Top 10 Tips for Setting Your School Year Up for Success

Top 10 Tips to Survive the School Year (Without All the Tantrums)

The excitement of new backpacks and first-day photos has worn off, and now it's week three: homework is piling up, shoes are missing, and everyone's exhausted. In this episode, we're tackling the small daily friction points that build up until someone (kid or parent) blows up.

You'll get 10 practical, easy-to-implement strategies for the school year ahead, including how to set expectations you can actually stick to, why a dedicated homework station cuts down on power struggles, how to protect sleep without obsessing over wake-up time, and why praising effort matters more than praising results. Plus, the most important tip of all: taking care of yourself, because you're your household's emotional thermostat.

You don't need to overhaul everything. Just pick one idea that fits your family, and give yourself grace on the days it doesn't go perfectly.

Thanks for listening to *Tantrum of the Week* with Lynn McLean, LCSW-S, Registered Play Therapist–Supervisor™.

New episodes each week to help parents understand and respond to their child’s biggest feelings with calm, confidence, and connection.

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Transcript

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This week's Tantrum of the Week episode is less about tantrums and more about trying to help you set yourself up for avoiding them. If you've been here at all, you know that I really love to help parents and kids figure out a way to avoid the dysregulated blow-ups that can happen in the blink of an eye, no matter how old we are, honestly. I'm including adults in that. So we're talking today about the top 10 tips that you can think about as you embark on the school year. Now we are in a time when a lot of kids have already been back to school, and we're out of the new school supplies and backpacks phase, and this year is gonna be different and perfect. And now we're in week two, three, four. It's the reality. Homework is starting to pile up, the shoes are lost, everybody's tired, and what are we gonna do? We're not gonna make it through the year. So here are some ideas about making all of those small daily friction points that come up and then make everybody's temperature rise until somebody blows up. We're gonna try to give you some small ideas to really help you avoid those kinds of things. My top 10 ideas for making it work, you don't need to do all of these. If only one of these lands for you and makes your life a little bit easier, then I'm hopeful that it made your time here worthwhile. So we're gonna start in no particular order. Our first tip is to really try to have reasonable expectations. Every school year, like I said, we start off, man, it's shiny. We have hope, we have optimism, we're excited about the teachers. There's lots of ambitious ideas about what everybody can accomplish, both you and your kids. And you know what? Those are amazing. Really shoot for the stars, have big goals, have big dreams. But know that those big dreams can really put pressure on you and your kids. So as the weeks go by, and maybe some of those goals start to feel like they're a little lofty and everybody is stressed out, and maybe that they were a little ambitious, just consider scaling back on them if they are causing more stress than happiness. Because really, we want your goals and dreams to give you happiness and not a bunch of opportunities for tantrums to develop. Tip number two, know what you can control. And what I mean by this is know what you can control with regard to your kids' behaviors. This comes up all the time. I hear parents call in, they're hearing reports from their child school or teacher that their child's behavior in class is really not up to par. And it's so important for parents to uh support school expectations. Teachers and administrators are under a lot of pressure, just like everybody else, and they really need kids to have support at home for how to behave. And there's only so much that you can control about your child's behavior when you're not there. Not being able to intervene at the moment makes hours later punishment about what happened not very effective, honestly. So, having a backup plan about how to support your child is a better path forward than trying to control the uncontrollable. One idea for this is to help them practice a situation when everybody is not stressed out instead of punishing them for something that happened hours ago at school. Think about a tricky situation like going in and sitting down and starting that daily journal assignment right away. They're really excited to see their friends and they don't want to go sit down and do that right away. So you can come up with expectations from your teacher. They're filling you in, let your kid know what they are, and maybe you practice before it's time to sit down for dinner. Oh, okay, we're gonna go in and put away our backpacks. Now we're gonna sit down and get our notebooks and write in our journal. All right, everybody do it. It's a way for them just to practice to get some ideas about how they're gonna delay gratification when they get to school the next day. Another idea I have number three tip to keep the school year moving in a good direction is to stick to the routine you establish. So it can be really motivating when you very first start a new routine. Man, everybody's ready to be going to bed on time. They're all up and getting ready in the morning. But once everybody starts to get more tired as the weeks and days go on, it can be tempting to really let bedtime start to slip. Maybe you're not laying out clothes the night before. So stick to the