As I sit this morning in the quiet and enjoy my chai, I have to wonder....as a parent, when do you make the hard decisions and teach your child a lesson and when do you push and shove and do most of the work to get them going?

My 11 year old can't seem to get up consistently. I think she needs to learn to get up and around on her own. She has had an alarm clock for years and a few years ago she was the one I never had to worry about. She got up with her alarm, got around, came downstairs, etc. Now she is the one I have to push and shove through the morning!

Almost every morning we have to get her up because her alarm goes off and she turns it off and goes back to bed. Every morning she takes her shower and half the time she just stands in there and gets wet and doesn't wash! I have put so many things in place to help her! She has an alarm, then in the bathroom we have put the light on a timer so after 15 minutes the lights go out....and she still often doesn't notice! She has a second alarm that goes off to tell her that it is now time to get downstairs and get breakfast in order to have time to get everything done. As a parent, what else am I supposed to do? I am SO tired of our family yelling through the morning. She can't seem to move with that! So discouraging! She knows my policy is that if she misses the bus because she was moving like a snail, I won't take her to school....that will be her day when she learns that staying home with Mommy is MUCH worse than anything else. She will be doing chores the entire time she would have been in school. I am aware that it would be an unexcused absence and I work really hard to avoid things like that. I see a great importance in school, but I also think she needs to learn to get herself going! She is also struggling in school so missing a day of in class work would really have an impact on her grades right now.

Ugh! So frustrating and definitely inspires more time praying for her and our mornings and wisdom and guidance! I feel I have already bent over backwards to put helps in place for her and she hasn't worked with me at all!