Issue 6: Spring Cleaning Your Routines

Nothing signals the end of the school year like the celebration of Easter and the endless Justin Timberlake Memes. This month as we start to wind down the school year, we are also ramping up to summer. Similar to New Year’s Resolutions, summer is often a time when our routines change, especially for our kids. This month, we wanted to offer some resources to help you do some “spring cleaning” of your current routines. Maybe you just need a quick spruce up, or maybe you need an overhaul. Either way, we hope you find something to help you and your family be happy and healthy. Next month will include some personal resource recommendations from our POPCS faculty as we close out our school year.

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Change the Way You Think About Yourself

Who are you when you are the best version of yourself? Do you have the mental energy to be creative? Innovative? Collaborative? Appreciative of playfulness? Do you more often find yourself caught in survival mode believing that there isn’t enough time, money, or resources? Can you tell the difference between a perceived threat to your survival versus a threat to your ego? This video from The Conscious Leadership Group challenges the way we think about situations to help us figure out how to free ourselves to enjoy the more joyful parts of life.

Locating Yourself - A Key to Conscious Leadership
By: The Conscious Leadership Group 

Why Thinking You’re Ugly is Bad for You
TedTalk By: Meaghan Ramsey

“About 10,000 people a month Google the phrase, “Am I ugly?” (ted.com). This TedTalk is invaluable to us as people parenting one of the most anxious and insecure generations of kids. If you think this is just for #GirlMoms, think about how many of your sons would name a muscle-bound professional athlete as his role model. To blame social media for yet another thing, there are countless images of well-built, traditionally beautiful, virtually flawless people flooding your kids’ Instagram and Snapchat. We celebrate the perfect images and the perfect performances of athletes and entertainers, and anything less than perfect is publicly denounced. The pressure to be perfect at earlier and earlier ages cripples many students from being able to enjoy the freedoms of childhood. Kids don’t want to try because what if they fail? None of their role models fail, so perfection must be attainable. Meaghan Ramsey challenges us with this: “Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. But let's show our kids the truth. Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel.”

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Change the Way You Think About Family Dinner Time

I totally nailed it last week. I made a beautiful dinner using more than one pan, and all the dishes finished at almost the same time. My two year old colored while I cooked, and a temporary peace filled the kitchen. I felt like Supermom. As I laid the plates on the table, my daughter pointed and said, “Rice!” I was excited she recognized it since that was a word she hadn’t said around me before, but then I realized why she knew it so quickly. I had just made the exact meal that we both ate at school for lunch. Chicken. Rice. Green beans. Fun fact about my daughter: she does not eat the same thing twice in one day. Our dinner dissolved into lots of “we don’t throw food,” “please just try it,” and “look mommy’s eating it” to no avail. Turns out, I didn’t nail it.

Maybe your dinners are full of good intentions and poor execution like mine. Maybe yours are okay, but not stellar and you’d like to spice them up. Or maybe you don’t eat together as a family, and you’d like to try it but don’t know where to start. Wherever you are on the spectrum, these two resources provide tips that you can implement as early as tonight. Don’t worry if you’re met with a little bit of eye rolling at first. Persevere! A lot of life is lived around a kitchen table together.

Making Family Meals Enjoyable: Six Tips
By: Raisingchildren.net.au

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The Family Dinner Project: Food, fun and conversation about things that matter.
By: The Family Dinner Project

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Change the Way You Run Your Week

When my fiance (now wife of almost 10 years) and I started our Pre-Marital Counseling, we sat down with our pastor to discuss our backgrounds, how we met, our relationship, struggles, and hopes.  After a lot of listening he brought up some important points about the differences we would naturally have, but perhaps not know about each other. One that stuck out in both her mind and mine was when he said, “Now, Gary will probably have a routine, and that may seem strange to you.  But when he wakes up in the morning, he will likely do the same things, in the same order, at around the same time, and not even know that he does it.”
 
​In the months leading up the our marriage, I paid more attention, and even asked my roomates if they noticed this about me or themselves.  We all agreed we had one thing in common: We did not have much of a routine. So I worked to develop one, even just starting with how I began my day, and with a lot of practice, I noticed a difference in both how I felt and how much I got done throughout the day.  So when my wife and I got married several months later and moved into our first place together, she caught our pastor one Sunday at church and said “You were right about that routine thing.” He laughed and winked at me, almost as though he had orchestrated the whole thing.  Routine was what I needed to not only relieve the scattered anxiety I usually felt, but also to bring some much needed structure to my life and my new home.

Summer is coming, and our kids feel it just as acutely as we do.  I know I always start summer with this “big plan” of what we will do, where we will go, and most importantly, “The Routine.” The routine charade usually lasts about 2 ½ weeks tops before we slip into zone defense and end up just feeling like we are hanging on.  So in the light of routines, this article from Today’s Parent takes on a pared down approach to simplify both your routine and your mind.  Kids need it, parents crave it, and with everyone needed and engaged, a reboot of your routine could be just what you need to breathe a little easier. The article from Motherly points to science in how these simple additions or switches to your routines not only benefit your children, but also bring health to the family system as well.  Since we are a little ahead of summer, now is a great time to pilot some new ideas when it comes to what is not working for you and your family.

How to get your family organized and on a schedule—in three steps
By: Today's Parent

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It’s science: Having a routine helps your family be happier
By: Erin Leyba, LCSW, PhD

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Change the Way You See “Happiness”

With the recent “baseball sized hail” scare that left many of us scrambling to strap rugs, sleeping bags and work out mats to the tops of our vehicles, I had a wake-up call standing in my garage: we have way too many boxes. I was shocked to see how many of our boxes we saved back from this past Christmas, and although “you never know when you will need more boxes,” it may be time for us to recycle some.  But I remember vividly how on Christmas morning it was not the toys, the tricycle, or even the candy that stole the stage for my kids, it was those boxes. Forts, caves, or train stations, they became the best thing in the room for a day.  Of course they played with and appreciated everything, but it reminded me that happiness is in quality time, not in things.  As parents we desire for our kids to find happiness, and we hope to bring it to them as often as we can. It is easy to fall prey to “keeping up with the Joneses,” or even just keeping up with the hamster wheel in your head, but what “really” makes our kids happy?  In this article from Parents, we see some tips about how sometimes what kids want is not often what they need, and how our approach to their happiness has a big impact.

7 Secrets to Raising a Happy Child
By: Marguerite Lamb

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