I don’t know about you, but becoming aware of exactly what is happening in my financial life is challenging for me.  Recording my spending and then analyzing it is frightening.  Creating and sticking to a budget feels foreign, and planning our financial future feels like sitting at the bottom of a very deep well and inching my way up brick by brick.  And then there’s the issue of increasing our income and decreasing our bottom line.  So now I’m hyperventilating.  Well, not really, but you get my point.

But the thing is, if we don’t pay attention to our finances, we will continue to live paycheck to paycheck, never really saving for our future, and as retirement approaches we’ll be up a creek without a paddle.  On the other hand, if we take a good look at our finances and bring the light of awareness to our earning, spending, saving and such, we actually have the ability to set goals and strive for them.

And if there’s one thing I know from years and years of personal development, it’s that setting a goal is the quickest way to make a change.  When we strive for things, we can often achieve much more than we would otherwise.

Now here’s the kicker, if we turn away from the responsibility of our financial future, we’re not just hurting ourselves anymore, we’re hurting our children too.  And not just because we can’t provide the things we want to give them.  I mean sure, it’ll be nice to know that we can actually afford to buy our kids healthy food and fun toys, or maybe we plan to save up for their college education.  But the real disservice comes in our children’s dysfunctional relationship to money.

We are always teaching our kids.  No matter how much we’d like to pretend they’re not learning things unless we intend to teach them, the truth is, they’re absorbing our relationship to money.  They will use our financial health as a template on which to build their own beliefs about money.

That’s not to say that they’ll be the same as we are.  Some kids grow up in poverty, don’t like it, and go on to become millionaires.  Others grow up in decadence, never learning the value of hard work or the need to earn money, and end up in poverty.  Still others consciously choose one road or the other, or something in between.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that we have a unique opportunity to help our children develop a healthy relationship to money.  But first, we have to start by healing our own relationships to it.  After we’ve examined our thoughts, beliefs, and actions around money and taken responsibility for our finances, we can teach our children to do the same.

I’m guessing we’ve all had the experience of telling our children no when they ask for something in line at the grocery store.  But I’m curious how we will tell them no and what message about money they will get from that.  Is it because “we can’t afford it” or because “we don’t choose to spend our hard earned money on candy” or will we remind them of that great vacation we’re saving up for?  I wonder how we can make our conversations about money inspiring, informative, and age appropriate for our children.

This week, take a good hard look at your financial wellbeing.  Are there areas that need your attention?  If all that’s already handled (is it ever really all handled?), then set some financial goals.  Finally, ask yourself, how will I teach my children about the beauty, wonder, and challenges of money this week?

Oh! And have a wonderful Mother’s Day

Love to you all, Shelly

See, the adults in the household are the ones who create the culture of the home, and if you’re spewing out frustration, resentment, and irritation, then pretty soon, you’ll start to see those same sentiments emanating from your kids.

On the other hand, if you can take a step back for a moment and really consider what kind of culture you WANT to have in your home, you can absolutely create that for yourself and your family.  With a little bit of foresight a strong commitment to consistency, you can have the kind of cooperation, kindness, care and generosity you most want to permeate your family.

But here’s the trick, YOU have to model for your kids exactly who and how you want them to be.  Here are some steps to get you headed in the right direction:

Step 1- Take care of your self. Are there ways in which you’ve been neglecting yourself?  Are you getting enough rest, nourishment, exercise, and alone time?  If not, brainstorm with a friend or partner about what you can do differently so that you can take better care of yourself.  When you’re well rested, nourished, and feeling great, you’re much more likely to be the example you want to be for your kids.

Step 2- Goal setting and values identification. Think about the values and qualities that are most important to you.  Is kindness and cooperation at the top of your list?  Or do you prefer independence and self-direction?  Do you want your children to love and care for each other or just to stop hitting one another?  By setting some goals and identifying your highest values you can begin to create a plan of action.

