Click for simple, affordable ways to make the most of what's left of summer. A child psychiatrist on the small systems that take the pressure off the hardest 20 minutes of the day. It’s 7:40, the bus comes at 7:52, and one shoe is missing.
You’ve asked about the backpack four times. Your kid is half-dressed on the floor, watching dust move through a sunbeam. If that’s your morning, you have company.
About 1 in 9 US children, roughly 7.1 million kids, has been diagnosed with ADHD, according to CDC data. For a lot of those families, the hardest stretch of the day happens before anyone heads out the door. There’s a reason mornings hit this hard, and it isn’t that your kid doesn’t care.
Michael Morse, MD, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist who directs the ADHD & Anxiety Center at Alvord Baker and is an associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, says the morning routine requires a child “to do the most with the least help.” Many kids with ADHD run on a later internal clock, he says, so at 7 a.m. the brain regions that handle planning and time aren’t fully up and running, and yet, that’s when we ask kids to move through a string of boring steps against a deadline. Executive function, the mental system for getting started, tracking time and shifting gears, tends to develop more slowly in kids with ADHD, so what looks like refusal is often a brain that can’t get itself going yet without help. For parents, that means making a mental shift from asking why your kid won’t do something to examining what’s getting in the way.
That reframe can often help you resist a lecture and lend a hand instead. Sign the permission slips, settle on what’s for breakfast, and, if your kid is old enough, have them pack their backpack and lay out clothes for the next day. (For younger kids, you’ll want to supervise this process.) He also suggests a five-minute planning talk earlier in the day to look at what’s ahead for the day together, whether that’s gym, a test or a game after school, which helps a kid build their own sense of what’s coming. Sleep is the biggest lever of all.
Sleep trouble is common here, affecting as many as half of kids with ADHD by some estimates. A steady bedtime, screens off about an hour before bed, and a warm bath or shower all make it easier for your child to nod off at night, which sets the stage for smoother mornings. Kids with ADHD often can’t hold a string of instructions in mind, so “‘go get ready’ is really six instructions in three words,” Morse says.
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