Parenting Blog

"Want to feel as playful and vibrant as your children? Want to feel an abundance of energy?  Want to experience greater clarity in all you do? Want to wake up jazzed about the day ahead?  Imagine taking care of yourself in all the marvelous ways you take care of others. It makes sense that, if you shifted self-care onto the top of your priority list, you would feel more rested, more centered, more present to your loved ones, more joyful..." -- womansfieldguide.com

Yesterday my weekly newsletter included the article "10 Commitments You Can Make to Become a More Inspired Parent -- and a Happier Person!"  A number of readers wrote asking me to cover each of these commitments in more detail.  Today, we begin with #1:

Commit to taking care of yourself and staying centered so you can be the happy, patient, encouraging parent your child deserves.

Nobody is centered all the time. This commitment is about noticing when you get off balance and finding ways to course-correct.  Equally important, it's about creating a healthy foundation so the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and children!) don't faze you.  How?  Integrate daily sustainable self-nurturing into your life, to keep your mood happy and resourceful:

• Make a list of things that make you feel joyful, and do at least one thing from your Joy list every single day. It can be as simple as a hot bath or as elaborate as getting a sitter so you can spend the evening out.
• Make a list of things you can do with your kids to shift the mood and energy when things get tough: Put on music and dance? Make popcorn? Spend the afternoon snuggling on the couch with a blanket and a pile of books? Get everyone outside for an hour?
• The minute your mood veers from loving to frazzled, stop. Breathe deep. Remind yourself that everything is better when you stay calm. Hug your children and regroup. 
• Start going to bed an hour earlier so you're better rested in the morning.
• Notice the times each day that stress you (bedtime? dinner prep? getting dressed?).  Write out a routine for that time of day, post it, and keep refining it until you can enjoy it stress-free.
• Figure out healthful snacks and meals that you actually love eating and can prepare quickly.
• Drop the addictions that are sapping your energy (you know what they are) and substitute other ways to recharge your batteries and indulge yourself. Get help if you need to as you break old habits.
• Slow down your pace so you can enjoy your life. Pare back your schedule to do only the essentials. Just say no to everything you can that doesn’t bring you joy.
• Forget about having a calm and orderly life. (You have kids, right?) Instead, aspire to remain gracious in the face of the unexpected. Find ways to laugh at what will inevitably go wrong.
• Adopt a simple mindfulness practice to stay in balance. It can be as simple as putting post-its reminding you to Breathe on your dashboard, mirror, and fridge.
• Transform those inner negative voices in your head into your inner cheerleader and shower yourself with encouragement.
• Forgive yourself every day for all the ways you aren't perfect, and accept yourself, warts and all. Only parents who can make peace with their own imperfection can fully accept and love their children (who are by definition imperfect.)
• Count your blessings and say thank you for everything good in your life, every single day.

Make sure your child gets the best of you, not what's left of you after life wears you down each day.  What’s your plan today to fill your own cup with love and joy?

Want to stop yelling at your kids?  Ready to start having dinner as a family?  Need to find a way to rebuild your relationship with your son or daughter? Desperate to change the tone in your house from sniping and snotty to laughing and loving?

Beyond the obvious opportunity for religious teaching -- and embodying the spirit of giving -- the New Year is a great time for families to reflect on, appreciate, and evolve their lives together.

It’s traditional at Kwanzaa to rededicate oneself to living a principled life. The rest of us usually rely on the tradition of making a New Year’s resolution. Unfortunately, studies show that most Americans make New Year's Resolutions, but most abandon them in frustration and self-disgust within a few weeks. Why?  

Their resolutions were too vague, or too overwhelming, or they didn’t have a plan, or they didn’t make their resolution into a habit, or they didn’t revise their plans to accommodate reality when they hit a wall. Or, most of the time, they never really committed themselves, so their resolution couldn’t grow roots, much less flower. Sound familiar?

There are a few lucky folks who actually make their New Year's resolutions come true, however. What can we learn from their secrets?

1. Prioritize. You can't get more fit, stop yelling at your kids, and get a promotion at work all at once. However, if you do one of these things, it gives you confidence to tackle the others.  The only way anyone ever met a big goal was by breaking it into little pieces and accomplishing one day at a time.  Set a manageable goal for January, and then make a list of "next goals" to cultivate in turn after you've mastered your first resolution. Take it one step at a time. If you make a daily choice to take a step in your desired direction, soon you’ll find yourself in a whole new landscape.

