Five Quick Parenting Tips: How to serve your family without losing yourself.

Reclaim your time

It is easy to be swept up in caring for others. Families are busy and the demands on parents is constant. Sometimes the demands of others seem to steal the hours away from us - but it doesn't have to be that way. Here are five things you can do today to reclaim your time and better service your family without losing yourself. 

How to reclaim your time:

1. Be organized. Think of organization on a continuum. As a parent you must have flexibility to respond to others needs. At the same time you frequently have small batched of time you can utilize if you are organized. For example, can you sort the mail daily and respond without it piling up? This only worked for me when once I set aside stamps, envelopes, pen, return labels and my checkbook in a drawer together. Otherwise, I spent too much time each day looking for a pen. 

2. Don't distract yourself. It is easy to distract ourselves with screens whenever we can. When you finally have a minute to pause, take that minute to breathe and think, not just click and scroll.

3. Prioritize. Decide each week what is essential and what is ideal, then protect the essential and strive to incorporate the ideal. If it is essential that you pray for 5 minutes in the morning, protect that time. If it is essential that you hit the grocery store Monday morning or attend an important meeting then make it happen. If you really want to have coffee with a friend, schedule it, and build the rest of your time around that appointment. If you have to cancel, be sure to reschedule right away. Thinking wistfully about doing something won’t get you there. Take the small steps to make the important things happen.

4. Use your quiet time carefully. Separate your tasks into things you can do with others around (fold laundry, wash dishes), and things you need quiet time to do (read, pray, respond to calls or emails). Use your quiet time for the things that you do better or more efficiently when you are not distracted. Using your quiet time carefully enables you to be more present to your family when they want attention.

5. Work towards a simple routine. This helps your family to better anticipate when you are and are not available. My family knows I am awake at 6, but not responsive until I come downstairs closer to 645. They know I do my weekly planning on Sunday. They know I am usually in the kitchen from 5-630 each night looking for company and conversation. Even young children can learn the best time to come to you for snuggles or reading time or conversation based on your schedule not their impulses.

We all have just 24 hours in a day and we all have a responsibility to be better stewards of the time we are given. 

Being at home with the family can be personally taxing as the demands seem constant. With intentionality and purpose though you can still serve with love and devotion, and maintain some semblance of self and you grow through your vocation.  

“We must take all the care that God wishes to take about perfecting ourselves, 

and yet leave the care of arriving at perfection entirely to God” .

- St. Francis de Sales

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 Tips for a Happy Summer

We all want our kids to be happy, but as you enter into the summer months and have more contact with your children, I want to encourage you to help them learn and grow this summer by letting them be just a little unhappy.  

Sometimes we need a happiness reset. 

We have a tendency (called hedonic adaptation) to return to a happy-midpoint emotionally. This means that if we experience the same awesome event repeatedly, after a while it doesn't seem as awesome. We experience less pleasure from that same event. We then seek even greater pleasure to just feel the same level of happiness we felt before. A period of boredom, although generally not pleasant, will help your kids to more fully appreciate the fun parts of their day or week.  

Boredom has two components: low arousal and dissatisfaction. You can help your children to be more tolerant of boredom by building into your day times of low simulation (no screens, family prayer time, alone time), and by occasionally saying no to their requests.  Letting your children be bored is not the same thing as simply checking out and disengaging from them all day long. 

I am a huge supporter of planning and intentionality in family life. Each summer has looked dramatically different based on the kids' ages and our travel plans, but one thing that has helped is having some loose schedules posted in a central place. This can be a weekly or a daily schedule or both and I have examples in previous blogs (here and here). But I want to get you to think about providing structure when you create your schedule rather than over programming the children. Structure means having quiet time each day vs having a set time that they must read a specific book. Or building in some crafty creative time vs you planning and teaching a specific craft. When you schedule, you give them an idea for the flow of the day, you don't necessarily entertain them all day long. 

