I will commonly give the following assignment to parents of teenagers who are caught up in the morning morass of fighting with them to get them out of bed:
"Avoid the usual routine of trying for an hour your increasingly loud and emotional attempts to rouse your teenager. Instead, during the time you would usually be making these efforts, enjoy an extra cup of coffee, peruse the newspaper more leisurely than normal, or do yoga.
Make no attempt to rouse your adolescent until the very last moment that he can get up and still get to school on time. At that point, get him up in a manner that honors the following three conditions:
- Get him up without saying a word.
- Get him up in a way that is no fun for him.
- Get him up in a way that is a lot of fun for you."
This approach accomplishes two very useful things:
1. It avoids the usual problem loop of useless verbiage and escalating emotion.
2. It frustrates your teenager because you are having fun at his expense.
This new way of doing things requires creativity on your part to extract yourself from the loop that has kept the problem in place for so long. One mother of a 17-year-old boy reported solving the problem this way:
"I waited until the very last minute that he could still meet his ride. I crawled into his bedroom undetected with a pair of tweezers between my teeth, commando-style. I quietly pulled back the covers from the foot of his bed and, with the tweezers, yanked hairs out of his lower leg. He immediately awoke and said, "What the hell do you think you are doing?" I merely smiled and said sweetly, "Good morning, son, it's time to get up."
The next morning, I crawled into his room in the same manner, but, newly sensitized, he felt me pull back the covers. He sat up, said, "Don't you dare" and got out of bed. After that second day, I was out of the morning wake-up call business."
What a great solution.