Did you make a New Year’s Resolution? Have you already broken it? No matter in a recent survey we discovered that 55% of Americans don’t manage to keep their resolutions for a whole year and 11% don’t even make it to the end of January. However, there’s a great reset button for the New Year’s Resolution that we’d like to share with you.
Resolution setting as a learning tool
There’s lots of evidence that setting an active goal is more achievable, and more rewarding, than a negative one and this is a tool we can help our children to develop, which will serve them well throughout their lives.
1 – Discuss your resolutions
Talking to your children about what they would like to do better, or what they would like to learn and explore in the year ahead can help you plan a whole 12 months of activities and visits, not to mention gifts and rewards. This allows you to support your child in a positive resolution and shows them that you, and your nanny, take their aims and aspirations seriously. Example – Valentina wants to become better at football: you might enrol her in an after school club, take her to see local teams play, treat her to a Lionesses game as a special treat, buy her a portable net for her goal striking and keep a weekly chart on the fridge of how often she practices, what skills she’s achieved. Your nanny can help by taking Valentina to parks when she can watch others play and maybe join in.
2 – Set family goals
Do you feel constantly guilty that you don’t eat together as a family? Why not make it a resolution – with a twist. Instead of nagging and failing to get a weekly sit down dinner, your family could resolve to eat together in as many different places as possible throughout the year, or each family member could take it in turns, once a month, to pick a kind of meal to share: maybe the littlest plans a dolls’ tea party, while the teenager wants pizza and computer games, Dad loves sushi, Mum enjoys eating out and your Nanny would relish getting everybody to try a vegan meal. You’d get twelve special occasions, try different foods and spend quality family time together, without making it into a chore.
3 – think about how resolutions help children learn
A positive New Year’s Resolution can be a superb tool to teach children a lot of useful lessons:
- goal-setting is important
- planning helps meet your goals
- having a team to support you is vital
- failing is okay, you can always start again
- helping others achieve their resolutions is good for them and makes you feel great
- succeeding boosts self-esteem
- challenges can also be fun!
4 – Model behaviour
Making your own resolutions positive and being honest about successes and failures helps children build robust coping mechanisms, so it’s not so much about ‘winning’ as about being willing to try. Then we all get to 2024 having succeeded in our goals.