and you're starting to think, Okay, if

school starts in a week, we need to start moving bedtime up tonight. We need

to cut off screens. We need to start getting back into it. And your kids

are still very much in summer mode, staying up late, sleeping in,

no schedule, and you're about to spend the next 7

days fighting them on all of your new rules, trying to

get back to the routine. So if that's you, if you're

thinking that, if you're prepping and wanting to plan and get back to

the routine and you're feeling stressed about school starting and you're like, these kids are

out of control, we need to get, you know, we need to buckle down and

get them ready. I wanna talk to you about that today. I wanna talk you

out of thinking that way. Not because routines don't matter.

Of course I want you to have good sleep routines and bedtime

routines and screen routines and all of those things. I love

routines. But this isn't the week to force your routines

because as much as I love routines, I know

from experience from coaching hundreds of moms and my own family That when

I try to force it too early, it ends up backfiring and

causing me more stress than it's worth. And

so I wanna talk today about savoring this last week

instead of stressing over this last week before school starts. Now,

if your kid's school doesn't start for a week or two, just bookmark

this podcast or whatever and save it for the week before your kids go back

to school so that you can have this reminder. So I often

hear from moms right around this time, and I've already heard it in my

own coaching practice, that they're supposed to be getting

ready for school in a very specific way. They're like, I gotta get early

bedtimes, I gotta cut back on screen time, I gotta start getting them up

early, and I have to get them back into chores. And there's this

instinct to get it all organized. And I wanna make the case

today that even if you put in all that effort, it won't actually

work and it will make the summer Stressful, the end of the summer

stressful instead of enjoyable. So let me

talk to you about what's worth doing, what you shouldn't

try to do, why I want you to spend this week savoring

the last bits of summer instead of scrambling and feeling stressed.

Before we get into talking about like why I don't really want you

to force getting back into your back-to-school routines right

now, I do wanna acknowledge why you might be feeling that

way. Now, of course, on one hand, you might be thinking this is best for

the kids, but what I've noticed in my practice is that a lot

of times us as moms, we are desperate to get

the routines back online. And we justify doing

that by telling our kids or telling ourselves that we have to do it

because it'll help them get ready for school. And it actually

doesn't really prepare them for school, and I'll talk about why.

In a minute, but I want to talk about for you that you are

eager to get them back into school. You're eager to get those bedtimes back

online. You're eager to get those morning routines kind of up and out the door

and that kind of thing because you've had 2 months of, you know, very little

schedule and a lot of togetherness and a lot more decisions and logistics

and less structure. And you might just be plain worn out

and bringing that routine back early, it is about

you. It's giving yourself that feeling of control and a little

predictability and a sense of, okay, we're getting back to normal after

the summer. And I wanna say that's a completely legitimate

reason to want structure back. That could happen at any

point in the summer, and it can also happen in the school year. There are

periods of time where our routines or our boundaries or our limits,

they get sort of squirrely and Maybe we get off track and we need

to go back to the foundations and reset bedtime, reset screen

limits, reset snacks. Those are important

things to do as a parent when you start to feel like things are

getting loosey-goosey around your house. But in the summer, that happens

normally. So if you are feeling like you wanna

have an earlier bedtime or a tighter evening routine and getting

back to that rhythm will help you feel calmer and will help you feel more

regulated right now, That's a good reason to do it.

But I don't want you to feel like you need to justify getting

back into the school routines before school starts

because that's like what good moms do, right? You don't—

if you want structure because you want it, that's great. But if

you are feeling pressure to do it because you think you need to do it

to help your kids, I'm going to tell you that forcing it early doesn't

help your kids have better success once school starts.

The distinction I want you to make is, are you getting back to routines

because it serves you, because you need the predictability, because you're

depleted and this will restore you? Or are you doing it because you think

you're supposed to, because good moms get the routine going early,

because you'd feel guilty otherwise? So on one hand, it's taking care

of yourself, and the other one is pressure dressed up as responsibility.

So if it's the first one, if you wanna get back to structure and routine

because it will serve you, great. Know that you will probably

have a lot of resistance from your kids because they are in summer mode still.

School has not started. They don't believe in prep time. So

it might be very challenging to get your boundaries and get your routines back

online. But if it's important to you and you wanna do it now, go ahead.

Don't apologize for it. But if you find yourself doing it 'cause you think you

should, That's the pressure I want you to let go of this week because you

don't have to. Now here's why. The idea is that if

we give our kids a week before school starts, then they'll have more

success once school starts. But that's not actually

how it works. It doesn't create a smoother transition just

because your kids have gone to bed early. Truth is, they are not

ready to go to bed early because they haven't gone to school

yet. They haven't had— That experience. Have you ever had that where

you're like trying to prepare yourself for jet lag and you're like trying to move

your calendar up an hour in order so that when you get someplace

you don't have jet lag? It doesn't really work because you can't really force

yourself to fall asleep when you're not tired. That's sort of what ends up happening

when you try to fix routines. The school

itself, the school schedule is the routine. That's what

creates The routine for your kids. So when

you try to add that back in before school starts, you end

up fighting about bedtime because your kid isn't tired at whatever time,

8:00 PM, just because you've decided it's bedtime. They're tired at

8:00 during a school week because they woke up at 6:30, they went to

school, they sat still, they socialized all day, and their body is actually

ready to wind down. So you can't manufacture

That tiredness or that rhythm that school brings just because you

declare that it's time to do it. So the circumstance of school does most

of the work for you. Once school starts, your kid has to be up at

a certain time. They're active, they're mentally engaged, they're around other kids,

they're using up energy in a way that summer with its late mornings and lazy

afternoons doesn't require. So the structure is what

naturally pulls your kid back into routine with sleep and screens

and sweets and, you know, all of the different rhythms that

school offers. It's not something you need to preload a week in advance.