2. Commit yourself – on paper. Once we set an intention, the universe lines up to support us.  We marshal resources we never even suspected we had available, from both inside and out. Hone your desire: Why do you want this goal?  What will be different in your life once you achieve it? Describe what your life will look like. Fierce desire + Intention = the seed of your Resolution. Without that seed, nothing grows.

3. Start by centering yourself. It's hard to launch a new project when you're already stressed out. Before you tackle a big new goal, set a smaller goal to get yourself more grounded. For instance, commit to finding ten minutes a day to sit quietly while you meditate, pray, chant, feel gratitude, or write in a journal. Studies show that just ten minutes a day doing any of these things diminishes stress, increases happiness, and assists in weight loss. It helps us become more loving and patient with ourselves and others. And it gives us the springboard from which to make other changes in our lives.  Consider this tilling the soil. Your Resolution might grow without it, but don’t you want to give yourself the best possible shot at success?

4. Make a plan. How will you support yourself to accomplish your resolution? What will you actually do, day by day, to achieve your goal? Write it all down. Assign yourself a (reasonable) task for each day, with one day every week free for catch-up or time off. (It might be the same task every day; for instance, “Get up ten minutes earlier than usual to sit in silence.”) Put your your daily tasks on your calendar. Make a chart to check off your daily progress. Every day you stick to your plan, you’re growing roots.

5. Make it a habit. Most resolutions go wrong because they aren’t sustained for long enough to change a habit.  Habits need to be repeated at least once daily (preferably at the same time each day) for 30 days to become entrenched. Check in every day and take a positive action towards your goal. Think of this as watering your Resolution. Don’t lose heart if your Resolution isn’t flowering during the first month. You should be able to see those shoots poking up, and maybe some buds forming.  In other words, progress in the right direction.

6. Take it one day at a time.  If your change were easy, you'd already be doing it.  So naturally it's hard to imagine that change lasting forever, or even for a year.  But you can do anything for an hour, or an afternoon. From there, it isn't such a big stretch to go a whole day.  Before you know it,  you've clocked a week of your new life, and then a month.  What about those days when you blow it?  Plan now -- of course those days will happen!  If you learn from it, it's not a total loss.  What can you do next time so you keep to your resolution?  Use those times you fall short of your goal to make a plan for the future, now. 

7. Review and Revise. Check your plan every single day. Give yourself lavish positive reinforcement for every day you take a step forward – which should be almost every day. Cheer when you see the first flowers.  Not working? Maybe you need some sunshine. Find whatever support you need to help you make your plan a reality. Or some fertilizer; revise your plan as necessary. For instance, take smaller steps every day, so you can actually make some daily progress. Don’t be afraid to lengthen your timetable. Even two steps forward, one step back will get you where you’re going. Any goal worth achieving will take longer than you thought.  Sometimes the impossible just takes a little longer.

“My memories of Christmas as a child are of stress. My mother wanted everything to be perfect and got so worked up trying to do it all that it made the rest of the family crazy. I remember my dad comforting me when I was about 8yrs-old, I was crying and said 'I hate Christmas' and he said 'I do, too, honey. We just have to get through it.' For my kids I try to be relaxed and fun. We make ornaments for friends and family in December and give them out as we see people — gets us into the giving without thought of receiving. We take time to see the lights around town, to decorate and appreciate our tree. We talk about the other festivals of lights and remember that feasting and gifts are to make the darkest, coldest time of year merry. We celebrate the return of the sun. We relax and play and laugh and appreciate each other." --  Amy S

What's the #1 Parenting Survival Skill, in December and all year long?  No, not knowing how to out-argue your 11 year old, charm your 3 year old into cooperating, or even get your baby to sleep through the night.  The #1 parenting survival skill with any age child is to manage and nurture yourself so that you can stay calm and loving with your child.

Remember that the holidays are stressful for kids, and they depend on you.  Your good mood helps your child to regulate his own mood. If you’re out of balance, you won’t be able to help your kid stay on an even keel. In fact, if you’re anxious about everything you have to get done, I promise you that your child will begin to act out.

Your child doesn't need a magazine-spread holiday. She needs you, in a good mood, living the spirit of the season and spreading love and good cheer.  How?

