I yell at my son most mornings and I hate it.
He has ADHD, and every step needs the same words over and over.
I say brush your teeth.
Then I find him in the bathroom holding the toothbrush and doing nothing with it.
I say it again and he asks where his toothpaste is, and it is right there on the counter.
Breakfast is take a bite, take a bite, take a bite.
By the third reminder I am already loud.
When it is time to leave he has no shoes on and his water bottle is empty.
Then I yell, and sometimes I say things I should not say to him.
The second after, I feel sick.
I say sorry at the door and it sits on me all day.
I feel guilty, and I am angry before seven, and I hate it.
I have tried everything the threads tell me.
Get up earlier so I start calm.
I did that, and I was calm right up to the third reminder about his teeth.
Say it once and walk away.
I said it once, it did not happen, and by the third time I was loud.
The low calm voice held until the shoes.
Connection over correction, so I sat with him first.
Then it was 7:10, nothing was done, and I was loud again.
At night I read the forums looking for a gentler way.
I am not bad at any of this.
The calm voice works fine at the store and at dinner.
I cannot do it from where the morning puts me.
I wrote myself a sticky note and stuck it on the bathroom mirror.
Say it once. Don't yell.
Last week he was standing right in front of it with the toothbrush in his hand, not moving it.
I said brush your teeth for the fourth time and my voice went up.
He looked at me in the mirror and said, I'm not awake yet, Mom.
That note was right there between our two faces and I yelled anyway.
That is what I am scared of.
He will not remember the twenty calm reminders.
He will remember me yelling.
And he will know exactly how I felt about him at 6:50.
A grown man in one of those threads said his mom cried after drop-off and he never knew.
Some mornings I catch myself not liking my own kid, and I hate myself for it.
That night I went back to the forums.
A mom named Carla answered someone's post about the twenty reminders.
She told her the part nobody had told me.
The fight does not start at the third reminder.
It starts in the first two minutes of his day.
Her kid was the same as mine until she stopped being the first thing he pushed against.
She is not the one who wakes him anymore, a wristband does it.
I looked it up.
How he gets woken decides the state he starts the day in.
A loud alarm, or a parent at the door, spikes his stress hormones before his feet hit the floor.
He starts the day in fight or flight.
An ADHD brain takes longer to come back down from that.
Kids with ADHD are harder to wake in the morning. That's a 2009 review of 16 studies.
So every reminder lands on a kid who is still flooded.
The twenty reminders are the wake-up fight stretched out over an hour.
The twenty-first one is my yell.
My calm is his calm, and this group has said that for years.
I cannot be calm at 6:50 if we already had the fight at 6:30.
I was losing the morning before he ever opened his eyes.
The wristband Carla meant is called Dawn Band.
It vibrates on his wrist at the time I set, no sound, until he sits up and turns it off himself.
Nobody comes in.
No startle.
The first thing in his day is his own.
It is not a phone or a smartwatch.
I read that and thought, fine, but how does a buzz on his wrist change brushing his teeth.
The kid I walk in on is already up and not against me.
So the reminders land on a calmer kid.
A calmer kid needs fewer of them.
Fewer reminders means nobody gets to the yell.
Dawn Band is a small company and this is the only thing they make.
They make it in small runs, so it goes out of stock. Trusted by 10,000+ parents.
I had never heard of them and nearly closed the page, but one thing settled me.
They give you sixty nights, and if it does not work on your kid you send it back and they refund you.
My first thought was that he will just take it off.
But nobody comes into his room and it makes no sound.
And he wants me out of his morning more than I want out of it.
I ordered it that night.
It is not here yet.
So this is a list of what I want to stop.
Not being the first voice he hears.
No more loud by the third reminder.
No sorry at the door.
The note coming off the mirror.
My first word to him being morning, and my second not being teeth.
I want to stop feeling sick about myself before seven.
And I want to stop apologizing for a fight that started before he was awake.
100% money-back guarantee. 60 nights.
Sixty nights is enough mornings to know if it works on my kid.
If you are loud by the third reminder too, it is here:
https://dawnbands.com/products/wake-up-band-adhd
P.S. The sticky note is still on my bathroom mirror, and I want to take it down myself.
P.P.S. If you said sorry at the door this morning, you are not failing him.
The morning started that fight, not you.
