Good Habits

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Parenting 101: Making Self-Care a Habit

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Raising a child isn’t easy. It is definitely a full-time, around-the-clock job! Even if your child attends a preschool or daycare during the day, you can still get overwhelmed with how much work and energy it takes to care for an infant, toddler, or preschooler. We strive to be the best parents that we can be. But being your best is nearly impossible when you are burned out, mentally drained and physically exhausted.

We get tired of picking up the toys, cleaning up the spills, and changing endless diapers while struggling to find time to eat or sleep. Things begin to pile up and we can quickly start to feel stressed and overwhelmed.  Parents devote so much time to caring for their children and often leave little time to care for themselves.

Benefits of Self Care

To be our best, we have to make time to care for ourselves. When we make self-care a priority, we begin to see many improvements in our lives. For instance, we will most likely experience lower stress levels. Good self-care habits such as regular sleep, relaxation, exercise, and eating well have been proven to reduce stress levels. These practices help maintain our emotional, mental, and physical health, helping us manage and prevent stress so we can be the best for ourselves and others.

How to Start Your Self-Care Journey

  1. Put “me time” in your schedule: Alone time is necessary. And something that we often forget to do when young children can command so much of our time. When you mark it down in your calendar, it forces you to take this time more seriously. A good time for this is in the morning when your child is at preschool or daycare, or in the evening when you can find alternative childcare options. What you decide to do during your “me time” is completely up to! You may choose to exercise, go shopping, go to the spa, take a long walk in nature, or any other activity that you find calming or stress-relieving.
  2. Meet with one of your friends: This is especially important if you spend most of your day around children and need an escape. Spending time with other adults without children around can be particularly rewarding. This allows you time to have mature, full-length conversations without having to censor yourself or fear interruption.
  3. Make a journal: Write in your journal for about 20 minutes every day and just let your thoughts flow onto the paper. This is a healthy way to release those feelings that you may otherwise keep bottled up or under the surface.
  4. Set limits: Sometimes we can get stressed because we don’t know how to say ‘no’ to others. Maybe your neighbor keeps asking you to host playdates at your house or you are being pressured to volunteer somewhere. There’s no shame in saying ‘no’ to one or even a few of these requests. Instead of automatically saying ‘yes,’ you can practice saying “Let me think about it” or “I’ll get back to you on that.” It’s best to keep your workload manageable, rather than let things pile up. This will help to avoid feelings of overwhelm.
  5. Download a meditation app: Even if you’ve never meditated in your life and think that its probably not for you, it doesn’t hurt to try. You can download apps that make it easy for you to follow guided meditations on a daily basis. These apps teach you how to meditate and do breathing exercises that can calm your mind and body.

When we take care of ourselves, we show our children that self-care is a priority. We serve as good role models when we lead by example, teaching our children that we value our own health and well-being.

Self-care is important because it helps us unwind after days or weeks of stress. When we feel more relaxed, we can be calmer, healthier, and overall better parents.

 

 

blog-post-23-tidy-child

How to Get Your Tot to Be Tidy

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Nothing is more frustrating than coming home from a long day and finding your child’s room a complete mess. With toys and clothes scattered everywhere around the room, it’s hard not to lose your mind right then and there. Thankfully, there’s another option – just teach your child to clean the clutter themselves!

5 Ways to get your tot to be tidy

Keep things at a child’s level. Looking at things from your child’s eye level will give you a better perspective on how to help them get organized. For example, closet hanging rods may be out of reach for your little ones, so lowering the rod and accompanying it with child-sized hangers will make it easier for them to put away his own clothing and keep the closet organized.  It’s also important to make sure that things like cubbies and dresser drawers are at their level so they can put things away on their own.

Teach your child organizational skills. Instead of getting mad at your children for leaving their room a total mess, teach them skills and maintenance methods that they can use to organize their room. This will allow them to adopt efficient ways to keep their room clean on a daily basis. One way to do this is to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working for them. Also, be sure to know what is important to your child so you can explain to them why staying organized is important in a way that is meaningful to them.  For example, if they are frustrated because they can’t find a favorite toy, be sure to use that as an opportunity to explain how being organized and putting things back where they belong can help them find their things more easily!

Create a system.  Sorting, storing, and simplifying will make it so much easier for your child to keep their room organized. Start by keeping clothing sorted according to style and season. For example, you can keep all pants in one drawer and all shirts in a separate drawer. Things like jackets and hoodies can be stored in the back of the closet, under the bed, or on higher shelves during the summer months when your child won’t be using them.

Label everything. Printing out photos of the inside contents of a drawer and slapping them on the outside of each corresponding drawer, will help remind your child of where each item belongs. You can also put them on the inside of toy boxes or storage containers so if they decide to dump the stuff out, they will still know where everything goes back by looking at the photo inside.

Make a maintenance routine. Creating a regular routine can help your child stay organized and not feel overwhelmed. It’s usually a good idea to break things up according to time of day. So you can assign tasks like making the bed and putting dirty clothes in the hamper as the “morning pickup” and tasks like putting toys away and getting their outfits ready for the next day as the “evening pickup.”

Our Take

At Carpe Diem, our aim is to create an invigorating and orderly environment for your child. We believe that this kind of balanced environment leads to inspiring thoughts and good habits that will follow them into the future. That is why we keep all of the materials in our classrooms at “child level” – not the teacher’s /adult level. We know that when a child gets things and puts them away by themselves they are experiencing independence, which is a fundamental part of child development.