Time to Reflect (featuring DGT’s first home video)
So many good volunteer ideas are flying through my in-box and down my Facebook feed these days. I can barely read them all, much less attempt each one. Sometimes five minutes really is just four and a half minutes too many.
The truth is, this time of year is full of opportunities to talk about gratitude, kindness, and compassion even if you can’t take advantage of every unique and heart-warming volunteer opportunity that comes your way. Focus instead on helping your kids reflect on all of the good things you are already doing.
So many good deeds happen organically as part of our everyday lives. From the carpool, to unplanned play dates, from holiday parties with friends you just don’t see often enough to loaves of pumpkin bread shared with new neighbors, from coins tossed in red buckets to toys tossed in the donation bins, December offers a feast of thoughtful conversation ideas.
Where do you start?
Focus on feelings: Whatever it is you are reflecting on, from gratitude for a special Christmas card to a recent sandwich making party, focus on feelings. How are you feeling? How does the event make the kids feel? How would you all feel if roles were reversed? Help them expand their language of feelings, which in turn expands their capacity for empathy. Don’t settle for sad, mad, and happy (though don’t be disappointed when these are the go to emotions.) Use this list and help them grow their vocabulary (and yours too!).
Use your imagination: Simple story telling tools can help make the impact of your everyday good deeds and blessing more clear for the kids and you. Play the what if game. What would it be like if you didn’t have you neighbor to share Monday afternoons with? What would happen if the F family moved away? Or if a favorite teacher was no longer able to teach? What if we needed help buying groceries? What if…. This sort of conversation often gets silly pretty fast, but it gets them thinking. It keeps them creative. And it helps us all recognize the great things in our lives.
Improvise: Maybe you don’t have time or the extra mental capacity to take on an evening of gift wrapping for a local charity or the financial cushion to allow you to buy a pile of extra presents for others. Small opportunities for child-sized good deeds come up every day. Take advantage of them. When your child mentions a sick friend in school, help them craft a get well card. Little Miss Four wound up making a friend an ornament (such as it was) yesterday. While we worked with glue and glitter, we had just enough time to talk about friendship in four-year-old terms. The next day, a mail delivery happened to come just as we were making chocolate covered peanuts. Miss First grader grabbed a zip-lock, filled it up, and presented our surprised delivery man with treats saying, “Thanks for delivering all of our presents.” Did I mention her parents are big internet shoppers?
More Questions: Don’t forget about the wonderful Doing Good Together reflection questions that help you prepare for and reflect after an official volunteer project. You can find them all here.
Whatever you do, don’t get overwhelmed by the prospect of reflecting. Keep it simple. The goal is simply to help your whole family take notice and bring a bit more intentionality too all of the good you already do.
Also, don’t be disheartened by the results of your conversation. They are just kids after all. And more often than not, their responses will sound more like Luke Dunfey than Manny (Modern Family anyone?)
For example, you may have seen my post on Monday about making sandwiches for 363. It was fun, it was easy, and it was an important opportunity to reinforce hygiene rules.
Did you notice the part in the post where I breezed over the discussion?
The discussion is always my favorite part, but it is never worthy of the Sunday morning roundtables. Our discussion went a lot like this:
Mom: “Can you believe that 4,000 kids are homeless in our state every night? That’s like five of your schools full of kids.”
Kid 1: “You mean in Africa where they don’t have houses or water.”
Mom: “Well, they do have houses and water in Africa. Just not enough of either. But no, that’s 4,000 kids right here in our state, every night.”
Kid 2: “But it’s cold here.”
Mom:”I know, how do you think you would feel if you didn’t have a warm home and a warm dinner to come home to after school every day.”
Kid: “Sad.”
I invariably help broaden their emotional language, offering frustrated and lonely. Eventually we get to worried and afraid, and I have to move them on to solutions before they get too concerned.
After the conversation I was able to capture a bit of video. Forgive the poor quality; clearly I’m a novice. In my defense, I had a large baby dangling from my short torso at the time, and I was trying to keep an eye on everyone’s sandwich assembly at the same time:
Tags: Big Ideas, Holidays, Video
