Put the smart phone away. Interact with your child!
If you are a parent of a young child, you need to spend time with him BEFORE he is old enough to work with technology. Model for your children quality time spent as a family. Set the smart phone and the computer away. Have a quiet dinner with no TV. Interact and talk with your child with all electronics away from you. Once your child is a teenager and she gets her own smart phone, tablet, and social media around, you may find it very hard to get her attention. This is why you need to instill the value of spending time with family from a young age.
Have a long term project with your child!
We live in a society of instant gratification. We want things to happen fast. We want things to happen now. The media has embraced that tendency and promotes it consistently. Our life keeps getting faster and that makes the problem even bigger. This is very different from parenting, which is a long process.
As our children are developing in this society, they cannot help the messages coming from the society itself and the media. This is why it is important to take time to provide opportunities for your child to balance that tendency and to develop the opposite qualities – patience and persistence. This can be done by providing opportunities to work on something for a longer time. Challenges and projects that require patience and time to accomplish will provide the balance our children need. Developing patience and consistency from an early age is crucial when preparing a child for later life.
Picking up a musical instrument can be a great way of achieving that. Music requires the development of persistence and discipline. Starting with an instructor is always best. However, you can also try music instruction at home in order to see how your child will take to the new challenge.
Learning a foreign language can also be a great new year resolution goal to develop persistence. There are many wonderful programs for children at all ages you can find locally.
Learning a new hobby or a craft together can also achieve this goal. Joining a class where both the parent and child can participate, or finding a home project that takes longer to accomplish, can be a great way of learning persistence and interacting with the parent at the same time.
Take time for yourself!
This is on all of our “to do” lists and it is also the goal with which we have the hardest time. Being a mother, a wife, and a career woman takes a lot out of us and often the area that suffers is taking time to take care of yourself as a woman. But think about it – overworking and over-scheduling lead to stress and the inability to enjoy parenting! Often we have so much on our schedule that we cannot step back and enjoy the time spent with our kids.
Having a relaxed mom who takes care of herself means being a better parent!
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Maria Stefanova-Mar is the author of www.musicteachingandparenting.com
Maria is starting a new online series introducing parents to the joys of reading through music books, as well as giving parenting advice. She is a music educator/specialist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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