In honor of Winter Break and all of the extra family time, your Toolkit Team is excited to bring you a special parent and caregiver-focused edition of the Toolkit!
The Practice
Whoever described the experience of parenting young children as “the longest shortest time” had it right. We believe, however, that the sentiment extends to all of the years in which your kids live at home (and really, beyond that). These delightful, busy, loud, messy, and maddening years contain so many experiences for us and for our children.
As the adults running the show, we need to be able to organize, execute, and get things done—particularly during the hectic holiday season. Yet these full days are fleeting in the span of our lives. There are so many joyful micro-moments that can fly by if we don’t deliberately notice and lean into them. Enter the mindfulness practice of relishing.
Relishing is the practice of noticing and appreciating the little things; the day-to-day occurrences and routines that we so often zoom through on our way to the next experience. If we are always looking ahead we’ll never quite capture the nuances of what is happening now. Through relishing, we become more attuned to those nuances and all the richness we often ignore, even if that richness involves being the audience for yet another couch dance routine.
It is worth noting that this Toolkit is not intended to put yet another well-intended, but vaguely guilt-inducing “to do” on parents’ plates! Having the ability to shift into auto-pilot and just Get. Things. Done. is a crucial parenting skill as well. But our hope is that we can all take a mindful pause here and there in this busy season of life to truly acknowledge our love for our kids and to relish who they are at this exact moment in time. That tiny investment of time pays dividends as a parent now and in the future.
The Language
Choose an activity or routine involving your child where you frequently find yourself on autopilot. Ask yourself, “How would I approach this activity if I knew I were about to leave on a three-month trip? How might I turn on my senses? How might my attention sharpen and my appreciation grow?”
Re-frame routine experiences with the phrase “I get to…”. For example, “I get to have two hours with my kids in the car on the way to my parents’ house. I’m really looking forward to some protected time to talk with them about ___.” Or, “I get to read my kid an extra chapter at bedtime tonight because we don’t have to wake up early tomorrow.”
Think of a past experience or routine with your child that felt like drudgery in the moment, but that you now miss. Helping them into pajamas as a toddler took time, but also involved closeness and coziness at the end of the day. Watching them shoot hoops over and over might not have been exciting in the moment, but offered a chance to bond over a shared interest. The goal here is not to induce nostalgia or sadness (though it’s fine if those emotions do show up!), but instead to intentionally notice how quickly time can pass and to use that perspective to dive more deeply into the present moment.
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