Survey Confirms Weekday Mornings Suck for Parents

A new poll found that the most stressful part of the day for parents is weekday mornings, a finding that will likely elicit a lot of “duh” responses from moms and dads across the globe.

2,000 and dads surveyed by OnePoll, on behalf of Amazon Devices, were asked to identify the part of the day they found to be most stressful and, to the shock of absolutely nobody, over half of them said that it was getting ready in the morning that caused them the most anxiety in their day-to-day lives.

Apparently, the worst part of school day mornings is waking kids up — and it usually takes parents at least two attempts to get their kids to leave dreamland and enter reality. And it turns out that alarms aren’t the only way parents are waking kids up: instead, they resorted to opening the curtains and turning on the lights in the morning to get their kids to open their eyes.

These findings will likely come as no surprise to anyone who is a parent. After all, weekday mornings are already a stressful time for any adult, but adding in getting a child ready for the day and suddenly it becomes a perfect storm of anarchy. (And one that takes a lot of time — the survey found that it takes almost 30 minutes for the average kid to get ready for school.)

Depending on their age, the process of getting kids ready in the morning can include waking them up, helping them bathe, making them breakfast and lunch, getting them clothed, and managing any particular tantrums they might decide to throw that morning.

All of that before you have even started working is a recipe for a whole lot of frustration and stress, which is certainly not the ideal way to head into the workday.

And unfortunately, per the survey, this digs into time moms and dads would like to have for themselves in the morning. Poll respondents said that if they had more time they’d work out, sleep in, or even watch a little bit of TV before they started their day — not a likely feat when kids have to get to class before the morning bell.

To top it all off, parents who participated in the survey said that the pandemic has basically destroyed any semblance of a morning routine they previously had, so what was once a structured process is now complete and total chaos.