It's built into the first few days back to school. So if you

try too early, you might end up having

a lot of frustration. You're gonna say lights out and your kids are

all wired up and you'll get frustrated and they'll get frustrated.

And the last week of summer that's supposed to feel fun and easy and

delightful will end up feeling tense and frustrating. I

actually coach moms out of pre-routining their

kids for this reason, because I want you to have

ease and stress-free experiences with your family. I

want you to enjoy your family and enjoy the last bits of summer and like

squeeze it out, like savor this last bit, like

slurping up a milkshake with a straw, you know, just taking

all the last bits in instead of trying to rush into the next

week. If your kid is still on summertime internally and you

try to rush them into school time, you're going to end up creating friction

that for a routine that's going to happen naturally anyway, the moment that

school circumstances start happening. So now I'm not saying

don't do anything because it can be pretty rough to get a kid up

at 7 if they've been getting up at 10:00 AM. So you may

want to 1 or 2 days before get them up at

their regular school time so that they are more tired

that evening and try to get them to bed at a

regular time or a little bit earlier than you have been. Bedtime

might still be challenging, but you won't have

1 whole week of challenges, right? I would rather you have just

a little bit of a head start. Start without turning the whole last week

into a summer of like an— turning that whole last week of summer into

a battle and negotiation and frustration. So

that's all you really need to do to get ready for school is a night

or two of earlier bedtime and like a couple of days where

you wake them up at the time that they will wake up for school. You

can kind of build in that school schedule a little bit. Maybe if your

school starts on Wednesday, you do it Monday, Tuesday. Yeah. But I want you to

be able to feel free to have that whole last week of school without

kind of getting into like the discipline and the structure and the rhythm and

all of that. Just wait, 'cause school itself is going to do that. Now

the other permission I wanna give you is that it's okay if the first few

days of school are rough. I have this episode that's gonna come out next

week called Back to School Shit Show because I want you to know that

you will end up after a couple of days of school with

a very tired and overwhelmed and dysregulated kid. You are

going to, even if you are perfect and you adjust everybody, they're still going to

be overwhelmed because of the demands of school themselves are

overwhelming and demanding. So if your mornings are slow, if your kids are tired

and cranky in the afternoon, if bedtime is still a fight the first

week, even after school starts, that's not a sign that you didn't prepare.

That's just what it will look like even if you did prepare. Yeah. So why

bother preparing? Also, I want you to know that teachers expect

kids to be a little bit of a mess after— once school starts.

They know that they're coming off of summer. They've done this every year with every

batch of new kids. They know that the first week of school is not

anyone's best week. So no one at school is judging your kid for being tired

or a little off during the first few days. So there's no reason

for you to judge yourself or panic or think you need to have fixed something

before the bell even rings. Give the transition back to school

a couple of weeks. That's what it's gonna take, and you don't have to solve—

have it all solved on day 1. So if this week isn't about

installing the school routine, what is it about? I'd say it's still

summer. Right up until the first bell rings, it's still

summer, and I think this week deserves to be treated that way.

Not as a training camp for school, but as the last stretch

of the summer that you've been in for the past 2 months. There was a

tradition in my family all the way from kindergarten to 12th grade that I did

with both of my kids because we didn't like that summer ended.

It honestly felt sad, like saying goodbye to that slow,

looser rhythm. So the years ago when my son was in kindergarten,

he came home from school on his first day of school and he was a

little bit grumpy from the heat and he was sad that school had started. And

so we made a decision on the spot, like, let's pretend summer's not

over. And so me and my 2 boys, we jumped right into the pool

fully dressed in our school clothes. And we did that every

first day of school for the next 12, 13 years

because it became our way of saying the transition back to school doesn't have

to erase the thing that we're leaving behind. We can still savor it

even though we're back to school. We still get to spend time. We still get

to enjoy each other. We still can have fun. And I want this last week

to be that for you. That's the spirit I want for this last week before

school. Don't spend it bracing for school.

Spend it actually being in the summer, the pool, the lake, the

river, the creeks, the late nights, the lack of schedule, the extra ice

cream at night, because that's going to end soon enough on its own

without your help. So what I want you to take from today is that you,

again, you don't have to force the school routine into place a week early.

It mostly won't work and it'll cause you this stressful last week of summer

for very little payoff. The one thing worth doing ahead of time

is nudging bedtime earlier the night or two before school starts.

Everything else, you can just wait until the school rhythm

builds into your actual life rhythm. There's an

adjustment period. It's gonna be bumpy. Teachers expect it. You can expect it.

It's okay. And if you want the routine back early because it genuinely

helps you feel steadier, go for it. Just make sure that's the actual

reason, not a should. So I want you to try

this this week. Pick one summer thing, a late night,

a pool day, an unstructured afternoon, a movie marathon, ice

cream by the, by the lake or whatever you do and

actually savor that one last thing on purpose.

Instead of spending time worrying about school starting, enjoy

that one last thing. Make it meaningful.

Okay, that's it. I hope you have had a wonderful summer and that

you are gonna kick off the school year when it starts.

And I will talk to you next week.