Every step of his morning goes the same way.
I say brush your teeth. Nothing happens.
Then he picks up the toothbrush and just holds it.
Then he asks where the toothpaste is, and it is right there on the counter.
Breakfast is the same. Take a bite, take a bite.
By the time we should be leaving he does not have his shoes on.
I have said all of it more times than I can count.
Nothing moves until my voice goes up.
The second after I yell, I feel sick.
I say sorry at the door.
It sits on me the whole day anyway.
I am angry before the day has even started, and I hate it.
I have tried everything the threads say to try on myself.
Get up earlier so you are calm before he is.
I did that. It held for a while.
Then one morning nothing moved, and I was loud again.
Say it once and walk away.
I said it once, then again, then my voice went up.
Use the calm voice. Connection over correction.
I can do the calm voice right up until nothing moves.
Then I am standing over a kid who has not started, and the calm is gone.
At night I read the forums looking for a gentler way.
I am not bad at any of it.
I cannot do it from where the morning puts me.
One morning last week I said teeth over and over.
My voice went up.
I walked into the bathroom.
His toothbrush was on the counter with the paste already on it.
Dry. Not used.
And he was standing right next to it, not moving.
He was not defying me. He just had not started.
He looked at me and said, "I'm not awake yet, Mom."
I stood there and thought, he will not remember the calm reminders.
He will remember me yelling.
He will know how I felt about him in that minute.
Some mornings I catch myself not liking my own kid, and that scares me.
I cried the whole way to school.
That night I went back to the forums.
I found a thread about mornings.
A mom named Karen wrote the part nobody had told me.
She said the fight does not start when your voice goes up.
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 said she put a wristband on him at night and got herself out of his wake-up.
That line stopped me.
I had never once thought of the wake-up as part of the fight.
Kids with ADHD are harder to wake in the morning. That's a 2009 review of 16 studies.
How he gets woken decides the state he starts in.
A loud alarm fills the room and startles him out of sleep.
A parent at the door is an order landing on a kid still half asleep.
Both spike 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.
So he spends the first hour flooded, and every reminder lands on a flooded kid.
The repeats are the wake-up fight stretched over an hour.
The yell is where it ends.
A vibration on his wrist is small and quiet.
It touches only him.
It does not startle him or tell him to do anything.
He feels it, sits up, and turns it off himself.
So the first thing he does in his day is his own, not an order from the doorway.
No startle and no order means no cortisol spike.
He comes up with a clearer head and a calmer nervous system.
A calmer kid gets lost between fewer steps and needs fewer reminders.
My calm is his calm.
I cannot be calm for the teeth if the day already started with a fight.
The wristband Karen 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.
Not a phone, not a smartwatch.
My first thought was, how does a buzz on his wrist change brushing his teeth.
But the kid I walk in on is already up, clear, and not against me.
So the reminders land on a calmer kid.
A calmer kid needs fewer of them.
And 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, until I saw the sixty nights.
If it does not work on your kid, you send it back and they refund you.
You are thinking he will take it off.
But nobody comes into his room and it makes no sound.
He wants me out of his morning more than I do.
I ordered one.
It is not here yet, so I cannot tell you how it went.
All I can tell you is what I want to stop.
I want to stop being the first voice he hears.
No more saying teeth over and over until my voice goes up.
No sorry at the door.
I want the toothbrush to get used the first time I say it.
My first word to him should be "morning" and nothing after it.
And I want to like my own kid before he leaves the house.
100% money-back guarantee. 60 nights.
Sixty nights is enough to know if it was the wake-up all along.
If your mornings are the same as mine, go look.
https://dawnbands.com/products/wake-up-band-adhd
P.S. The toothbrush is still on the counter with the paste on it, dry, not used.
I left it there to remember what I am trying to stop.
P.P.S. If you said sorry at the door this morning, you are not failing him.
The morning started the fight, not you.
