Parenting Goals

Mary’s New Year’s Resolutions: 2024

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

It’s 2024, which means that Child(ish) Advice is four years old (old enough to be in preschool).

The lull between Christmas and New Year’s always has me contemplating what goals I’d like to set for the upcoming year. This time around, I found myself writing the same goals that haven’t been achieved for years (or piggybacking on goals that have recently been met). The resolutions started feeling like a never-ending hamster wheel. I don’t want 2024 to be mundane.

During our monthly meeting, Patti had mentioned creating resolutions about how you want to feel rather than what you want to accomplish. That perspective shifted my mindset on how I want to live in 2024. So, with that said, here are my New Year’s resolutions.

Continue reading →

The Self-Aware Parent

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Do you remember being a teenager and getting into arguments with your parents?
There would be yelling, and it would escalate and you would throw out the “I can’t wait until I’m 18 and out of this house.”
Then, they would one-up you by firing back with “Yeah? Well, when you’re a parent, I hope your kid is just. like. you.”

One thing I’ve noticed about being a Millennial parent is that our generation strives to be the caregivers we wanted to have growing up. It might be a by-product of social media or more access to information, but it’s like we can see in real-time exactly how our parenting is affected by how we were parented. There is a lot of call and desire to break the generational traumas by healing our personal childhood wounds and investing the time and effort to make our children feel loved, whole, and understood.

That task we place upon ourselves is no easy feat. Much of how we parent has been laid out by our parents and their parents before them (and so on) and we don’t really recognize that stuck cycle until we catch ourselves saying the same lines or doing the same harmful actions. So, are we any different from our parents and how can we break the negative cycle?

Continue reading →

What Makes a Good Parent?

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

We all know that parenting is not for the faint of heart. Parenting is a skill developed over time and is influenced by many, many factors. We know families have tough days and we know to take people’s perfect Instagram feeds with a grain of salt. But whether you have kids, are planning to, or are watching from the sidelines, we all have our opinions on what good parenting looks like; and sadly, we are prone to judge.

We look at kids and how they behave, and we assume it’s because of parenting. We may witness a child have a tough moment and depending on how their parent responds, we judge if they handled it well or not. We might even investigate our own childhoods and determine what parental traits are worth keeping and which ones get the boot. But what makes a good parent, really?

Continue reading →

Coffee Chat: The Parent Test

| Patti Webb

Last month, I saw an IG promo for The Parent Test on ABC. It’s a competition-ish show, originally from Australia, on 12 different parenting styles and which one is the most effective.

Each week, four of the 12 families are given two filmed challenges. The other eight sets of parents watch and give their critiques based on how the parents handle their kids in the challenge.

Immediately, we knew we were watching and would most likely be cringing for every single episode. A tweet said it best, “This show is triggering, messy, and impossible not to watch.”

We watched the first episode together and the next with our husbands, and so far we’ve been decently surprised. Here are our initial thoughts:

Continue reading →

Patti’s New Year’s Resolutions: 2023

| Patti Webb

This Christmas, all of my cousins bought our grandparents Skylight frames. It’s a digital frame with an app that allows people to add photos and video directly. I sent four years’ worth of kids pictures to each of their great-grandparents and Lolo and Lola.

It gave me a chance to go through my phone and sort all of these photos of the girls. Reflecting back on everything we did with them when they were little, and now as school kids, the highlight reel really is heartwarming. That doesn’t mean that our day-to-day is any less challenging or that burnout isn’t perpetually looming on the horizon.

I did accomplish what I said I would do last year: to be more selective with my time and attention. I said no to more things and didn’t overschedule or overcommit. But that’s not just what it’s all about.

In a recent news article about Yale’s viral course on Happiness, it’s not about being time-rich. It’s about actually having fun. While we can spend time recovering from work or winding down, relaxing things are simply just relaxing. They are NOT invigorating.

Full transparency: I signed up for the Yale “Science of Well-Being” course on Coursera right after I finished listening to this article.

So now that we have this context, I’ll jump into my Resolutions.

Continue reading →