Getting Up and Out the Door on Back-to-School Mornings and Work Mornings

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Transcript: Getting Up and Out the Door on Back-to-School Mornings and Work Mornings | Community Q&A

Welcome to the Neurodiverging Podcast

Danielle Sullivan: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. My name’s Danielle, and I’m here today with Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney, and we’re excited to introduce this new feature to the podcast.

It’s called Community Q and A. Anne, will you introduce yourself and say a little bit about Community Q and A?

Introducing Dr. Anne Elrod Whitney

Anne Elrod Whitney: My name is Anne Elrod Whitney. I am a coach, a writer, and an educator. My day job is I’m a professor at Penn State in the College of Education. I do a lot of work around things that are in my life.

So, neurodivergence, parenting, surviving trauma, and also just writing and how it’s useful for things like journaling, telling your story, and coming to understand yourself a little bit better.

The Concept of Community Q&A

Anne Elrod Whitney: So here’s what we’re doing today. I’m here for this new podcast series. We’re calling it Neurodiverging Community Q and A.

And honestly, Danielle, it’s because I have questions—so many questions—every time I meet with you, and every time I engage with something at Neurodiverging.com, whether it’s the podcast, whether it’s a workshop that you give, or if it’s a community event, like the recent Connect in Community pop-up event that you had.

I always learn so much, and yet I always have so many questions. I’m realizing—newsflash—I am not alone. When you have a question, you think it’s just you. You think it’s just you, like not knowing something. But no, I think I’m not the only one having questions. We all have questions, and so you and I are here today.

We’re just gonna take up a question directly and answer it if we can.

Danielle Sullivan: I’m really excited for this, and I am so grateful to Anne for coming up with this concept because we always have questions popping up in the Discord, in an email, and in everything. And it would be great to answer some of them for you.

So we are not promising easy or tidy answers to anything. We are just people. We are—but we do have a lot of experience. I have experience as the founder of Neurodiverging and as a neurodivergent coach and somebody who has my own personal experience, but also worked with 200-something clients now at this point in my career.

And also drawing on Anne’s experience as an educator, researcher, writer, and coach. We both have very deep and wide experiences—both professional and personal. We’re neurodivergent people. We’re also raising neurodivergent kids, so I think we have a lot to give to you. So let’s go ahead with our first question.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Now I’m feeling nervous. Like, what if we don’t have a lot to give? But I’ll tell you one thing—I found with questions in life, and I don’t know if this is true for you, that even identifying the question is usually a huge step. So if nothing else, we’re going to discuss some questions, and if someone wants to call it answers, hey, that’s cool. Yeah, perfect. Are you ready for the first? I’m so ready. Question. I’m so excited.

Back to School: The Real New Year

Anne Elrod Whitney: Alright, this community question is about back to school, and in most of the Northern Hemisphere right now, we are approaching back to school. I call this the Real New Year, and that’s because I live in a college town where it doesn’t matter if you have kids, it doesn’t matter if you’re connected to the college—you can just tell in the grocery store, in Target, in the streets that something is happening. All of a sudden, the population in my town is doubling.

And I always get that kind of back-to-school feeling when there are school supplies for sale. And it might be time to get out the cooler weather clothes, depending where you live.

There’s this sense that summer is ending and we’re moving into fall. And so I don’t want to presume that everybody has kids or goes to school, but at the same time, it’s a cultural thing that’s happening right now. Right. And I think you and I together cover a lot of the bases, so don’t correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that you homeschool and sometimes unschool your own children.

I have a student entering the ninth grade, and I have a student with their first day of college today. And by the way, I did receive a photo from said college saying that classes were attended, so this is really good. And then, of course, my job has to do with school. And this year, I’m actually returning to school myself for some graduate courses as well.

So for a lot of reasons, this is the real new year: back to school.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah. So here’s the question.

Morning Routines and Challenges

Anne Elrod Whitney: What do you do about the morning, right? Yeah. So there’s a lot with school. You have to—mm-hmm—wake up. You have to prepare for the day of school or work or whatever, and you have to leave the house at a certain time.

How do we do this? Because I am really struggling still at 51 to make that happen for myself, much less anyone else.

Danielle Sullivan: So I will, just to clarify, I do homeschool my kids. We have a couple of community programs we do that do require us to leave the house at a certain time. And we do a lot of unschooling.

