Parenting Goals

Mary’s 2025 New Year Resolutions

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

It’s a new year which means a new opportunity to dust off those old resolutions, update, and try again. While last year’s resolutions did not go as planned, I believe I fulfilled 2024’s intention: to feel fulfilled, secure, accomplished, and complete. With that said, 2025 poses similar challenges to years past. Every resolution looks like the one before it, but why? Obviously, I’m seeking to achieve something greater than the tasks, so what is it?

After looking over my goals for the year (and the year before that, and the year before that), I noticed that I ultimately want to be more productive and intentional with my time. I’ve struggled with time management for years and while I score mini wins in establishing a new habit every now and then (daily workouts, drinking water, etc.), I never feel like I accomplished what I’m truly aiming for. So now that I’m 40 (Happy Birthday!), this year serves as a reset: ridding old habits, establishing new ones, and maintaining consistency.

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Patti’s New Year’s Resolutions: 2024

| Patti Webb

Yay for my third Resolution post! My planner and I live for this.

Last year was a bit crazy in our household. While some amazing things happened (our student loans and cars got paid off!), some out-of-the-blue things happened as well (emergency home repairs, deaths in the family, job insecurity).

TBH, it was a season of life and a change that was due to come. So now instead of a clear, long-term view, I can’t really see past the next couple months. But we keep going and make changes as needed.

So with a renewed flexibility, here are my 2024 Resolutions:

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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.

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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?

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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?

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