Everday life provides us with many opportunities to celebrate, commemorate, or quietly reflect. By calling attention to and highlighting those moments, adult family members and community leaders can help children become more aware of, and engage with, the people and world around them. They can lovingly build a home or center in which the children are nurtured, challenged, and encouraged to be fully themselves in ethical relationships and to appreciate both mundane and special occasions.
This is a chance for course participants to refer to their experience from Lesson 1 of “taking stock.” The family habits you cultivate can be reparative and generative toward the solutions and visions you discovered in that section.
Some questions to consider in developing practices for your family are:
- What are the repetitive opportunities we face daily and can bring intention toward?
- Are some daily needs always difficult to accomplish?
- What chronically stressful transitions can be redesigned proactively?
- What skills can family/group members teach each other by being more inclusive?
- How is the labor of the family/group divided or shared?
- Do tasks in your family/group encourage teamwork, autonomy, or isolation?
- What is the role of personal contact in your family/group?
- What kinds of choices do family/group members make in how they help?
- How does your family/group offer reassurance to one another each day?
- How are different members’ contributions or responsibilies acknowledged?
We can cultivate chosen practices. Daily life is full of rituals that become the grounding of family life. When shaped with intention and mindfulness, these can create greater ease in a family’s household patterns and assumptions, and greater harmony in their relations. Waking up, mealtimes, transitions, and bedtimes are classic opportunities for designing stress-reducing, values-enhancing patterns of action. Especially when children are involved, repetition and ritual can offer a reliable grounding that supports self-regulation. Values like gratitude, care, and connection can be cultivated with reliable supportive structures. A song, poetic phrase, rhyme or gesture can become a lifelong point of reference to touch deeply and instantaneously upon those values. The practices you develop become the culture of your home. Much of this happens naturally. Bringing intentionality to it can be very satisfying and growthful, and can often bring forth solutions to unsolved problems or chronic stressors.
It is in the ordinary and invisible moments that values take hold. Knowing this is golden! The senses nurture the heart strings, with tone, touch, and attention. A family who rushes from one thing to the next, ruled by the practicality of things rather than the humanity of them, are missing the crucial opportunities of growth that live in TRANSITIONS. The family that divides home tasks according to who is good at what may be missing opportunities for teamwork and learning from one another. A light-hearted reminder from Free To Be You and Me: “Make sure when there’s housework to do, that you do it together.”
Giving space and time to the things we wish would flourish is important. For example, making a “gratitude desk” (or a gratitude kit you take out once a week) of thank you cards and coloring materials available, and making a time each week to fill out blank thank you cards manifests an abstract value. It encourages the deed of gratitude and fosters the language of it instead of just the feeling of it. Cultivating a time to contemplate gratitude before a meal or before bedtime supports the consciousness that can flow into this action with ease. Adding a dimension, let your child choose toys to donate to a homeless shelter whenever they receive a new toy themselves.
Free To Be You and Me is a children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas.
Pay it Forward
The idea behind paying it forward is that whenever you benefit from a good deed, you let others participate by doing another good deed, instead of repaying the benefactor.
By paying it forward you can make an important difference in the world. You will brighten another person’s mood and set a chain reaction in motion. If you pay it forward to three people, who again pay it forward to three others themselves, and so on, the entire planet could be transformed.
