Tag: Parents

At her dining table one evening, a young woman sat worrying. Taxes were owed. The house needed work. And the following day the whole family would be arriving.

Gratitude was not what she was feeling.

The homework

Glancing to one side, she saw her small daughter bent over a notebook, writing furiously.

The class had been set an unusual paragraph to write, the girl explained, on the subject of negative thanksgiving. They were to list things they were grateful for, but only the ones that feel unpleasant at first and turn out well in the end.

Curious now, the mother leaned across and read what her daughter had put down.

Grateful for final examinations, on the grounds that they mean school is nearly finished. Grateful for medicine that tastes horrible, on the grounds that it works. Grateful for being woken by an alarm clock, on the grounds that being woken means being alive.

The same list, read again

And the mother realised that her own evening would take the same treatment.

So she went back through it.

Taxes were owed, which meant there was employment to owe them from. The house needed work, which meant the house was hers. A family had to be fed, which meant there was a family to sit down with.

The habit underneath

Complaining about the bad things comes naturally to most of us. Turning them over to see what is printed on the other side does not.

Which makes one question worth putting to your own day. Inside your negatives, where is the positive?

Find the better half of today, and let today be a good one.

Domestic chores are only part of what a woman in employment has to carry, and the rest of it arrives fresh every morning as a new set of demands.

Which makes the handling of time not optional but essential. Give the day a structure, put honest effort behind it, and very few of those demands remain unsolvable.

Become an early riser

Get up ahead of the house, and put the thoughts of the office aside for a few minutes.

Begin instead by ordering the work according to what matters most. Doing that is what buys you the clear head to deal with the chores actually in front of you.

Manage in order to save time

Clearing the domestic work in the early part of the morning is the gentlest possible way into a day, and it pays out in the evening. Come home from work and the hours belong to your family, or to you.

Where the workload is genuinely more than one person can finish, bring in help. And cook things that are quick to prepare without losing their nutrition, so that the evening is not swallowed by the kitchen.

Keep a memorandum for weekend chores

Household shopping belongs to the weekend. Scattered across the working week, it simply lengthens the list on days that are already full.

Write out, in advance, everything the weekend has to absorb. Through the week, as items occur to you, note them down and put each one in its place.

The practice earns its keep twice over. Nothing gets forgotten, and what does get done is done in a sensible sequence. Reminders on a phone will carry the same load if you prefer to let the device remember.

Use the minutes that are already free

Some chores run themselves once started. When that happens, do not stand and supervise them absent-mindedly. Fill the gap with another job.

Water heating on the stove is time enough to fold clothes, or to put a lunch together. It sounds like very little. Counted across a year, the practice is anything but.

Being yourself has a plain enough definition. What you say is what is true for you. The ideas and the thoughts you order your days around are your own. Something then becomes visible in you from the inside out, and other people read it as certainty.

Why pretending costs so much

Anyone in the world who is not doing this is hunting for that same assurance about who they are.

The reason is not mysterious. Stop being you, and the thing you have started attempting is to be something you are not.

Sustaining that has a price, and the price is charged internally. Stress arrives. So does confusion. So does a competitiveness that has nowhere to go, because the person being forced into existence is not you.

Where the habit was learned

Look at the crowd of people around you who have no idea who they are, and the origin of the habit becomes visible.

Nobody sat us down and taught it. As children we absorbed it: that in this society attention has to be competed for, and so does affection, and so does respect. Above all we absorbed two instructions: that a person must become somebody, and that a person must fit in.

Every one of those lessons carries a person away from what they already were.

The part of you that does not change

How you appear from outside will shift across the years. That is ordinary, and no cause for concern.

What sits underneath does not shift. There is a child in there still, unspoiled, fresh, playful, wide awake. At that depth, a person is not a version of life. They are life.

People who have stopped performing are simply what is true about them at that moment. They talk out of that inner place, and nothing about them needs managing.

It gives other people permission

Here is the effect that is easy to miss. Dropping the performance does something to the people around you, because it frees them to drop theirs.

Allowing another person to be who they are, and treating that as their right, is precisely what opens the same room for you. The two movements are one movement.

