Small Steps to be More Present with Your Kids
Practicing mindfulness each day helps you stay in the present moment, increase awareness, decrease reactivity, and relieve stressors. Taking small moments throughout your day to intentionally connect to your surrounds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions can help you come back to the present and be more connected with your family and push those looming thoughts and feelings to the side.
Below are some simple steps to start moving towards being more mindful throughout your day.
Practice over perfection. Find a time to practice mindfulness, no matter how brief or long you choose to practice. The point is to practice each day. Whether it is first thing in the morning, right before bed, during a meal, while at your child’s sports game, or even when you go for a walk. You can practice when seated, standing, laying down, or walking. These are just examples find what works best for creating consistency in your every day.
Connect with your senses to increase awareness and be in the present moment. Ask yourself - What do I Hear? What do I Smell? What do I See? Notice colors, number of items, animals, or anything else within your sight. What do you Taste? What is something you can Touch to bring you into the present moment, and how does it feel: smooth, bumpy, round, or have sharp edges?
Acceptance is being aware of how things are, rather than how you want them to be. Acceptance does not mean approval or compliance. Acceptance means seeing things as they are, rather than how you wish for them to be. Accepting the good, joyful, bad and difficult thoughts and feelings that arise with each situation. Acknowledge this and allow them to pass. Remember, the good and the bad always pass, neither are consistent.
For example, accepting that your teenager has to be told to put the dishes away yet again, but in the future what is something you can change so you aren’t having to ask them 3-4 times. Such as before dinner rather than afterwards, buying colored dishware so each child takes care of their own dishes, if they take care of the dishes after being asked once they don’t have to do it tomorrow.
Be without judgement - allow things to be as they are, and learn to let go of reactive emotions as you become cognitively present. This creates a sense of calmness and self-control, as stress and reactivity decreases. If judgements do arise, acknowledge this, and work towards letting it be and come back to the present by connecting to your senses and mindful breathing.
Using the same scenario above, some judgmental and reactive thoughts that may arise “why do I have to tell them again, they should know what they need to do?”, “I’m sick of having to tell them again, I’m taking their phone away for a week.”, “they don’t respect me that’s why I have to tell them again and again.”, etc. Acknowledge these thoughts and feelings, allow them to pass, accept you need to tell them again, and change how to present the situation in the future.
In the near future, I will be posting exercises to practice that will assist you in developing your mindfulness skills, seven attitudes of mindfulness. Mindfulness.org provides more information on mindfulness and free beginner guided meditations - https://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-started/
