Developing a vision for your Family

Excerpted from
Becoming the Parent You Want To Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years
By Laura Davis, Janis Keyser

Principle 1: As parents, it's important that we hold a vision of the kind of parent that we want to be and that we strive to achieve that vision in our daily lives.

All of us of us come to parenting with hopes for our children, our families, and ourselves. We imagine the families we want to create. We dream of all that we want for our children. We hold a vision.

Through the experience we gain as parents, this vision is continually reshaped. Our perspective shifts, our values change, and our understanding deepens.

At the beginning of her parenting classes, Janis asks everyone to bring in a list of three of the most important things they want to teach their children. As parents call out their answers, Janis writes them on the board. The resulting list is always a powerful testament to parents' commitment to their children:

• I want my children to always feel cherished and loved, no matter what they do.

• It's important to me to have a close-knit family that always pulls together.

• I want to be the kind of parent my kids can always talk to.

• I want to teach my children to make a difference in the world.

• I want to be able to give my kids a lot of the things I never had.

Creating and holding a vision is critical to us and to the health of our families. Where we know what we are striving for, we have a yard-stick by which to measure our choices and actions as a parent. We learn to enact our values in the present and project them into the future.

Understanding My Values: What Do I Want to Teach?

As parents, we are our children's first and primary teachers. What we teach and how we teach it has a significant impact on our children. As Jean Illsey Clarke writes in her book, Self-Esteem: A Family Affair, "What families have in common the world around is that they are the place where people learn who they are and how to be that way."

Offering values to our children is the thing we do that most clearly defines our family as unique: "The Sanchez family always has the welcome mat out." "The Segals are always out supporting one social cause or another." "You'll be able to find the Wood Smiths out in the backyard with their hands in the dirt."

We acquire values through our family history, our cultural perspective, and our life experiences. Many are absorbed naturally in childhood. In Janis's family, these are called "the values we swallowed whole with our Cheerios." Among these are some values we hold dear, some we are unaware of, and others we no longer believe in but still carry.

Having children also leads us to discover values that we previously considered unimportant. We find values that we've been carrying but not acting on, or beliefs that we want to make more explicit for our kids. We come to appreciate certain values in relationship to our children that were less obvious to us as single people. It's one of the transformative parts of parenting.

Narrowing the Vision-Action Gap

The dreams we hold for ourselves and our children are impressive. Many of us enter parenthood with ambitious ideas about the kind of parents we are going to be. These hopes were safe and sacred before we had children-the reality of our daily lives didn't challenge or tarnish them. But now we have to struggle to put our principles into practice, and that's often harder than we thought it would be. As Laura once put it, "It's a lot easier to be a parent in theory than in reality."

None of us consistently lives up to our ideals. When we feel criticized, hurried, or stressed, we may not be able to figure out how to implement our values and, instead, may find ourselves making habitual mistakes. Inevitably, there's a gap between our vision and the way we actually live. Even if we think we'd like to approach things differently, we may not have the practical experience or information to implement those changes. Yet the fact that we cannot perfectly embody our vision doesn't make holding that vision any less important.

Our job is to narrow the gap between the vision we hold for ourselves and our daily-practice as parents. Here are some ways to bring your vision and your actions into closer alignment:

Clarify your own values. A careful consideration of the values you want to pass on is an essential first step in teaching children what you truly hold important. You can ask yourself: "What are the values I learned in my family?" "In my community?" "What are the five most important values I want to pass on to my children?" "Are there specific ways I've taught those values to my kids?"

Look for opportunities to teach values. There are numerous daily activities through which we teach our children values. A simple trip down the sidewalk, stepping over the caterpillars, can demonstrate the way you value living things. Saving your daughter's half a sandwich for later can show your commitment to avoiding waste. Allowing your son to cry teaches him that you value his feelings.

Find parents who support your vision. Parents who are working to implement values that are similar to yours can support you as you work to put your ideas into practice.

Do some thoughtful self-evaluation. When we regularly reflect on what we have done with our kids in light of what we want to be teaching, we naturally bring our action closer to our vision.