I also teach at SNHU, and so I’m in that—it’s virtual, but it’s still like in that system of having to do certain things at certain times, and having due dates and assignments and all that. I think this is a really hard question for a lot of people. I have to say that my personal answer before I give you any professional expertise: my personal answer was frankly to opt out, which not everybody gets to do. But when my kids were younger and we were going to the public school, which was a great school overall,

I could not get up on time. I was routinely getting them in late. My kids had the traditional—or the sensory—challenges that I think a lot of neurodivergent kids have of getting dressed every morning, and brushing hair every morning, and just looking presentable. Putting shoes on was a huge deal.

I use that example a lot in my workshops just because, same—it was real. Shoes are so hard. It was a real serious challenge. Yeah. And so first of all, I guess what I would want to say is: if you’re having trouble with this, you’re not alone, and you’re not doing something wrong. It’s just legitimately hard.

There’s a lot of moving pieces. There’s a lot of executive function work that has to be maintained for adults as well as for any children you’re attempting to guide. And also, school is scary for a lot of kids, even once they get there, and they like it, if they do. That transition of going into something that you don’t know exactly what to expect is really frightening and dysregulating for a lot of children.

So, with all that said, here are a couple of things that come up for me. First of all: actually writing out or talking to another human about all the things that need to happen before school every day, right? Because a lot of times, we keep all this in our head, and it gets all jumbled up in there.

So if you can just have a conversation with your partner, or your older child, or your mom, whoever it is, around, like, in the morning, “I have to get dressed, get Jeremy dressed, get Sasha dressed, find everyone’s shoes, get everyone fed, be out the door by this time in order to get there at this time.”

And just make sure you actually understand the tasks you’re requesting of yourself to accomplish. Make yourself a manual. Make yourself a list. Make yourself a visual schedule. We have resources for that on the website as well. Potentially making visual schedules for your kiddos if you can.

Also, sometimes it is worth it to see if there’s things you’re trying to do that you could just opt out of. Are you trying to do your kids’ hair beautifully every morning, and it’s really stressing everyone out? Is there a demand you could drop? Could you just not brush their hair, and their teacher might look at you a little funny, but realistically, is it going to be harmful to them or other students?

Yeah, I would love to pass it back on to you, Anne, ’cause you have a very different experience of kids in your house.

Anne Elrod Whitney: I have experience, but it’s not all success. I’ve had success and failure. I’ll share that. When I was a student, I was so hard to wake up to get to school—mm-hmm—which I dreaded. By high school, some of the things that my mother tried to wake me for school were calling me on the phone,

’cause we had multiple phone lines in the house. So that was one. My house had one of those weird little intercom speakers, and it didn’t really work, right? But if you pressed it, it just crackled. So she would shout into it, “Time to wake up!” She tried just not doing anything and making it my problem.

And so I would just not go to school. Like, “Hey, great!” ‘Cause she had to go to work, right? Mm-hmm. She threw water on me, and even ice on me in the bed, tickled my feet, put a dog on me. I was really impossible to wake up.

Medical and Practical Solutions

Anne Elrod Whitney: So the first thing that I would say is: are there physical things happening that make it difficult to wake up?

I have that problem right now. I’m working with my doctors and so on to investigate. I have this daytime sleepiness. Maybe it’s narcolepsy. Maybe there’s something diet-wise, that if I’m old enough, if I have caffeine in the afternoon, I won’t sleep, then it’s going to be hard to get up.

If you are someone who has the room very dark to sleep, which I can be that person, is there a way to have it get lighter when you need to wake up, so that you’re not trying to rouse yourself in a dark, dark room?

And obviously, that goes for children. So, is it possible to open their blinds before you really try to get them up? And I, when my kids were in preschool, that was what I did. I kind of went slow. Is there a person in the house who is an early riser, and can that person be in charge of waking everyone else?

Yeah. That was huge for me. When my second child was born, he was always one of these 5:00 a.m. babies. So I was up. Yeah, because I had to be. Now I wasn’t functional, right, but I was awake because there was a toddler that was loose in the house, so someone had to wake up. Up through middle school, even.

