Getting ready to go out

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My 8-year-old daughter, like me, has Asperger tendencies. She's doing quite well with social interaction - although she has her foibles she's learning about how other people work and I doubt we will ever get her officially diagnosed because it doesn't seem worth it. However, one issue we're currently stumbling over is trying to get her ready in the mornings, particularly for school.

If we send her to her room with specific instructions to get dressed, ten minutes later she'll have been distracted by something else and will have done nothing. Once we've harried her into getting dressed, we have to do the same with having breakfast, getting her stuff together, putting her shoes on etc.

We did have a checklist for a while, which helped a little bit. We try to keep their morning routine to a minimum (and she has two brothers who are doing the same things). It really doesn't take a lot to distract her, and sometimes it's just drifting off into a daydream rather than being distracted by anything physical.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to tackle this? It doesn't seem fair to keep on fighting over getting ready when it's clearly not something she's doing on purpose.

I tried some of what is written in Smart but Scattered, but it seems not to work for us. Your results might vary, but no manner of incentives or gradual reductions in scaffolding the reminders helped. When we were in public school, I had to choose between waking him up early (not a good idea) or basically constant reminders and help. He gets too distracted by all the fun things in his brain. During the weekends, when we had more time and flexibility we could practice it, b/c of the lack of consequences to me, if he dawdled.

We home school now, and giving him more time seems to help, but he still needs a lot of reminders. The main thing that has helped is including games, like, "See how fast you can get dressed." He loves timers so he loves to time himself doing almost anything, and he likes to beat his record.

The timers idea is a great one - she also loves the idea of testing herself - thanks, will try it out!

So we sent her off to get dressed really quickly this morning - in a matter of minutes she returned... dressed in her school uniform. Oops! Luckily after we reminded her it was Saturday she went and got changed pretty quickly