If your feed is already full of colour-coded planners and bento lunchboxes, you’re not alone. Back-to-school season has a habit of making everyone feel slightly behind before term has even started.
Lou Beckett, author of the brilliant Lessons From a Default Parent, has given us her top 5 tips for getting through it with a lot less fuss.
1. Do less, not more and KEEP AS IT SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE.
I don’t know about anyone else but my Instagram feed is currently full of meal plans, lunchbox ideas, organisation stations for school bags and colour coded wall planners meant to ‘simplify’ going back to school.
If, like me, you’ve never once been that kind of shiny Pleasantville type of parent who makes sandwiches cut into shapes and lunchboxes containing handwritten notes everyday up until this point, don’t let the call of September 1st trick you into thinking you’ve got to do it now.
Get the basics sorted ready for school – find their school bags, replenish missing stationery and check their uniform fits. The rest you can add in as you go, don’t set yourself up with a massive mountain of admittedly lovely but very unnecessary things to do.
Ditto for clubs, trip volunteering and class rep duties etc, if you’re feeling harassed already don’t let what anyone else is signing up for guilt you into joining in as well. Let them crack on with it and just focus on what actually needs doing.
2. You are not the family Google.
The actual school run isn’t the hard bit, it’s the admin leading up to actually getting them out of the house with the right things on, with the correct stuff in the bag and at the right time.
Don’t be the keeper of knowledge for your whole family – whatever info stream you can add any other competent adult to, add them! Make sure they’re on the email list from school, add them to the class WhatsApp, without colour coding your entire lift on an aesthetically pleasing family calendar unless you want to, make as much information accessible to everyone without you having to provide it.
Put the kids weekly schedule on a bit of paper on the fridge so they can check when their own PE days are. They’ll still ask you, but at least you can say ‘check your emails’ or ‘look at the wall’ instead of repeating yourself 18187298749837 times.
3. September will be a s***show. Accept it.
There’s going to be wobbles going back after so long, from the kids and you. They’re getting back into a routine again, and so are you, and that takes a bit of time to readjust to. Accepting that I’m going to forget something vitally important at least four times in the first month back, or they’re going to have an overtired emotional meltdown at some point, makes it easier to process when it inevitably happens.
Lower your expectations of both yourself and the kids until you’re back in the swing of things. Freezer dinners, earlier bedtimes, homework done to barely acceptable standards, whatever you need to do to get from A to B. Give yourself permission to just survive for the first few weeks until you’re all back into the swing of things, thriving can come later.
4. Breathe.
As frenetic and harassed as getting them up and out in time is, it doesn’t last very long in the grand scheme of your day and once they’re in school you can recalibrate.
As long as everyone eventually gets to school in vaguely the right thing, that’s a win. All you’ve got to do is keep it together for long enough to get them up, dressed, fed and dropped off into school and then you can find ten silent minutes to regroup yourself for the day. I’d love to be a ‘prepare everything the night before’ kind of parent, but I never seem to stick to that very sensible plan, so I accept my mornings are slightly more chaotic but it makes me appreciate the silence as soon as they both leave the car at school drop off all the more.
5. Remember it's hard work. You’re not failing, it is just hard.
Recognise how work you’re doing getting everything and everyone ready for school. It feels like hard work because its exactly that – hard work. The mental and physical load of back to school is real and give yourself the recognition that you deserve for managing it.
Lou Beckett’s debut book, Lessons From a Default Parent, is a refreshingly honest account on her experience being the default parent.
You can buy Lessons From a Default Parent here.