He was the reason I was waking up. And in fact, the more competent he became in the mornings, the more I tended to accidentally sleep in.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: If you are the person, can you make yourself be needed in the morning? If you have a morning person, can you shift some of the load of morning onto that person?

For kids, that’s empowering. Yeah. Right. To have a trait in themselves that they can draw upon as an authority in the home.

Empowering Kids and Adjusting Schedules

Anne Elrod Whitney: Another thing was what you mentioned, Danielle, about the schedule. I know in coaching you have worked with me to try to have a visual schedule for the morning. I really resisted it as an adult.

Yeah. I had one for my kid. So I have two children: one is diagnosed autistic and with ADHD. The other is diagnosed with ADHD, but not autism. So, for what diagnoses are worth, that’s what I have. The one with both diagnoses is more self-regulating than the one with the ADHD only.

So, for him, he would worry. He would be like, “Okay, I’ve got my shoes. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?” We made a schedule for him to reduce anxiety.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah.

Anne Elrod Whitney: And some years it’s just been on the whiteboard. Now I have a little clicky to-do list where you can click off each item, which we enjoy. It really doesn’t matter. It can just be a sheet of paper taped to the wall, but it has on it for him: everything in your bag, socks, shoes, glasses, brush your hair, breakfast, pills, phone. And they’re in that order because we learned about what would fall through the cracks.

Like, he does carry a phone to school. I like that the school does not allow them to have it, but he has it in the backpack for after school or divorce. There’s reasons. He would walk out without that because he’d be using it. Right. Same with glasses. He only needs glasses for reading, and so he would take them off and put them on multiple times in the morning. That has to be near the end of the list. Mm-hmm. I wasn’t doing that for me.

I guess I thought I was the orchestrator of everyone. I shouldn’t need it or something. And as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder. I’ve started at zero. Yeah. My first thing, and this is where I’ll end, my first thing was to simply get up at the same time every day. Those of you who can manage different things on different days, I honor and respect you.

I cannot. I am simple. I need to wake up at the same time every day, and I need to do that whether the kids have school or not, whether there’s something early or not, whether anyone else needs my assistance or not—especially now that I do not leave the house as much for work. I’m 99% from home now. I just have to get up no matter what. 

Related to that, no snooze.

Danielle Sullivan: Mm-hmm.

Anne Elrod Whitney: This is tough. Listen, I already had my phone alarm going off in the bathroom so that I have to get up, stand up, walk to the bathroom, and even then I was hitting snooze and walking all the way back to bed and falling back to sleep. I have to set it to no snooze. Mm-hmm.

And I ha that way. I want to press snooze, and it’s not there. I don’t have my glasses on, so I can’t see to make a new alarm, which stops me from doing that. And it means I meant what I said—I set this alarm because I wanted to get up. So I try to think about it as like honoring myself. There is an Anne who wants Anne to wake up right now. Mm-hmm. And current Anne doesn’t really feel it, but there’s another Anne somewhere who thought this was a good idea.

Yeah. So I wake up and I immediately take meds. If you do take medication or if your children take medication, I would suggest tying that very early into your routine. Because for me, if I need it for executive function, and my problems in the morning are about executive function, maybe I should take my meds. Yeah.

And then the last thing I’ll say was that I got a dog, and that—I don’t know. Is it a crutch, or is it a pet? I don’t know. But the dog—the dog’s needs are concrete. The dog has to pee, and the dog doesn’t have an indoor bathroom. And so I wake up and I start the routine by simply getting up, taking the dog out, and then taking my meds. From there, I can see the list on the wall, and I’m good to go.

Danielle Sullivan: Yeah. The one is, like Anne said, some medical reasons that people oversleep, and so it’s always good to check in about those. And if you are an ADHDer, a lot of us have specifically ADHD reasons that we can oversleep. So yeah, check in with a professional about those. If you are the parent of a teen, teens naturally want to go to bed later and sleep later, and that’s physiological. And then the schools, the structure of schools, don’t support them to do that.

So it is sort of not your teen’s fault that they want to stay up till two in the morning and then get up at noon. But also, school happens when school happens.

And so just being upfront that it’s like—they’re not failing, they’re doing something their body wants to, and also it’s not working for the situation, so we need to address it. Yeah. And there are also some adults who fall into those sleep categories as well.

