April 27, 2016
Nurturing Your Family
No matter what sort of declarations are made about how “this year will be different,” busy schedules wreak havoc on family normalcy. It’s easy for distractions to set in, to settle into survivor mode, and to forget that families need nurturing. Are you feeling a little disconnected from your family unit? Take a step back and explore a few of our favorite ways for reconnecting.
Inspire creativity. On the whole, people feel happiest when we’re working towards something. For your children, who have so much of the world to experience, let that effort develop by inspiring their creativity. This allows your kids to experiment, to discover, to make mistakes, to have wonderful successes, and to spend some time with you letting their imagination fly. Although it’s important to nurture your children individually, think of a few projects you can work on together as a family and make sure to set aside special time for those each month. Who knows, you may develop some new traditions or discover a skill you never knew you had!
Tone down the stress. We’d never tell you to try and eliminate stress completely. How stressful would that be? But truth be told, the big things — death, financial issues, job stress — are always going to come around, so when you inevitably have to deal with those things, why sweat the small stuff? Not only does it rarely get you anywhere, but many studies have shown that people in relationships (this includes your children) will mimic the emotions of their partner (or parents.) That means that if you’re walking around like a big stress-bomb all the time, freaking out because you forgot your phone, or the house is maybe a little messy, or you’re running 5 minutes late, that energy is going to impact your family members, bringing them down into the negative vortex right along with you. So before you feel the need to completely freak out, take a breath, think about it in the context of the very stress-worthy things you undoubtedly have going on in your life, and ask yourself if it’s worth projecting those emotions onto your family.
Focus on your relationship with your partner. We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. Studies have proven that there is a noticeable decline in the happiness of a married couple after the arrival of their first child. This does not mean that your children are inflicting unhappiness on your life, and we’d never deign to say so, but it does mean that all of that time you had before, just the two of you, is probably diminished and definitely having an impact on your relationship. You can’t be the best parent to your child if you aren’t the best partner to your spouse. The primary relationship that children have to model “normal” from is the one that exists in their very own home — wouldn’t you like to show them how happy and healthy that can be? Take time for each other, in whatever form best works for you, and make sure to schedule kids-free dates at least once every week or other week. Taking care of your relationship and taking care of your children is synonymous, we promise.
Family dinner. Dinner is, most likely, the one meal you are all able to share together each day, so it had better be a good one. That means, no cell phones, no iPads, no iPods, no Kindles, no nothing but nourishing food and attentive conversation. Come up with a tradition that you repeat at each meal, whether it’s asking about the best/worst part of the day, discussing classwork, or going around and saying something that you’re thankful for. Not only will this connect you and help you learn about what happened in each other’s day, but it establishes dinner time as an expected ritual — nothing something to be dashed off in a hurry (as much as we want to do that sometimes.)
