Resolve to live a happier and saner life in 2009! Parenting expert Stacey Boyd offers simple, easy ways to transform your habits and provide a healthier environment for your little ones.
1. Reclaim your home
Resolve that one day each week will be a day without television, videos, computers and electronics of any sort. Shut the things off! Be present with your child without beeps, flashes, music and voices other than your own distracting you from one another.
2. Celebrate boredom
Resist the pressure to become your child’s day planner, social secretary and entertainment organizer. Allow for days where nothing is planned. Don’t protect your child from a day with nothing to do. Day after day filled with adult-organized activities and events destroys any possibility of creativity or self-discovery.
3. Get creative together
Play together, fantasize together, and get creative together using only the simplest of materials: old clothes, a cardboard box, crayons, paper and glue. Pretend to explore a world under the sea or find wood nymphs and fairies. Make up characters and go on grand adventures. Together. For ideas and suggestions, visit www.savvysource.com/activities.
4. Stop rescuing A friend recently told me a story about her dog, who showed up at the back door with a muddy rabbit hanging from its jaws. Horrified upon realizing that the rabbit was her neighbor’s daughter’s rabbit, and very dead, she proceeded to take the rabbit, wash it, blow-dry its fur, sneak over to her neighbor’s yard and carefully slip the now very well groomed but still very dead rabbit back into its cage.
Well, the next day she saw her neighbor, who looked shell-shocked. When she gingerly asked her what was wrong, the neighbor said that their pet rabbit had recently died. She and her daughter had talked about death and given their sweet, dear bunny a proper burial. But yesterday the rabbit had miraculously reappeared. She told my friend that she and her daughter were now struggling to understand what possibly could have happened!
The moral of the story? Our hardest responsibility as parents, I think, is to prepare our children for a world that is not always kind and gentle and accommodating. Oftentimes, we try to protect them from its ugliness. But the better the job we do of giving them tools to handle hardship, the better equipped our children will be to thrive in the world they inherit.
5. Get out of the way Adults sometimes need to get out of children’s way. Give your child time, either alone or with friends, that is largely unsupervised and where an adult will only intervene when the screams reach a high decibel level. Teach your children to trust in themselves. Let them make mistakes and experience the consequences.
6. Don’t be afraid to deny your child
Intentionally deny your child something he “really wants.” Don’t just delay its acquisition, but never allow the desired object into your home. Have conversations about the experience of disappointment. Share your own experiences of how it feels to not get something you “really want.”
7. Less is more
Don’t buy into the “more is better” culture. Almost always less is more. That is important for us to keep in mind and is a wonderfully teachable moment during these uncertain economic times.
8. Plan a long weekend awayOne for just you and your spouse, and resist the urge to check in by phone every hour. Your children will survive and everyone will benefit.
9. Have faith
Have faith in something and share it openly with your children. It can be God, the universe, love or the inherent goodness of your fellow man. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can pass on to your children.
10. Remember life before children
Have a life of your own replete with activities, friends and interests. As James Baldwin said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” So imagine the life you want for your children when they are your age. Then live it.
Learn more about “Resolutions and Reflections: Getting the New Year Started Off Right” at www.savvysource.com, the guide to all things educational for your little ones.