The second thing I’ll echo is that the alarms piece is really important for a lot of us. And a little thing that works for a lot of folks is to put a note with your alarm that is like a positive affirmation or like, “Why am I doing this?” Right?

So your alarm goes off at eight, and this won’t work for you, Anne, if you need your glasses. But if you’re somebody who’s maybe more nearsighted, if you have a little note with your 8:00 a.m. alarm that says, “I’m doing this because I love my kid and I want to go for a walk with them,” or, “I am honoring myself by having a good breakfast before I go to work,” or whatever, right?

It can put you back in touch with the Danielle or Anne you were when you set that alarm. And that can be really helpful for some people. And the last thing I’ll just say is what Anne talked about with it being light in the room. Often, what can help you have sensory cues that help you go to sleep, right?

Similarly, you have sensory cues that will help you wake up. And so if you’re having trouble waking up and it’s not a medical issue, getting one of those clocks that gets brighter over time, or like Anne said, getting someone to come in and open the blinds. And also, my daughter got that clock, I forgot to say. Yeah. And it really has helped her. Oh, good. And apparently, it woke her this morning at college. Awesome.

So yeah, a nice transition right from getting mom to do it, to being independent, doing it. Those clocks are great for clients who like them. And there was one other thing, which is the, oh, temperature, right? 

That often, our bodies want it to be cooler when we’re sleeping, and then we warm up as we wake up. And so sometimes just looking at your heating controls or your air conditioning controls, your indoor temperature controls, or setting fans to go on and off at certain points—those are things that can also help.

Danielle Sullivan: I feel like there was one more thing that I thought of while you were talking, Anne, but it might be gone now, so that’s okay. I will just tell the audience that for any products we’re recommending, I’ll put links in the show notes. Go for it. And, you know, also show notes exist @neurodiverging.com. If we went too fast, and you want to look at some of these ideas.

Anne Elrod Whitney: Yeah, that’s really a good point. I know that you mentioned visual schedule, and you have a workshop available on visual schedule that I found really helpful for myself. So that’s one that I know we can point to. The other thing that you kind of hit on at the beginning, and then I forgot to touch it, was the ways that the morning can be made better and easier.

So you said rightly, you know, what do you actually have to do in the morning? Mm-hmm. And really like, do you? Mm-hmm. So, for example, I am a person who will change my clothes a lot in the morning. I will—or I won’t get dressed, ’cause I am able to work in pajamas. Either way, it’s a problem because I’ll waste time getting clothes out.

It’s also making a mess. Right. Or not being able to find things. Or if I don’t get dressed, then later on when I have to go somewhere, I’m not ready. And I run late to it because, oh crap, I forgot I had to get dressed. So for me, it’s been essential to lay the clothes out the night before if it’s an important kind of day.

Mm-hmm. I don’t do it every day, and then to go ahead and get dressed. Yeah, when I get up. And my son has been able to learn to do the same. And that way, there’s not a big frantic search, ’cause I realized that my family was having a lot of frantic searching. We’re not great at keeping up with laundry, and so maybe there’s no socks, or maybe there’s no underwear, or maybe the pink shirt for Spirit Day is not to be found.

And laying the clothes out the night before is really important. The other thing that I did was I made the morning more desirable for myself and for the kids. So instead of the morning being me saying, “Do this, do that, haven’t you done this? Haven’t you done that?” which kind of startles my son and dysregulates him, and it makes him frustrated and anxious, he had the list, right, so that he could receive many fewer reminders from me.

It made his morning calm and kind of powerful because he was the one doing it. It frees me up to just sit there and eat breakfast with him, which I hadn’t done in a long time. I also learned that if I do get up before some of the other members of my household for myself, I get to have time alone.

Yeah. And time alone is rare in my life, and I really like it. So spending that time in a joyful way, and not only tidying, because I don’t really want to get up and empty the dishwasher, although that’s a morning task for us. Mm-hmm. But I do want to get up and have journal time. Yeah. Or I do want to get up and be able to walk the dog with my son. Or I do want to do some stretching. So trying to make as much of the morning being fun and easy, anything you can offload to other people or to the night before, yeah, is going to be super helpful.

Danielle Sullivan: And don’t be afraid to be weird about how you solve problems. I will tell you briefly that when my kids were—so my kids are 22 months apart—when my eldest was like four, he was still not talking, but his sister was talking, and she was about two, they would both get up earlier than me.