One area that is fairly structured in our home is meals. We typically have one wake up time and in previous years I make a decent breakfast for them. I do this because it will keep them from parading through the kitchen all morning and it gives them a good start. The key is consistency. Either make breakfast, or leave it up to them. But be consistent about it and provide some time frame for their meals. Breakfast 9ish,  lunch 12ish, snack 3ish and dinner 6ish works well for us. Getting everyone eating and sleeping in sync helps me escape the summer title of short-order-cook.

By providing a loose schedule, regular meal times, giving them a chance to be bored and saying no to their every demand, you all can have a happier healthier home this summer. If you have enjoyed these tips for a happy summer please share it with others!

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Dealing with Discipline: Why good cop/bad cop works and what to do when it doesn't

My oldest, had a curious way of never alienating himself from both his father and me at the same time. As a scientist it fascinated me and as a mother it made me laugh.  I used to say he always wanted to make sure someone would be there to feed him. As conflict cropped up in the family, I found this to be the same in my other children as well. Almost naturally, my husband and I would divide and conquer when it came to discipline - one of us would take the lead, and the other would follow up more gently. 

Until one night this week when everything fell apart. 

The details of the situation are less important than the lesson I learned. We both found ourselves frustrated with one of our children and decided that the drive home was the best-time to address the situation with the child. After carefully discussing that we wanted be careful not to "crush her spirit", yes those were my exact words, we inadvertently proceeded to do just that. 

The good cop bad cop way of dealing with discipline we had carefully crafted over 19 years of parenting went out the car window. Rather than letting her hear from one parent, we took turns piling it all on. Our good cop bad cop routine fell apart.

This conversation will go down as one of our greatest parenting fails. 

Good cop bad cop work because one parent is able to give the child the clear message for improvement, while the other gives the message of unconditional love. We love you irrespective of the problem, we care for you.  It lets the parents be aligned with a shared goal of helping the child fix the discipline issue at hand, without teaming up on the child. As I said recently in my podcast episode on Motherhood, you and your spouse don't need to be clones of one another, you need to compliment one another. 

So what do we do when we have one of these parenting fails? You apologize. Ask for forgiveness for being unkind, or impatient, or for your lack of prudence. Show humility and love. Begin to build back that relationship stronger. And next time you have to deal with discipline discuss who gets to be the good cop or bad cop before you head into the discussion. 

God Bless you in your endeavors!

How to Stay Connected to Your Kids by Saying Yes

As I washed the dishes for the n-teeth time today I reminded myself that I was being intentional. We always said we wanted our home to be THE home where the kids wanted to gather.  

It is one reason why we happily accepted a families gift of a fooze-ball table, and why we made the kids bunk up in one room when they were little in order to leave another room as a hang-out space. 

It is why we make sure we always have frozen pizza, microwave popcorn, and loads of ramen in the pantry. 

It is why I try to make sure the bathrooms aren't totally disgusting, dirty socks don't constantly litter the couch, and the little kids stay out of the way of the big kids. 

I want our place to be a comfortable, welcoming, easy to be at home.

But it also requires that I say yes. I say yes to brining that extra mouth home to feed, even if it means adjusting my meal plan. It means I say yes to the cookie making and hot cocoa drinking and giggles in the living room, even though I am bone tired. It means I say yes when the team comes over for a polar-bear plunge after the game, even though there are a few more loads of towels to do now before bed. 

When you have tweens or teens, staying connected with them means opening your home and your heart to their friends as well. They move in packs. They live a collective life. As my college son returned home this month it was his friends who are picked him up at the airport, then come over for a welcome home dinner.

These peers are the ones who challenge them in friendship, who teach them about loyalty. They learn to keep a secret, stand up for and sacrifice their time and attention for each other. They learn about themselves when they share their life with others.  A good friend challenges your child to do and be better. 

Saying yes to our children's friends gives us a chance to see our children in a different role. We see them as confidant, leader, cheer leader, compadre. We get a different glimpse of what type of person they are growing to be. But we only see this when we say yes, and invite those friends into our family.

So say yes to your kids and their friends, even if it complicates things for you. Say yes and connect with them. Get to know their friends and draw deeper into relationship with them all. 

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