Let Your Child Write to His Future Self
If you are trying to find ways to help your children improve their behavior when they are stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, or hope that older children will begin to understand the connection between behavior and family harmony, it may be time to put everyone in the family down and ask each of them write a letter.
For myself in the future.
Congratulate themselves for how they acted, what they learned, and the help they gave their friends in family during the pandemic.
This idea comes from Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project , Happier at Home and many other books on the relationship between behavior and happiness. As she recently explained on her blog , writing a letter to yourself in the future can help you understand not only what behaviors will make you happier in the moment, but also how to put those behaviors into practice:
For this Try This At Home idea, you write a letter to yourself in the future to say, “Congratulations!” for achieving what you want to achieve. You make the letter as detailed as possible by outlining the steps that made you successful, how you dealt with predictable problems, and you include all the changes you made to your environment, your habits and your schedule that made it happen. possible.
It is not an opportunity to talk about “I hope,” “I will,” or “I plan,” but rather, “I did,” “I achieved,” “I succeeded.” You project yourself into the future to reflect on what you have done .
Rubin offers this letter writing exercise as an activity that adults can do on their own, but it can also be a great mindfulness project that families can do together. If your children are experiencing extreme frustration with self-isolation, changes in daily routines, etc., writing letters congratulating themselves on how they coped with the stress of a pandemic life can actually help them prepare better to cope. with any problems the next weeks (or months) may bring.
Writing the behavior you hope to demonstrate over the next few weeks is not the only goal of this exercise. It’s also a way to think about what family life could be after the pandemic and what kind of people you would all like to be when it ends. To quote Rubin again:
This is a hopeful exercise to do right now because it is a reminder that this terrible time will end and we will go out into the world to resume our lives.
So think about what you want your life to look like when you return to the world and what you can start doing right now to be the kind of person to be congratulated on for your behavior during this unusual and turbulent period in history. – and then ask the same question to your family members.