As I watch the deer silently foraging in my backyard while the ground is fully coated in white snow, I wonder about what this year will bring for my family and yours. The start of the new year is a natural time for reflection and if you live in a cold climate as I do, the bareness of the landscape creates ideal conditions in its quiet and simplicity. At Confident Parents, we’ve just come through our twelfth year and we continue to learn and grow with you, our parenting community. There are a few key truths that have emerged over those years of parenting and observing our children.
- Change is constant and persistent in our children’s learning and development which requires us, as parents, to observe, reflect, learn, change, and adjust as their needs alter our lives.
- Change is constant in the world. The rapid pace of technology’s development and influence in our lives puts us as parents often in a reactive place as we orient ourselves to how new devices, new apps, and now artificial intelligence will impact our children’s lives whether in school or at home.
- Our children’s experiences and our teen’s experiences cannot be compared to our own since the context they are growing up in is vastly different than what we encountered. So we, as parents, are reinventing what it means to offer the support and conducive conditions for our children to flourish now and in their future.
- Our children’s and teen’s flourishing requires a complex path of attending to their physical, social, and emotional well-being as well as their knowledge acquisition. This learning takes place in every space and place in their lives and most often comes through relationships.
- There is no one way. There is no perfect way. And the more we learn from one another, the more we grow in our connectedness, support, and learning.
All this change and complexity can create fear in us…fear of the unknown changes ahead; fear of how technology is impacting our children and teens; fear of whether our children will be ready to tackle their academic challenges, or their interpersonal challenges, or their health and growth challenges. If we allow fear to creep into our days and rule our decision-making (and it can happen without our full awareness), our choices – our words and actions – will come from instinct and impulse. And we know that responsible decisions are typically not made in that way.
Responsible decisions instead require that we get quiet, pause, reflect on our higher values and how those values can be enacted through our choices, words, and actions.
Because we are all busy in keeping up with our ever-changing careers, supporting our children’s school and learning, and running our family’s lives, we will not slow down enough to truly reflect individually, as partners, and as a family unless we prioritize it as essential to our well-being and flourishing.
We do understand that essential learning for our children in who they are becoming (their self identity) and how they relate to others comes first through our modeling. And then, we can deepen that learning through supported practice and coaching. So as we are attempting to teach them responsibility, an important place to start is in how we lead our families to be reflective, to make meaning together. Research confirms that the process of meaning-making adds to our health and happiness. In order to gain the benefits of meaning making, there are three areas that research focuses on including reflecting on the significance of our lives (Why do we matter? How do we matter?); coherence (or how do we make sense of things and things make sense to us); and purpose (or what is our big why in being and/or in doing).1
So in 2025, we are ushering in a year of meaning-making with our families. In it, we’ll take regular pauses to ask questions of meaning and explore them together. Some of the important conditions of this meaning making are:
- When we ask big questions, they’ll be no RIGHT answer.
- Meaning can be made through family dialogue and co-constructed. Instead of one person offering a definitive perspective, we can bring our ideas together around central questions and decide how we choose to perceive what we experiencing.
- The stories we tell and how we make sense of them become evidence of our families’ culture and values.
- These stories build trust, care and collaboration among us.
- They offer a foundation of support for all times but become especially important when we endure hard times or one or more of us experience pain.
Making meaning of world events, national leaders’ choices, school events, course content (a book assigned for school), community and neighborhood news, and family and friend choices are all fodder for asking these big questions.
In a year of meaning-making with our families, we might ask questions like:
- In the big picture, what really matters to us? How are we showing what matters to us through our words and actions?
- What is our purpose? What is our big why? Yes, children need to understand the why of their education, of their day-to-day lives as much as we do to keep in focus how their efforts contribute to something bigger and important.
- How are we making a difference in others’ lives? What are ways in which we could be making a difference in new ways?
- How are we seeking truth? How can we understand how the stories we are telling came into being? Have our views changed and why? What are new or emerging truths and how do they make us feel?
- What are our highest aspirations for who we are becoming?
- How can we reexamine stories that may sabotage our sense of agency, stories of lack, criticism, or not-enoughness? What new stories can replace outdated stories? And how can we name our children’s inner voices – their inner critic and their inner wisdom – to call forth the one that will best support their confidence, capacity, and courage?
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” wrote poet Muriel Rukeyzer.2
How can we co-create stories over our dinner tables this season and this year that tell of our family wisdom and how we are bringing our best selves to contribute to one another and our communities?
We wish you a healthy, happy and confident new year!
Thank you for your participation in the Confident Parents, Confident Kids’ parenting village! We reached a milestone in 2024 of over one million views! With a number of new valuable partnerships, we’ll have many announcements to make this coming year for more supports for parents and caregivers in doing the most meaningful job in the world. We are here because of you!
References:
- Hicks, J.A., & King, L.A. (2021). Three ways to see meaning in your life. Struggling to find a sense of meaning in life? Researchers have found three different pathways to it. Greater Good Science Center, Nov. 2.
- Rukeyser, M. (1968). The speed of darkness. NY: Random House.