If you have been following these newsletters for the past several years then you know that I have several daily (and a couple of weekly) emails that reach my inbox. I read them every morning with my coffee. In each email I am looking for a little nugget that I can carry with me. This week I found one and I want to share it with you.
My house is typically very quiet on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, during the school year. Dr. Carol is in the office seeing patients and our girls are at school. I try to make that time alone as productive as I possibly can. During the summer, however, it is much more challenging to get anything done because our girls are here. This week has been a little different because Dr. Carol and the girls were taking part in VBS at our church this week. Dr. Carol has taken on the role of director, while our two older girls will be volunteering, and our youngest will be a participant. So the house is quiet again! Briefly...
Earlier this week, while sipping my coffee on our deck, I read Ryan Holidays Daily Dad email and it struck a chord with me. Here is a LINK if you would like to read it. The email's take-home message was that we need to be focused on being present with our children.
The email opened with Holiday wondering why we focus on learning so easily when we start something new. When it is something that is new and interesting, we focus because we are seeking to learn. When we pick up a new hobby, we watch videos about it. We read about it. We talk to anyone who knows anything about it. The same thing happens when we talk to the people that we find new and interesting. We pay attention to what our bosses say, or what a new dating partner says, or what our friends are saying.
Yet sometimes we struggle to pay attention to what our children are saying. Why is that?
Holiday suggests that we always need to make an effort to be kind and to show interest, especially to our children. Many of us struggle with this because the assumption is that we won't learn anything from the stories that they share, or the video that they want to show us, or the music that they want us to listen to. So we quickly lose interest and get distracted.
We may not learn from them in that moment, but they are watching and they will learn from us and the choices that we make. When we focus on them and pay attention, they learn that they are important. They see how much we care. They learn to share the things that matter to them. And that when they choose to share, we will be there to listen to them.
As I sat and thought about the take-home message that Holiday intended, I approached the bottom of my coffee cup and something else dawned on me.
The email is written for the Daily Dad, so the focus of the article is in building and maintaining relationships with our children.
Hear me out for a second... What if we applied this idea of being kind and showing interest to all of the important people in our lives. It is very easy in all the hustle and bustle of our lives as working parents to forget to be kind and show interest to our spouses, our parents, our siblings... I admit that as I stared into my empty coffee cup, it dawned on me that I can also be guilty of taking those people for granted from time to time.
We owe it to the people we love the most, who we can easily take for granted, often unbeknownst to us, to always be kind and show interest in them and all that is important in their eyes.
We need to be present in all of the moments we share with those who matter most!
