Have you ever felt proud of yourself for changing your old ways?
I am writing this after 2 weeks of my children being on Easter Holidays from school.
It reminded me of the tough days during the school lockdowns.
For a lot of you it is better to “not mention the war”.
How did parents who were expected to work full-time manage to keep their children occupied?
Seriously, I am not going to re-open this can of worms.
The question I would like to ask is what did we learn from it?
A lot of parents tell me that everything is as busy as before 2020 and their children enjoyed the slower pace of not having to rush anywhere.
You might be able to relate to some of this?
The honest truth is that our children just want us to be happy.
Do you think they sometimes play along with our expectations of them and our projection onto them of what we think they need for a happy life?
What I hear young adults say is that they feel really burdened with having to full-fill an expectation to make their parents proud.
Now that we have so much material wealth, we can grant almost every wish our child has.
What I mean is not that we are like a genie in a bottle to our children but that most of our children in the Western World have everything they need to feel safe.
Wanting more and more is the natural tendency of our mind - is what my meditation teacher taught me.
This is the beauty why mantra meditation works and our mind naturally wants to release stress to help our body stay balanced.
What if we are causing our children stress by sending them to endless activities and exposing them to more screen time than their young mind can handle?
What I discovered over the last few weeks is that our children being bored is something that should not make me jump as a mother and needing to fix the situation, but something to endure and hold space for.
Lately, my child comes to me and says that they are bored.
My first reaction is to suggest endless games that they could play.
Guess what the answer is to everything I say?
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“No, I don’t want to.”
So I came up with something different than my default to micromanaging my child’s life.
This is something that keeps me on my toes too - to not be reactive when my children open their mouth.
What a life skill I am learning, in this later stage of life.
Let’s hope by me role-modelling less reactivity whenever I am aware, my child will benefit in the long-term.
So what I started validating for them lately instead of asking questions when the dreaded boredom comes is:
’This must be so hard for you to think of something to do.’
One child asked me if I am ever bored?
I almost burst out laughing as I clearly remember this feeling of not knowing what to keep myself busy with when I was younger and asking my parent the same question.
Click my Contact page -> select You Tube and watch my clip dated 22/04/22 on the topic of never-ending housework.
Back to our children being bored.
Have you ever lost all sense of time when you are in an activity that requires you being creative?
I think that the ability to being in the moment is so crucial for us to feeling alive.
So I propose to have some small amount of screen-free time for your child where you simply leave them be and don’t attempt to fix things, like I do.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
As always, I would love to hear how your child gets on with their ability to be in their own company.
Please send me a private email that only I can see and will be kept confidential to: effortlessparenting@gmail.com
Are my ideas helping you?
You are more than welcome to suggest other topics that you may like to discuss here.
You can simply connect through any of the links in my 'contact' section above
Enjoy creating calmer homes and maybe with some opportunity to experience boredom in the coming days.
This race-car track was created out of boredom:
