Jan 01 2009
Anything Goes this New Year!
We have started a tradition at the Genereux house on New Year’s Day. We started a year ago and the kids have been talking about it all year, looking forward to this day.
I’m talking about our New Year’s Day Breakfast tradition, where kids make the decision about what to eat. Anything goes as long as the food they want is in the house. Last year, the kids asked me what was so special about New Year’s Day and not having a satisfactory answer for a 3 & 5 year old, I told them that on New Year’s, kids get to decide what to eat for breakfast. Anything we had in the house, they could eat for breakfast! Well they had a blast picking out crazy things to eat for breakfast, most notably they wanted to eat ice cream! Ok, I told them, kids decide on New Year’s.
You may think it’s crazy, but it’s crazy like a fox! Jim & Charles Fay at the Love and Logic Institute recommend giving little kids lots of choices about things we don’t care about, so when it comes time for the parent to make a decision about what will happen, the kids feel a sense of shared control in their lives. All we are doing with the silly New Year’s Day breakfast is making a deposit into the bank account of control. For me, it was spontaneous, unplanned, but completely in keeping with the Love and Logic philosophy that we have been studying & practicing since our first child was born.
A video that has been very helpful to my wife and me is the Painless Parenting for the Preschool Years DVD. Dr. Charles Fay’s ideas on parenting small children are pure gold! Our kids (and their parents) aren’t perfect, but looking back we’ve done enough right that by and large the kids are pretty well behaved.
(Oops, I gotta go… Thomas just poured melted ice cream on his sister’s head.)
Ok, I’m back. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Love & Logic is great help for raising happy and responsible kids. There’s no guarantee that everything will work out perfectly, but by doing enough things right, we increase our odds that things will work out well.
I have to go now and see about how my son plans to put the energy he’s drained from the family back!
Happy New Year!
