Happy Friday, Reader!

The 4th of July holiday has made for one of those weeks where I’m constantly having to ask myself, “What day is it?” All day yesterday felt like a Saturday to me, so it threw my brain for a loop when I realized it was time for a Friday newsletter. Whether you’re still recovering from holiday festivities or haven’t missed a beat, I hope this week’s edition finds you well!

Tip of the Week: Practice Morning Independence in Summer

Students with weaker executive function skills sometimes need lots of prompting and reminders to get things done. But what happens when those prompts and reminders go away? This has been on my mind lately as I work with students transitioning to college. For years, these students may have had parents checking on them, waking them up if they slept through alarms, or nudging them through their morning routines to get out the door on time for school. But what happens when that failsafe gets removed? Summer can be an excellent time to find out!

Work with your teen to negotiate a goal for what time they should be up each day. While it may be good to sleep in a bit more than what’s allowed during the school year, waking up before the summer goal time should require some effort and not just give in to the teen’s tendency to sleep until late morning.

Then, it’s time to experiment.

• What’s the best alarm to get the teen out of bed in the morning? Many people default to using their phones, but research increasingly suggests that teens shouldn’t keep those in their bedrooms overnight. Phones also run the risk of encouraging the teen to stay in bed, stuck in endless scrolling. Consider using a more traditional alarm.
• Where should the alarm be placed? Some teens benefit from having the alarm placed on the other side of the bedroom, so they’ll have to get out of bed to hit snooze or turn it off.
• What helps mobilize the teen next? Caffeine, exercise, a shower, or something else? Consider using the summer break to experiment with different morning routines that could be implemented during the school year.
• Build motivating consequences for inaction. Once, while trying to build a new morning habit that got me out of bed earlier, I tried programming my coffee maker to automatically start brewing coffee at 6:05 AM, but I purposely left the carafe out on the counter overnight. If I didn’t get downstairs in time to put the carafe in place, I would have to start my day cleaning up a huge mess. It didn’t make me love getting up earlier, but you better believe I got out of bed to prevent the mess.

If none of these strategies seem to work, there are more extreme options. Clocky is an alarm clock on wheels. When the alarm goes off, it jumps off the nightstand and starts rolling around the room. The only way to make it stop is by getting out of bed and catching it. It also caps the number of snooze button hits to one snooze each morning. Alternatively, the Wake N Shake app has obnoxious alarm sounds that can only be silenced by shaking the phone. There is no snooze button. You can set different levels of difficulty for how vigorously and how long you have to shake the phone before it stops. The process gets the body moving which makes it much harder to go back to sleep.

What strategies have you tried to help ease morning mobilization while building independence? I’d love it if you’d email me to share more ideas!

Executive Function Elsewhere in the World

Here are a couple of my favorite articles and resources from this week:

• Additude Magazine shared a great list of 10 Things to Do Before School Starts. While it doesn’t go into any depth on the list items, it’s a good big picture reminder of things to consider.
• Stephanie Sarkis shared a helpful article on Psychology Today that explains why unstructured summer schedules can exacerbate ADHD symptoms and offers helpful suggestions of what to do to combat that.

A Few Spaces Left in Wednesday Group Classes

Starting later this month, Building Savvy Learners will offer virtual, in-person, and hybrid coaching options to students and families at 505 Medlock Rd., Decatur, GA 30030.

Starting in mid-August, we’ll offer the first of four six-week classes for middle and high school students. Together, these four six-week classes will build a year-long curriculum teaching important foundational skills for EF and academic success.

1. Achievement Unlocked: Building Savvy Habits for School Success (August/September)
2. Achievement Unleashed: Building Savvy Study Skills for Better Performance (October/November)
3. Achievement Unlimited: Building Savvy Strategies for Effective Time Management (January/February)
4. Achievement Unblocked: Building Savvy Writers through EF-based Strategies (March/April)

Visit the small group page on my website to learn more about these courses and register for the inaugural cohort. Newsletter subscribers who enter the promo code BSLNEWS can get $50 off the course price at registration.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. If this email content is valuable to you, would you please forward it to other parents who might benefit from it? I’m on a mission to build savvy learners who can develop and leverage tools that support executive functioning, and I’d love to connect with more parents. Your support in that endeavor means the world to me.