What's Your Vision for Your Kids?
What’s Your Vision for your Kids?
Imagine your child is eighteen. She is ready to leave home. What kind of adult has she become?
I think we are often encouraged to think too narrowly of our kids’ future. Throughout their time at school, we are pressured to help them stack up a resume or ace classes or make it onto competitive sports teams. But our role as parents is so much broader than that. We are setting up our kids to be the next generation of our country’s citizens, tomorrow’s leaders—and more tangibly—the parents of our grandkids, a work colleague, a husband/wife, somebody’s next-door neighbour, and simply a friend.
It’s not the teachers’ job to help our kids become the best person they can be. That’s our job. No one else will stick by our kids for five, ten, twenty years. We will. And for that reason, we need to have a vision of where we want our kids to go and of what kind of people we would like them to be.
Have a Vision for Your Kids...for Today
Image by Ben White via Unsplash.
Have you ever sat down with your spouse and talked about how you would like your kids to end up? We would like our sons to know how to do their own laundry, how to cook a few meals, how to be polite, and how to take a girl out on a date. Those are a few things. But while that seems really far in the future for our little toddlers, it is still important to keep the end in mind. When I have a vision of the type of persons I would like my kids to be in the future, I am able to give direction and purpose to our many ordinary days.
You might have heard the story about a man building a cathedral. A passerby sees a building being constructed and comes across a worker. He asks him, “What are you doing?” “I’m cutting some stone,” he responds. The man asks a second worker, “And you, what are you doing?” The second one responds, “I’m carrying the stone to the building.” Finally, he asks a third worker, “And what is your role in this project?” The man stops and looks at him squarely, “Me? I am building a cathedral.”
It’s the little things we do every day with our kids that help them become the best persons they can be. It’s the little shows of example, it’s the small corrections, the off-hand remarks, the way we act, our prods of encouragement--those are the small stones that eventually build the cathedral of a strong character and a man or woman worth mentioning.
Priorities…
freestocks.org via Unsplash
We teach children our vision of life by setting priorities in our own lives. If we choose our projects and entertainment over them and their needs time and time again, we teach them the priority of personal pleasure over family life. If I am busy texting a friend and my son asks me to read a book, I know that the better thing is to put the phone aside for now and read with my son. Of course, we have to look at priorities in the grand scheme of not only today but the week, the month, and the year. If it’s really important, I may tell my son to wait. Most of the time I put my phone aside, but this time, I take the time to finish my message. It’s not about ignoring our needs, it’s about weighing them out. Do my actions reflect what is truly important to me? And, what does my family need right now? What will bring peace to me and my home?
Model the Excitement
Some Priorities:
God, Family, Work, A Clean Home, Relationships, Health, Intellectual Pursuits, Hobbies, ,
Time in Nature, Volunteering
As our children’s first educators, we also have to decide for them which priorities we think should come first and coach our kids. To coach them is not to tell our kids what to do, it’s to get them excited to be the best kind of person they can be. It’s to get them to want the good that we want for them. A great way of getting someone excited about something is to model the excitement. As we go about our work and our daily tasks, we show them that this is how we have chosen to live our lives and that we are proud of the choices we have made.
A friend of mine in university used to have a saying that struck me. We agreed, for example, to go to Toronto Island for an excursion and then she called me to say, “I’m sorry, something came up, my sister (or someone) needs me. Family first.” I had always felt bad about cancelling on friends when family events came up, which, in a large family, was often. But she did it so simply, in a way that didn’t show she was upset, and that demonstrated her priorities--family first. I respected her for it.
Our Best Kind of Life Possible
Image by Tyler Nix via Unsplash.
Once we know the priorities we have for our family, we can create a rhythm of life to make sure we meet all those priorities and they don’t remain just an idea. We might have priorities for the family as a unit, and then each of us probably has our priorities of how we would like to live our lives and spend our free time.
For example, my in-laws have as a priority certain events during the year--family Mass on Sundays and family time on holidays. But during the week my father-in-law prioritizes work and my mother-in-law prioritizes household management and volunteering. They have one evening a week where they always go out on a date. Then there is another day when he always goes out of town, and when she goes out for a walk in the morning with a friend. They are not fighting for each other’s time or trying to figure out who will take out the garbage. They’ve thought through their priorities for themselves as a couple, as a family, and as individuals and every week passes like a symphony of events. That’s the beauty of a rhythm of life.
We’re used to using schedules to make sure things happen during our day. But have you ever sat down and used a schedule to make sure that you live the best kind of life possible? What does your best possible day look like? What does your best possible family life look like? It’s fun to sit down and dream together. We set plans and goals in our professional life, we can do it in our family life too.
I imagine as my kids get older, they’ll influence the dream we have for our family. When I was growing up, my parents put us all in music lessons. They weren’t musicians themselves, but they loved the idea of us kids being musical. Now that we are grown up, we all play a musical instrument, and when we get together, we usually play music. My parents weren’t musical, but they had a dream of becoming a musical family.
What are your dreams for your family?
Character Building
There are some things I would like my toddlers to know now, but I also keep in mind things I would like my toddlers to know in the future. I know they don’t understand concepts like “patience”, but I use the word anyway. I know that if I speak about it, eventually they will understand it. At the very least, they know that it is a thing that I want them to have.
The other day I was reading to my one-year-old. I had read him the same book over and over again about a tree going through the different seasons. There is one page where the tree is bare of leaves and looks like it has died. The caption reads, “Be patient.” I’ve read the book so many times that when I got to that page, my toddler spoke ahead of me, “Be patient!” he exclaimed when he saw the dead-looking tree.
Leisure and Rest
Image by Angelina Kichukova via Unsplash
When I train like an athlete, I make choices every time I go to work out that are somewhat difficult but I know will pay off in the long run. When we try to accomplish something difficult, like a 4h hike up a mountain, we stop part of the way up and congratulate ourselves. The going is difficult, but we anticipate the view. We encourage ourselves along the way. Part of the rhythm of our life has to include leisure and breaks.
We are the leaders of our family. We push, we pull, we prod, we encourage and we find time just to be together. Our kids look up to us as models of what a great adult looks like, and that shouldn’t be a couple of burnt-out perfectionists. We teach our kids to have a healthy mental state when we encourage them to find time for hobbies, leisure, and rest.
Final Thoughts
On our bad days, parents can fall into the bad habit of thinking that we are not good enough. We start to think that someone could do it better or is doing it better. Parenting is hard, and sometimes we are even tempted to give it up and do something else with our time. Sometimes we lose the vision that we have for our kids.
When I got married, I had an idea of where I wanted to go in my career, and my husband had his ideas. We had shared ideas of vacation, and vague ideas of what it would be like to have children. Over the last few years, we’ve made choices that drew us into a better rhythm of life. I’ve made choices that I never imagined I would have ten years ago, but I’m happy for them. Choices like deciding to stay at home with my kids or Gerhard has made choices that he never thought he’d make--like going back to school to get his degree.
It is easier to make these big decisions for our family when we have discussed our priorities with each other first. I think we all make decisions that we know are right for us but for which other people drag us down. Don’t get dragged down. Be confident in the vision you have for your family. You know your family best.
Credits: Special thanks to my mother-in-law, who hosted a mom’s group on this topic. Check out her article on this topic at 10kids.com. She also provides a number of articles for further reading. Also thanks to Megan Bouvier for her synopsis of Michael Moynihan’s talk on Decisive Parenting, which he gave in Ottawa with support from Neeje Association for Women and Family.
Further Reading: Matthew Kelly’s book Resisting Happiness is lighting a fire under me to keep living out my dreams for my best life. I highly recommend the read.