January always puts me in a reflective mood, thinking about what is to come in the new year. Like many parents, I easily get caught up in the routine of day-to-day shuttling of kids and just keeping the house livable. But I want to utilize the new year to bring about changes in how I am interacting with my daughter. One thing that is known in the research on changing behaviors is that making a pledge and being held accountable helps to achieve that behavior change.
Consider pledging to do the following along with me, we can hold each other accountable!
- GET OUTSIDE MORE INTO NATURE. We live in a beautiful area with ready access to the beach, hills, and forests, among other terrain. Everyday, I pass by trails into the forest that look enticing but I have not entered. It is easy to laze about in my free time or have a slow morning on the weekend. Because my daughter has not seen enough of the various state beaches and parks up our coastline and inland, I hope you will join me in pledging to enter into nature more. Kids living here should know the prehistoric-looking Pinnacles National Park and the giant redwoods in Big Basin State Park and m ore, given how close we are.
- BETTER SCREEN TIME. I know that there are advocates of no screen time, but I think, this year, I pledge to work for better screen time for my daughter and for me. Better screen time means talking about what is being watched, and it also means sharing what is being watched. This pledge means I watch more inane Disney shows, but we also spend time together talking about what is happening. Better screen time means I get to see what she thinks are funny YouTube shorts and why she thinks they are funny. I also realize there are some great classic movies that she has never seen and that we can enjoy together.
- SHARE SCHOOLWORK. At the end of the week, my wife and I get a pile of papers and are told, “These are for you to look at.” I dutifully look at them and see the check mark, happy face, or minus and a number and promptly recycle them. Sometimes I ask a question about an answer or two, but otherwise, that is the extent of the interaction with schoolwork. I now recognize that this is not enough of a full understanding of what my child’s life is like. I have forgotten to stop and ask her about her working life (at school). I am now pledging to ask her more about what she struggled with or the strategy she used to solve the problem. I am pledging to ask about the spelling words that seemed tricky or those that were easy to remember. Just like I share what happens with my day or what I am working on, I am pledging to get my daughter to talk more about her schoolwork in order to learn more of how she is tackling challenges.
- ACKNOWLEDGE INCONVENIENCE AND INTERRUPTION. There are days where the chaos and disorder of things in our living space get to me. I go around picking things up and putting them into their places. Given that a significant portion of the disarray is the outcome of a child beginning and stopping activities as they do, I have to solicit my daughter’s assistance, and sometimes, with forceful coercion. This activity happens at the time I want to straighten things up. Straightening up is never a chosen activity for my daughter and so there is lots of drama around putting away her own stuff. However, I have come to realize that when this happens, I never really acknowledge that cleaning up is inconvenient for her and interrupts her activity. I am guessing that other parents have had similar experiences. So in order to hopefully quell the resistance, I am pledging to acknowledge that my need to straighten up indeed intrudes into her world. Hopefully, by doing so, the drama will subside and the task will get accomplished faster.
- SAY NO TO GIVEAWAYS. We go to all kinds of public events and festivals. At most of these, there are booths of organizations bringing awareness to what they do by giving away pencils, stickers, and all kinds of plastic trinkets that appeal to children. Most of the time, these items end up in a bin or a drawer, ultimately to be thrown away. We have enough pencils for several years of schooling and lots of bouncy balls. So for this year, I am pledging to work in concert with my daughter to politely decline those items that she won’t really use. Stickers she likes to put onto her water bottle right away, yes! Other items that have no immediate utility, no thank you. We are working on not keeping things to use for later and living with things we use for now.
There is little time to focus on making changes in relationships and in the family. The new year opens that opportunity by helping us think about how the year can unfold. I am putting some pledges to change out there; how about you?
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