Have More Fun and More Fun Together!

Many thanks to Viva Miramar for permission to reprint this article.

We begin exploring how each suggestion on your 2013 Parent’s Top Ten List can influence your life and your family life.  We begin at the top with the first suggestion – “Have more fun and more fun together” – because fun makes everything better!

People from Albert Einstein – “Creativity is intelligence having fun” – to Groucho Marx – “If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong” – have commented on having fun.  Possibly the staunchest supporter of fun is Dr. Seuss who said, “If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”  Having fun is refreshing.  Our brains need fun to recharge.  According to the Washington Post, “Brain research suggests that fun is not just beneficial to learning but, by many reports, required for authentic learning and long-term memory.”  Studies have shown that fun in the workplace increases employee satisfaction and performance.  Fun is connecting. 

Fun produces great results!   When you have fun, you nurture yourself.  You will be more creative, flexible, and composed when handling challenges with your children.  The same holds true for your child.  He or she will be more fulfilled, more cooperative, and happier.  Having fun together will strengthen, connect, and ground your family. 

Ask your child about his ideas on fun.  He is an expert!  As you plan activities for your family, keep in mind that having fun and being entertained are two different things.  You are involved in having fun.  It isn’t passive.  Turn off the television and computer, and let your child teach you all about running through the woods like a horse, swimming in the ocean like a fish, singing her favorite songs, painting a family portrait, or riding bikes. 

As Dr. Seuss said, “Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”  Enjoy having more fun and more fun together!  

2013 Parent's Top Ten List

 

David Letterman is famous for his comical Top Ten List.  Whole Hearted Parenting has put out an annual Parent’s Top Ten List for a number of years, and your 2013 list is here!  I invite you to print it out, place it on your fridge, and pick one suggestion to practice each month.  Over the next few months, we will explore the ten suggestions right here in the WHP blog. 

Why have a top ten list for parents?  Don’t parents have enough to think about and enough challenges to handle?   The answer is yes, parents do have enough to handle!  Because you are so busy, the Parent’s Top Ten List is an easy guide for creating more peace in your family. 

This isn’t about having to practice every suggestion on the list.  It is about choosing one that sounds interesting to you and playing with it.  There is a tendency when seeing any list of suggestions, especially suggestions about parenting, to think that unless you do all of them or at least the great majority of them, that you are not doing enough.  This list is not 10 more things that you have to do in order be a perfect parent.  The Parent’s Top Ten List is about fresh thoughts, new ideas, and inspiration.  If a suggestion resonates with you and your family, choose that one and have fun with it. 

Parenting is not about perfection.  It is a not a test.  It is about your relationship with your children, your children’s journey in the world, and your enjoyment in being a mom or dad.  I hope these ideas make your journey more fun!  

Where Babies Come From

This photo montage was created by Canadian  photographer Patrice Laroche and entitled "How to Make a Baby".  Although there are more photos than seen below -  Patrice and his wife Sandra took photos at the same location throughout the pregnancy - this montage gives you the storyline.  I love the last photo following the explosion, which apparently has knocked down Patrice!  He is holding their baby in front of an excited Sandra whose belly is back to normal! 

A Refreshing New Year

With the New Year, your thoughts may turn to making resolutions, those things we commit to do to improve ourselves and make the upcoming year better than the last.  Have you noticed that most resolutions involve giving up or quitting something, such as stopping smoking, losing weight, or cutting out sweets?  Our brains don’t like to “give up” things. Have you also noticed the pressure around resolutions, particularly the pressure around failing to maintain your resolve?  The word itself – resolve – connotes feelings of force and suffering.  The perceived loss in giving up something, the pressure around failure and the implied force of a resolution all sabotage your success. For greater success, think of the changes you desire as refreshing your life.  Here are a few ideas for refreshing your family life.  Out with the old and in with the new can be refreshing without the pressure.  Consider these four ideas an invitation.

Have monthly family meetings.  Family meetings are a great time to connect, tune in to what other family members are doing, synchronize schedules, resolve challenges and support one another.  The key to making family meetings work is to choose a regular meeting day and time with your family and then hold it sacred.  Do not continuously change the day because “something comes up”.  Schedule other activities around your family meeting time.  Turn off the phone and television, and do not schedule your family meeting during mealtime. 

There are other ingredients for successful family meetings, such as keeping an agenda, having a secretary and leader (children have an opportunity to lead), beginning each meeting with an activity that creates unity, and keeping your meeting minutes in a journal.  For details on making your family meetings fun and successful, check out the Whole Hearted Parenting website under “Resources” and “Articles”.
 