Step 3- Model the behavior you want. This is the most challenging step by far, but if you are committed to creating the kind of culture in your home that you most want, it all starts with you.  When you get frustrated, angry, whiney, and irritable, you’re teaching your kids the very behaviors that you don’t enjoy.  So, this week, practice whining and venting with a friend during naptime, instead of in front of your kids.  And when you’re with your kids, practice generosity, kindness, or whatever qualities embody your highest values.

Step 4- Give positive feedback when you notice your kids embodying your highest values. This week, encourage your kids to give help and support to one another and to their friends then share with them about how happy, excited, and joyful you feel when you see them sharing and cooperating.  Let older children know how grateful you feel when you seem them treating younger siblings with kindness and care.  By noticing the things you WANT, you’re encouraging even more of those things to happen every day.

I’ve seen families turn sibling conflict into cooperation and kindness in a matter of weeks using these steps.  I hope they’re helpful for you and I would love to hear about your experiences in actively creating the culture of your home.  Please share a question or comment below.

Have a fantastic week!  Warmly, Shelly

It’s spring. Time to think about renewal, visions, and growing the lives we want.

Do you want to have a life in addition to having a child?

I think that’s perfectly reasonable.

What do you want that life to look like?

Between school, the babysitting coop, and my work with Awake Parent, I talk to parents quite a bit.  I’ve noticed that many parents, particularly parents of young children, are pretty much consumed with parenting. Parenting is their life.

If that’s what makes you happy—cool! Congratulations on manifesting exactly what you want.

However…

If since becoming a parent you have found yourself:

• Wanting more time with your friends
• Not finding enough time with your spouse or partner
• Not knowing whether or how you might be able to date or have romance or sex in your life
• Wanting to be more caught up on your reading
• Neglecting self-care rituals
• Lacking exercise
• Either giving up your boundaries too easily, or enforcing them more harshly than you’d like

And…

You would like that to be different…

…you are not alone!

Parenthood can be the most consuming undertaking of your whole life, and few resources show us how to balance things. For all its talk of family values, this culture offers precious little in terms of built-in structures for support, relief and balance.

Luckily, we can create our own structures and practices. When we stand back and rethink things like social time, self-care, and exercise, we can find many, many options for structuring these activities in ways that allow us to have more of what we want in our lives in a way that also nurtures our children.

When we replenish ourselves by meeting our human, adult needs, we bring a stronger and more able self to our children.

The first step is to decide to do it. A friend, a single mom who scarcely gets out more than once a year said to me, “I don’t know how you have time to do all that you do,” I told her it was because I decided to.

Okay, no fair, I decided long before I had a child that I would only have a child with someone who truly saw him or herself as a full-time parent, so I could also have a whole life as a parent. And I was fortunate enough to find someone who saw himself as, and agreed to be, a 50-50 parent. We continue to co-parent in this spirit, even though the relationship between the two of us is no longer what it was.

I am very fortunate. I had seen way too many examples of families, even progressive families, in which the birth mother simply took on everything, sometimes including a full-time job, while most or all of her former life fell by the wayside.

I knew I wanted a different form of parenting, one in which being a parent was an integral component of who I was, but not the one determining aspect. Given my strong calling to give birth to books and other creative projects, I had decided that being a 50-50 parent was the way to go.  That intention helped me create structures that would allow me to parent in the way that met my needs. Now I have time with my child, and also time to do other things, some that involve my child, some that do not.

Still…my first step in creating this life that I wanted was to envision it, and then decide I was going to have it.

In the coming weeks, as part of this Whole Life Parenting series, we’ll be sharing  practical tips on how to meet your needs as well as your children’s needs. Many, many sources tell us that the first step in creating things the way we want is to get specific about what we want.  So, let’s do it now: With specific detail, What kind of parenting life do you want?

Please feel free to share your answers in the comment box below. We’ll try to incorporate your wildest dreams for yourself as a parent into our upcoming posts.

I can’t wait to hear them!

Warmly,

Jill