routine that you set. Repetition is your friend. Hard copies of those routines can really help it go a long way. One of my favorite things on Amazon right now is a little plastic checklist, and it's got a space to write in whatever you want for your routine steps, and then a little dial, or I don't even know how to say a lever for your kid to scoot over and it shows that they've completed that routine. It feels great. It feels great to check something off your list. So keep something like that around if it helps. All right, our fourth tip, number four, establish open communication with teachers and school staff. I know that uh back to school nights are super fun and you get to meet everybody. I think that they can feel kind of chaotic and you might not be able to get as much interaction as you wish you could. That was my experience when my kids were younger. So just a quick intro email can go a long way towards starting the year off as a team instead of strangers. It lets teachers and staff know that you're really interested, it'd be in there for them and for your kids, and it can be a great way to get off on the right foot. Number five, set up a homework station and have a time expectation for kids to complete that every afternoon or evening. So, what this means is again going back to knowing what you can control, unless you have developed Jedi mind control. I've tried and I still haven't done it. Can't force your kid to actually do the homework. And you really want to try to cut down on those power struggles. Like write this down right now. Instead, really start to say, okay, you know what? I think um you're gonna need about an hour for your homework. Be reasonable about this. And so, okay, we're all gonna sit down at the table, we're gonna do our homework. It might be that you help co-regulate them. You sit down with your own work, your computer, and you also have a homework station. So uh everything that they might need. So if they're young and they're gonna need, you know, scissors, they're cutting out letters, shapes, glue sticks, pencils, pens, erasers, a pencil sharpener, the paper that they're supposed to use. Keeping it all in that place every day means fewer negotiations. Nope, we're sitting down during this hour, and that's what we're working on. And everything you need is right here. So we can all be here and make it happen. It can really cut down on some of those um daily struggles, the last-minute trips out for whatever they need for their project, really helps reduce the strain on you and them. Number six, protect their sleep schedule and not just focus on the wake up time. That's one of the key stressors that I hear from parents is their kids, especially as they get into tween and teendom, it's hard to get them up in the morning. It's what their brains are doing. They're growing and they need a lot of sleep. And it's easy to focus on getting out the door on time. And because I mean, let's be honest, a lot of us are working and we have other big schedules on our day. So just getting the kids to school on time is the first step in that day. Really thinking about how bedtime sets up the whole scene for a good morning is a very important piece. So stick, stick to that consistent bedtime. Number seven, build in some unscheduled downtime. All of us as parents really want our parent, our kids to succeed, and so we really will give them the best opportunities for extracurriculars. And often I hear about kids that have a calendar that can really rival an adult's. So think about a way to actually schedule time that they're unstructured, where they don't have to be doing homework, they don't have to be going to soccer, just a time that they can hang out with you. Maybe you don't have an agenda, you're just hanging out with them. It's amazing. Let them do it, schedule it in. Number eight, set screen time expectations before they become a nightly, daily, hourly negotiation. So decide ahead of time when and how much screen time they're gonna get. And that way they can just start to predict it. It's less to argue about, it's less to push back about, and it can really help prevent a lot of tantrums that show up around homework time. Everybody's tired and stressed. And if they know it's just not gonna happen on a weeknight, hopefully the arguments will start to diminish, and so will the tantrums. Number nine, praise their effort and not just their results. So a great grade is worth celebrating. Absolutely. They deserve congratulations, but so is a kid who studied hard and still got to be, or who asked for some help instead of giving up. Kids who hear you worked so hard on that, they tend to keep trying when things get difficult. And kids who only hear about your praise for their good grade tend to avoid anything that they might not be good at right away. And number 10, and honestly, I said in no order of importance, but this is the most important: take care of yourself. Parents are the household's emotional thermostat. So a few minutes of time for yourself, for you to decompress at the end of a busy day, have a quick cup of coffee alone first thing in the morning, five quiet minutes before you roll into that carpool pickup line. It's not indulgent. It's absolutely necessary, and it's what it's really going to help you show up and steady your kids for the parts of the day when they actually need your calm. So I really hope that you walk through the list, get an idea of just one thing that will work for you. You don't need a perfect system, you just need a few repeatable ones and just give yourself a little grace for the days that they're not holding. Thanks, and I look forward to hearing about the tantrum of the week at your house and what else we can do to support you.