Lose the ‘Tude — Dealing with the After School Attitude

Anyone else feel that zen-like calm once you drop your kiddos off at school each morning? Sure you have laundry to fold, errands to run, chores to accomplish, but you can do it all with gangster rap blasting in the background and swear loudly along with the music to let out all your contempt and frustration for said chores and errands…sigh.  How peaceful (and passive aggressive) of you. But hey, it works.

By the time your little ones get home at 3:00 you feel like all stress is gone, you have a night ahead of you filled with swim lessons, snuggle time, and hopefully some Walking Dead and a bowl of ice cream.

If you’re like me, you have everything set up to ensure a quiet start to that evening  — dinner started on the stove, crayons and freshly sharpened pencils out for homework, and a delicious snack waiting for the school weary children that will enter at any moment. You smile as they run toward you at school pick up, but that smile slowly fades, as your daughter approaches with a scowl. Someone screwed up the four square game today. Someone else got picked for Character Counts. The stars did not perfectly align for her. Behind her is your son. He doesn’t voice his feelings as fluidly. He’s more of an “internalizer” — so, instead of telling you he got all of his “owls” taken for behavior, he simply plows into your daughter, knocking her to the ground and laughing, a wicked, devilish laugh of pure tension release. And you know your night will not be the tranquil euphoria you imagined.

The after school attitude is one I am very familiar with. The bright eyed, bushy tailed kids I dropped off in the morning are not the sullen, snappy “teen like” kids I pick up at the end of the day. They hate everything and everyone and it’s only after an hour of screen time that I get the slightest smile out of them or a positive word for that matter. So, I have come up with some tricks to stop them from going total “head spinning, spitting pea soup” on me at the end of the day.

1.  Homework should be done AFTER a snack. And the snack should be healthy but c’mon, throw in a hershey kiss or handful of gummy bears. 😉 Even seeing the treat makes them say, “Ok, maybe she understands me.”
2. If they get a couple of answers wrong on homework, wait until a little later to tell them. I find my daughter deals with being told she’s wrong much better after a shower and an episode of Ever After. Just saying.
3. Shower and bath time should occur almost immediately after homework. We call it “washing the day off of you” and somehow that helps with attitude improvement.
4. Let them pick what’s for dessert BEFORE dinner. Something to look forward to? You know that helps!
5. Ask open ended questions about their day. My son is big on, “Yes. No. I don’t remember.” Well if you ask him to describe his writing center that day, he has no choice but to answer. I mean, he could say I don’t remember,  but it’s LESS likely.

I would love to hear your suggestions for beating the after school attitude, until then, I’m going to crank some Dr. Dre, and deal with it.