Help Your Child Manage The After School Meltdown

Inside This Post: Meltdowns after school are common and normal. Here are some proven strategies to help you get ahead of the meltdown and help your child cope with overwhelm and stop the after school back talk and attitude.

How Routines Improve Behaviour

Routines give the opportunity to grow external structures, while their internal structure is still in development.

As adults, we can multi-task due to a part of the brain that’s called executive functioning.

This basically means that the brain is able to identify the problem, solve it and come up with a solution to prevent it from happening again.

We aren’t born with this brain. We need to nurture it to develop from early childhood. Routines help with this as they provide structure and knowledge of how to manage daily life.

Routines Put Us On Autopilot

Having a routine takes away from having to make more decisions than necessary in our daily lives.

Putting some of the mundane aspects of our day to day on autopilot helps us solve the problems that are different on a daily basis and the expected tasks still get completed without thought.

Routines Nurture Independence

Once children learn and understand their routines, they no longer need hand-holding for the next step. Therefore they become independent little beings.

Having a morning routine, an evening routine, an after school routine and so on helps children learn the expectations of life and they can learn to “Adult” (as the kids say..).

Whether your kid is in Kindergarten or High School, they all need constant reminders after school.

Put an end to the nagging with a good after-school routine.

If you can start your after school routine at an earlier age, that will help a lot when your child is older and seemingly lazier.

I mean, isn’t it common sense to put your backpack away and not throw your shoes in the middle of the floor after school?

I guess not, since kids don’t seem to be able to handle that kind of responsibility without the constant reminders.

A good routine chart will help you instill good habits in your child.

After School Routines

When children come into the house after a full day of school (hey even after a half day of school) they simply have no energy to deal with life. 

But don’t let that happen! 

Set up a few things that NEED to get done before they go off to their room or park their butt on the couch.

The first thing on our schedule is to put away our shoes and backpack, and then unpack the lunchbox. Once that is completely completed, they are allowed to go have a snack. 

It’s usually a good idea to allow some time for consuming snacks and relaxing before starting the evening hustle.

Every household will have a different evening routine, but the basics are usually :

• Set Up For Dinner
• Help Cleanup After Dinner
• Complete Homework
• Take A Shower
• Brush Teeth
• Off To Bed 

Most of these “actions” and activities are pretty straightforward.

If you can print it out and put it in a common area (Command Center Maybe?) then your kids will know exactly what needs to be done and when. Heck, you can even laminate it too – this is the laminator I use! 

If you do laminate, you can use a dry era marker to check off the items on the list as you go along with your after-school routine. 

Having a routine like this keeps the electronics use down during the school week. Even though everyone has different opinions on electronics, I try to keep it to 30 minutes maximum after school.

You may want to have 0 electronics, that’s completely up to you. 

My thing is, if all the things on the list are completed and they are all ready for the next day, then 30 minutes of electronics is ok with me. 

Creating a routine like this sets them up for success in the future. 

This helps them be more productive now, meaning they can be more productive in their adult life too. 

The Chart