And anyone who recognises the genuine article in you will respect you for it, for the simple reason that it is what they are looking for themselves.

Are the shelves at home overflowing with bits and pieces? Is it a struggle to turn up a matching pair of shoes, or two earrings, let alone one hairpin?

Here are three ways to get a house better organised, and the pleasing thing about all of them is that they repurpose something you already have.

Binder clips in the freezer

Take a handful of binder clips and clip your bags onto the freezer shelves.

It is a little fiddly at first, keeping the bag sealed while you fix it to the rung, and practice sorts that out. What you get back is time and space, and a freezer that looks considerably more organised than it did.

A magazine rack for pot lids

Once the pans themselves have a home, the lids still need one, and lids are what turn a tidy cupboard back into a jumble.

The walls inside a cupboard are the right spot and they are almost always going unused. You can buy a dedicated lid holder. Or you can save the money and give an old magazine rack a second life doing exactly the same job.

A cutlery organiser for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes are among the most germ-laden things in a house, which is not what most people expect of an object they put in their mouth twice a day.

What they need above all is to dry out properly between uses, and a crowded pot does not allow it. Take an unused cutlery organiser and give every brush its own compartment. Each one gets air on all sides, and nothing touches anything else.

Three small changes, no purchases, and a house that is easier to live in by the weekend.

Working mothers have been argued over in the parenting world for decades, and the charge is always the same one: that they are not there. There are things that make them a distinctive kind of parent, and they are worth setting out.

Some mothers choose to stay at home and take the traditional role. Others prefer to work outside it and live life at full stretch. Choosing between the two, most mothers are weighing what is best for their children rather than what is easiest for themselves.

And some choose both, pursuing a career while raising well brought up children. Here is what that gives the children.

A positive role model, for both the daughters and the sons

Children need to understand early that women are not household staff, and that a woman may have a professional life of her own.

The effect divides usefully. Girls learn that a career is something to think about, rather than assuming the path runs straight from marriage to children. Boys learn that domestic work is part of family life and not somebody else’s department.

That second one matters longer than people expect. It shapes how those boys run their own households years later.

More independent children

A working mother is out of the house for much of the day and tends to carry guilt about it.

What the children see is different from what she fears. They know their mother is impressive and that she handles every front effectively. So they get on with their own chores and do not lean on anyone to do it for them.

The independence is not a consolation prize for the absence. It is produced by it.

Better quality time, because it is deliberate

Everybody talks about quality time with children. The sad fact is that a great many parents are only half listening while they are with their children, because the other half is attached to a device.

A working mother knows she has to switch off the moment she gets home, and that the hours she does have need all of her attention.

Which is the quiet point underneath this whole argument. Presence is not measured in hours in the building. It is measured in whether anyone is actually listening.

However tough a person is, emotion remains a powerful part of a life, and there are moments where what you feel simply swamps you.

Start with what this is not. Learning to control your emotions does not mean learning to suppress them. It is closer to the opposite. Once you accept that you, like everybody else, react to particular inputs with particular feelings, you give yourself the chance not to let those feelings run your thoughts and your actions.

There is generally nothing wrong with expressing what you feel. We are wired for it. But anger, anxiety and fear are the three that need handling, and the question underneath is simple. Are you running your emotions, or are they running you?

You are in charge of your thoughts

Do not accept the idea that your own thinking is beyond your say.

Emotions certainly influence thoughts. What gets forgotten is that it runs both ways, and thought can be used to guide feeling, either strengthening it or working against it. The two are closely linked and they are not the same thing.

Try to look at the situation objectively. If you cannot, put it to a friend you trust, someone who can see it with less bias than you currently can and help you sort out what you actually think.

You are in charge of what you do

Even when the feeling stays stubbornly negative, what you do about it is still open.

Acting on a feeling, or declining to, is within your gift. Take a step back and look at the options instead of moving on instinct.

Be clear about what this buys you. Choosing the next action well will not make the feeling disappear. It reduces how much power the feeling has over you, which is a different and more achievable thing.

You can only control yourself

Run through the difficult emotions and the same thread shows up in all of them, which is control.