• Pare back your schedule to do only the essentials. Just say no to whatever doesn’t bring you joy.
• Find ways to laugh at what will inevitably go wrong. The dog ate the turkey?  Order Chinese food and make the best of it.  This will give you so much laughter as you tell the story over the years that it's well worth the temporary disappointment!
• Be sure your own expectations of the season are reasonable. (What makes you think your difficult relative will suddenly be less difficult this year?)
• Make sure you nurture yourself and stay in balance. Start by getting enough sleep.
• The minute your mood veers from loving to frenzied, stop. Hug your children and regroup.
• Count your blessings and say thank you for everything good in your life, every day.
• At New Years, pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself on a job well done, not just in December, but all year long.

What’s your plan today to fill your own cup with love and joy?
May your day be filled with miracles, large and small.

“Commanding the pressures of this life begins with understanding that the stress we feel is first an inside job. In and of itself, there is no such thing as a "pressurized" moment… any pressure we come to feel in any given moment is the unhappy effect of.. of some hidden agent within us acting on the ordinarily free-flowing content of each of these moments." -- Guy Finley

December has a way of overwhelming us.  Even if we love the holidays, there are always extra tasks that increase our anxiety. In addition to the stresses that affect everyone else, those of us with kids find ourselves juggling school holiday events, agonizing over teacher and nanny gifts, negotiating gift demands from children who've been bombarded with too many TV ads...

How to cope?  Realize that the pressure actually starts inside you. We all want to redeem ourselves as parents by giving our children perfect holidays. And the media frenzy creates a perfect storm of high expectations that can only lead to meltdowns all around.

A picture-perfect holiday is impossible, of course. And the pressure to make one undermines what our kids really need from us. Which is?  Yes, you guessed it.  A relaxed, loving parent who makes time every evening to snuggle and look at the holiday lights, and spends a weekend afternoon helping the kids make presents. Who communicates the deeper meaning of the holiday by giving kids simple family traditions, and sets limits on the commercialism that leaves kids feeling unfulfilled (for the most impact, ban TV for the month),

Are you wondering how you could possibly find time for those snuggles and present-making sessions? There's only one way.  Give up something else.

My house is even messier than usual over the holidays. My extended family long ago got used to my gifts, which are limited to homemade (with the kids, of course) cookies and a donation in their names. Teachers get cookies and appreciative notes.  I give presents to my nieces and nephews, of course, but most of those are ordered online.  I haven't been to a mall in years.

Your choices might be different. But I encourage you to think about the memories your kids are shaping this December, not of the holiday, but of you.  When they look back, will they describe a parent who communicated the spirit of the season with laughter, warm embraces, gracious patience? 

What could you do to make it easy for you to be that parent?

"Before we're 8 years old, we have almost no capacity to filter out information that comes to us. So if parents or teachers, people we count on to nurture us, say something hurtful to us before the age of eight...it goes in quite deep and we carry those misbeliefs with us. They profoundly affect our relationship to ourselves, to others...our sense of value in the world."  -- Dr. David Simon

What did you learn before you were eight?  That you're a capable person, worthy of adoring love and an abundant life, lovable exactly as you are, even with all of your messy imperfections, bodily functions, anger, fear, and neediness?  Or maybe that you somehow aren't lovable enough to have your needs completely met, that some of your feelings and body parts are shameful, that harsh words or even blows might rain down on you at any time?

I'm hoping the former.  But if you're like most of us, you learned some things before you were eight that no child should learn, that no adult should be carrying around as motivating beliefs. Most of us have long since driven those unbearable thoughts into the dark regions of half-memory, or tried to cover them with bravado, but that only increases their power, unfortunately. 

The good news is that you have the secret weapon to get rid of those untruths, and it doesn't take years of therapy.  Here's how:

1. Notice the places in your life where you're unhappy, stuck, worried.  What's the limiting belief?  (Hint: Regardless of the original situation, the bottom line is always that we aren't good enough or lovable enough, which will cause us to be abandoned and die.)

2. Feel that unbearable feeling.  Just stop, drop, and endure it for a couple of minutes. Breathe. Notice that while it would have been unbearable for a child, it's not unbearable now. 

3. Give yourself a new thought:  "I am more than enough, exactly as I am." Let that love sink into every cell of your body.

That's it.  Shining the light of awareness on our toxic beliefs -- by simply noticing them, tolerating the feelings, and correcting the limiting belief  -- makes them dry up and blow away.  Of course, messages we got before we were eight might take repeated sessions. 

Which is why I've been focusing so much lately on supporting you in speaking gently to your children.  Whether they're four or fourteen, your words have tremendous power with them.  What beliefs do you want your child carrying for the rest of his or her life? This is your chance to work miracles.