Create a family handshake or greeting.  Having your own handshake is a creative and unique way to make saying hello and goodbye fun.  It can also be comforting for young children saying goodbye at pre-school and for kids going away for sleep-away camp for the first time. Every family member contributes one movement to the handshake or one word or sound to the greeting.  Combine everyone’s contributions, and you have a unique family ritual that you can refresh every year.

Each month, find something that you are doing for your child that he can do for himself and let him.  When we do things for our children that they can do for themselves, they miss the opportunity of knowing how capable they are.  Feeling capable is one of the components of self-esteem.  If you wake your child up every morning and she is capable of getting up on her own, make an adventure out of shopping for her new alarm clock.  Let her pick it out and teach her how to operate it.  If your child is capable of making his own lunch for school, have him write weekly menus so that he knows in advance what he will be making each day and so the ingredients are on hand.  Not only does your child feel capable, but you also have more time for you!

Keep track of your emotional bank accounts with your family members.  Stephen Covey spoke of these “trust accounts” in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  You have an emotional bank account with everyone in your life.  Starting with a neutral balance, you add deposits and make debits with your interactions.  Yelling is a debit.  Hugging is a deposit.  Begin to regularly notice your balance with the people you love.  Teach your children this concept as well.  If your account takes a hit because an argument, add a few deposits to be back “in the black.”

Instead of the heaviness of a resolution, I invite you to refresh your family relationships with these four ideas.  Happy 2013!

Divorced Parents : Home Alone Over the Holidays

By Rosalind Sedacca, CCT
 

Please welcome our guest blogger Rosalind Sedacca of Child Centered Divorce.  Her timely article on handling the holidays without your children has great information not only for divorced parents but for all who may be feeling alone over the holidays.  My favorite of Rosalind's tips is to be in service to others.  It is then that you notice how connected, valuable, helpful, special and loved you are!

One of the saddest consequences of divorce for parents is the alone-time when your children are visiting their other parent. While short-term periods when the kids are away can be a welcome respite for an over scheduled single parent, for other parents the intervals between seeing the children can be long and lonely.  The holiday season can be a particularly challenging time, especially when friends and neighbors are busy with their own family gatherings.

It’s really important for parents who are alone during the winter holidays to get creative and absorbed in activities that you find personally fulfilling. This can also be an opportunity to reflect on meeting your own needs and finding friends and activities that bring joy into your life.

One of the greatest challenges for divorced parents is avoiding self-pity.  Overwhelmed by a sense of isolation, or feeling undervalued as a parent, can often result in making poor choices when communicating with your children.  It’s not difficult to bury your hurt in comments designed to make your children feel guilty about not being with you, despite the fact that most times those decisions are not really within their control.

Turning toward your support group of friends can be really helpful when these feelings arise. Seeking out a counselor or divorce coach can also provide advice and new resources for creating alternative holiday traditions.

Here are some other ways you can stay in the lives of your children despite the distance between you.

• Create a Journal of holiday activities that you can later share with the kids. This might take the form of a travelogue of places you’ve explored, people you’ve visited, movies you saw and other activities participated in. You can even bring home a souvenir from each place as something to show and talk about with the kids on their next visit, such as paper restaurant menus, movie ticket stubs, tee shirts, colorful brochures, post-cards, hats, pens, etc.

•  Send an email or text message “of the day” to the kids with a theme: such as the Staying Warm Tip of the Day, favorite Candy Bar of the Day, Sledding Tip of the Day, Favorite Frozen Yogurt Flavor of the Day – just to keep in touch.

• Join a toy or food distribution drive over the holidays to help needy children in your community so you feel valued while interacting with and bringing joy to other children.

• Make plans to see the same movie as your kids on the same day and then schedule a call to discuss the movie together and share the experience in your own way.

Be creative. Think out of the box in healthy ways and your children will appreciate you without guilt, sadness or shame. This is one of the greatest gifts any parent can give to their children – the gift of enjoying their childhood without the burden of parental divorce issues weighing them down.

Rosalind Sedacca, CCT, is a Divorce & Parenting Coach, founder of the Child-Centered Divorce Network and author of How Do I Tell the Kids about the Divorce? A Create-a-Storybook Guide to Preparing Your Children -- with Love! For her free ebook on Post-Divorce Parenting, articles, coaching services and other valuable resources about divorce and parenting, visit http://www.childcentereddivorce.com.

All rights reserved. © Rosalind Sedacca