We are angry because we cannot make other people do what we want. We worry because tomorrow is not ours to arrange. We grieve because we lost someone or something through circumstances that were never in our hands. We are afraid because something is threatening us that we cannot govern.

Once you see that almost the only thing available to you is yourself, letting go of the rest becomes easier. Not easy. Easier.

Which leaves one place to put your attention, and it is enough. Not the event. How you respond to it.

A quietly useful idea from the health sessions: each organ has its own language, and it speaks to you through the habits it thrives on. Give it the habit it prefers and it does its job; ignore that habit and it eventually complains. Here is the short phrasebook.

The map

The heart prefers a daily walk. The brain prefers quality sleep, not just any sleep. The lungs prefer deep, deliberate breathing. The bones prefer weight-bearing effort — walking, squats, climbing stairs. The blood prefers plain water, taken daily. The gut prefers foods rich in the good bacteria of probiotics. Muscles prefer resistance work at least twice a week, not cardio alone. The nervous system prefers meditation. Memory prefers being made to learn something new. The skin prefers daily protection from the sun. The immune system, like the brain, prefers good sleep.

The principle underneath

None of these is dramatic, and that is the point. Health here is less about occasional big interventions than about listening to each system through the ordinary habit it responds to, and giving it that habit often enough to count. Pick one organ, give it its favourite habit this week, and let the list grow from there.

The pull of other people stays powerful across an entire life. It is never stronger than it is in childhood.

Childhood is the period when values have not yet settled and the self is still being assembled. It is a tender age, and a parent has to look after a child’s feelings and a child’s conduct at the same time.

Here is the part that surprises people. For children and teenagers, meeting a bad influence has an upside. Much as fighting off certain bacteria trains the immune system, a measure of exposure to bad behaviour toughens a child’s character and sharpens his ability to choose well.

If you want a resilient child, you cannot keep him away from every social germ. What you can do is recognise which one he has met.

The back talker

Told to get on with his homework, he answers with something cutting. Older ones add language to it.

Rate this one high. Children who watch somebody answer an adult that way try it themselves, usually as a way of testing how independent they are, and it travels through a group like fire.

What to do. The first time you hear the language, or notice the new defiance settling in, let him see quietly that you have a fair idea where he found it. Then say you do not accept it, and set the boundary.

The mean girl, or boy

These children are practised in the darker arts of leaving people out and running them down once they have gone.

Rate this one high as well. A child taken into favour by whoever leads the group picks up a share of that exclusiveness as the entry fee. He learns to talk about people behind them, which is no small thing, and left alone it will spoil his character.

What to do. Do not attack the friend, who will be defended. Ask instead about feeling. What does it stir in him when she behaves that way. What does he make of the things being said.

The sneak

If a rule stands in the way he breaks it, and then denies having done so.

Rate this one high too. With this sort, parents are cast as the opposition. The child is busy defining himself and proving he is nobody’s copy, and he has a personality of his own that he intends you to notice.

What to do. Tell him plainly that you are trying to keep him clear of something worse and that this is on his side. He needs to see the consequence coming, and to hear your reasoning rather than only your ruling.

Things worth keeping in mind

Accept what a parent cannot do. Once your child is at school, or anywhere else among people, his behaviour is out of your hands. So is the behaviour of his friends.

One thing is left to you, and it is enough. Make him understand the consequences that are coming later. Carry it in a story, because a consequence inside a story can be turned over without anybody having to defend himself. And show it, by doing good to other people where he can see you.

Watch how he behaves, and do ask him to change, but use gentle words for it. Do not be harsh. Children at that age are more tender than their conduct suggests, and they need your affection. Affection and understanding will change everything in the end, though never quickly. Take your time over it, and give him his.

Physical education matters more than studies. Not as a pleasant addition to them, not as the period that empties the head between two difficult lessons. More, because it is what shapes a young person into a better human being, and no examination has ever been designed to measure that.

What it teaches, before anything else, is how to raise the quality of your own life. Fix a child’s whole attention on school work and the life around it goes flat and stops moving, and a young life in that condition heads somewhere particular. Towards low spirits, and towards failing.

