I have talked to so many parents who tell me that it is a monumental task to get their younger daughters ready for school in the morning. Every little girl wants to dress herself in the morning, but deciding what outfit to wear can take forever and could even be a runway model selection process every morning. Unless your daughter has only one set of clothes to wear, she probably wants to change clothes three times before choosing which ones she will “agree” to wear to school every day.
At our home, we have instituted the guidelines for dressing for school and you begin by choosing your outfit the night BEFORE. So every night, before my daughters get ready for bed, they can pick up up to three outfits; of those three outfits they must choose the one they will wear to school the next day. Most of the time they use the popular “Eeny meeny miney moe” method to make their final choice and now, at ages 5 and 7, they have figured out how to make that rhyme give them the result they want.
While it takes a little longer to get them to bed at night, it saves a lot of effort in the morning, when everyone is often late to leave the house. Just don’t start with the hair in the morning or the whole plan could go out the window.
The “official” rules are that if they choose their outfit the night before and then don’t wear it or go back to the closet and start looking again, they can only choose between two outfits for the next day. This method of organizing the girls in the morning has worked wonderfully in our house with just a few incidents from my minor slightly reviewing her choice, mostly when it comes to shoes. The good news is, if they’re going to switch that decision, it’s usually to one of the other two outfits from the night before and that in itself can save a ton of time.
If you implement this method at home, I am sure you will find, like me, your daughters walking into your bedroom to wake up to them fully dressed and ready for school. Now they are the ones who push me or my wife to get ready to make breakfast for them and get to school on time. Mom, hurry up, we only have 5 minutes, that’s all I hear in the morning. And the children are right, now it is mom who stops the bus to school.
The program helps keep girls focused in the morning. It also helps them dress themselves without your help in the morning, and helps ensure that you get out of the house to go to school on time. Now if I could put my wife on the same show when we go out to dinner at night, my life would be perfect.