And I could, like the way our house was set up, I could still hear everything, but I was so sleep-deprived and dealing with mental health stuff. What we ended up doing to make sure they had breakfast—I tried putting cereal out the night before, and all the stuff—we ended up doing is they wanted to have waffles for breakfast. I taught my four-year-old how to microwave a waffle, and then we put a second microwave. We put it on a TV tray in my bedroom so that he could come in, and I could make sure he didn’t set anything on fire.

Right. Because he was four, but I was there and present. If there was an emergency, he could wake me up. He didn’t have a ton of words, but we communicated fine. And he could make a waffle for him and his sister, and then they would go watch TV until I got up. And it was like a very nice split-the-difference way—they felt empowered to make their own breakfast when they were hungry. And sometimes they’d do that at 5:30, and sometimes they’d do that at eight.

And then I would get up at the same time every morning, having slept enough, right? But also feeling like my kids were safe. And so it’s okay to be weird with how you solve problems. I just want to say that to people. ‘Cause sometimes it’s like, you are thinking, like, “Oh, well, so-and-so needs to eat at this certain time, and I need to make this happen.” And it’s, it really is like, what could you offload and where does it have to be used as the task? Yeah. I was going to love that, serve my kids better if I slept those extra two hours. And that was proven over and over again. And yet they needed to be fed.

IEPs and Accommodations

Anne Elrod Whitney: They needed to be nearby so that you could at least hear a problem. That’s so smart. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the last detail that I can add onto that is that occasionally it’s appropriate to have adjustments in the school hours and start times in different classes in an IEP for a child. Yes. And that’s not always, and it certainly wouldn’t have helped accommodate my problem, to have it in my kids’ IEPs.

But it is sometimes possible and appropriate depending on the needs of your child. For example, kids can have a study hall first block or first period, and then start the academic classes later. Or students who might not necessarily have a bus can have a bus, so that they’re in the building a little earlier. Yeah. Or students can have like a home base in the school where they can arrive a little later or where they can depart in some different way.

Don’t forget that the accommodations that a person is receiving in school or work are meant to accommodate that context, but within the context of your whole life. Yes. So on the one hand, morning is kind of our problem, right, ’cause it’s home. But on the other hand, it’s still morning when they get to school. Yes. And so if the problems are carrying with the child to school, then that’s something the school might be able to help you address. I feel like it’s worth it to ask, you know?

I can also refer people to Sandy Lerman, who was a past guest on this podcast, around working with kids with trauma. Has a great resource that’s like—it’s titled something like IEP Requests for Kids with Trauma, and/or educational trauma. And it’s a list of things that she’s had clients request to support their kids at school. And sometimes there are things like that that you might not think of in terms of like how food is offered, when food is offered, creating safe spaces, offering different kinds of supports. You can check that too. Thank you. Okay.

Resources and Final Thoughts

Danielle Sullivan: I feel like that was totally a lot of information for people. I can say that we do have resources at Neurodiverging. We did a podcast a couple months ago on open routines in the household, so you can look at that. I do have a great course on executive—creating visual schedules for executive function support for adults. If you’re interested in that, I’ll put a link below.

And please check out the transcript for more resources and links to products we may have mentioned and lots of other things. What do you want to tell folks?

Anne Elrod Whitney: Oh, I’m just so grateful that we’re doing this and that you are willing to have me on. I have a lot more questions. So what do you say? We come back and do it again real soon.

Danielle Sullivan: Absolutely. Thank you to my patrons at Neurodiverging for making this happen.

If you’d like to support the podcast or get access to some of these courses as part of your patron rewards—’cause the Resilience Circle High Tier gets access to that—for example, visual supports course, along with 45 hours of other courses at this point. That’s at patreon.com/Neurodiverging. The website is at Neurodiverging.com.

And please tell folks where they can find you online.

Anne Elrod Whitney: You can learn about all the different kinds of work that I do at anneelrodwhitney.com. We’ll have a link to that in case spelling is not your jam, but it’s A-N-N-E-E-L-R-O-D-W-H-I-T-N-E-Y.com. Anne Elrod Whitney.com. And you can buy books. You can see what I’m doing and more to come. Thank you all so much. Remember, we are all in this together.