Exercise also does something quieter. It builds stamina, and a student with stamina starts to be pleased by his own intelligence and his own abilities rather than anxious about them. That is a rare thing to watch happen in a child, and it does not happen at a desk.

Study after study has shown how much physical activity matters inside a school, which is why so many now push their students towards it instead of surrendering the games period the moment examinations appear on the calendar.

It gives concentration back

The research points at the basal ganglia, the region that governs how well a person can hold focus, and finds that physical activity enlarges it.

That has never mattered more. A student today carries several distractions at once, the television at home and the phone in the pocket among them, and simply staying with one subject has become genuinely hard. A teacher who pushes physical education is doing something direct about that, not merely letting the class run about.

It matters for healthy growth

A great many school children now treat unhealthy food as ordinary daily fare. Fries, fizzy drinks, pizza, burgers. Eaten on a regular basis, that road leads to obesity in childhood.

Exercise at school holds off both obesity and high blood pressure, and the mechanism is plain arithmetic. Activity spends the surplus calories. Calories that go unspent are laid down as fat. Physical work turns the same surplus into energy instead of storage.

It protects sleep

Sleeping properly through the night is one of the foundations of a happy and healthy life. A child who has genuinely exerted himself finishes the day with a tired body, and a tired body wants that sleep rather than resisting it.

Follow what comes of it. A rested child sits straighter through lessons and follows them instead of drifting. Attention of that kind prevents the careless slips that lose marks on work already understood. And it leaves something over, which the child spends being useful to his teachers and decent to the students beside him.

It gives the stress an exit

School is a hectic business for every person inside it, and the pressure is often not academic at all. It may be a quarrel with a friend. It may be a poor grade that turned up despite honest work.

A student under that weight cannot concentrate on his performance if he is never given room to unload it. Physical activity provides the room. Working the body and breathing deeply pulls extra air into the lungs, which carries more oxygen to the brain, and a brain supplied that way settles and lets go of the tension.

Why the schools changed their minds

Many have now written physical education into the core of the curriculum and actively encourage a balance between lessons and exercise.

They did it for a reason that should close the argument. The children who join in turn out happier and in better health than the ones who give every available hour to school work.

Positivity makes an optimist of a person, and an optimist spends far less of the day on worry and on the thoughts that circle. Build the habit and you become happier company, someone whose eye goes to the brighter side of a thing and who assumes the best is on its way.

The word to notice is build. This is not a temperament issued at birth to the lucky. Take it up as a way of living and the ordinary business of the day gets easier to carry, and useful changes start arriving in the life around it. Here is what it actually gives you.

The aura effect

You will have heard this put loosely elsewhere, and there is something to it. What you genuinely want begins finding its way to you.

Part of that is simply company. Decide to be positive and you drift towards people who have decided the same thing, or better still towards people who are further along than you and pull you up. Some of the others you convert. You help them notice what is worth noticing in a situation they had already given up on.

That is not a small service to perform. It is how peace gets carried into a vast and troubled galaxy, one person at a time.

Days of fun and folly

This one is close to obvious once you say it. Look only at what is good in a situation and you can pull that good out of surroundings that are mostly bad.

Even through a season of grief there is a flicker of something better somewhere in the day, and locating it is what lets a good day start at all. Not a perfect one. One that began well rather than badly, and then another behind it.

The best thing you can pass to anybody is exactly that. Be positive, then watch the day follow suit.

For a glass half full

An optimistic outlook lets you picture the world as a cheerful place, and anyone who pictures it that way finds something to be glad about wherever he happens to be standing.

It also turns you into a supply of happiness for the people nearby. The optimist lifts others without being asked and works for their good almost out of habit, and that is welcome news for everyone within reach of him.

There is a practical dividend as well. More ways open up to involve yourself with other people, and you take your share of the pleasure of a thoroughly merry world.

Where it starts

Not with a resolution, which is gone by Thursday. With one ordinary situation today, and the decision to look for what is good in it before cataloguing what is wrong.

Repeat that often enough and it stops being a decision at all and becomes simply the way you see. Which is the whole of the method, and the reason the question is how to gain the attitude rather than whether you were born holding it.