Why You Shouldn’t Overwhelm Your Family When We Return to Normal
Many of us have yearned for what we were once allowed to do in the past year. Of course, there were the basics, like working and studying with other people, but there were all the extras as well – things like personal volunteering, piano lessons one child took, and another child’s volleyball games, playing golf with friends. favorite yoga classes, happy hours with friends and swimming lessons for kids on weekends. Our life stopped and it was not good; and yet we have forgotten – what may even seem like a luxury now – is how damn overwhelmed we were.
I found myself wanting to sign up for anything when it becomes available again: every week-long summer camp for my son to make up for all the summer he spent at home, every sport he wants to do, every local outdoor concert air, every last bit of a thing that seems safe enough to try. But part of the reason the outage was such a shock to the system is because of the sheer amount of things we had to do on any given day, and the way it was canceled one by one. We were rescheduled and we knew it, but we also didn’t know how to cancel the schedule.
Erin Loechner, author of The Pursuit of Slowness : Courage to Get Off the Beaten Path , tells the Washington Post that right now we have the opportunity to:
“As we reintegrate into a changed society,” Lochner says, “can we keep our home resilient when society encourages us to tie ourselves to something else? We have survived the COVID-19 pandemic, but we have yet to defeat the haste pandemic. Now we have a chance to consciously develop a new, stable rhythm for ourselves and each other. “
This is our chance, guys. This is our opportunity to do “repetition” and start getting back to normal without letting our daily life become overwhelmed again by car depots, meetings, training and everything else that we did ourselves. torn cases before. So if you want to start filling your calendar more thoughtfully this time, here’s what I suggest.
But first! Pandemic alert
I am writing this at a time when more and more adults are being vaccinated every day, but the number of cases is still high, and our children are not vaccinated. We (or at least should ) return to something resembling normalcy, but for a while, things will not be as usual (with a capital letter). However, I think that is why it is good to think about it now, before we get back into the thick of life as-we-knew, and once again look around and ask ourselves, “When did things get too busy again? ? “
With that said, now is the time:
Take time to think
There is no emergency here – you have time to think. Start simple by thinking about what your family has really missed out on over the past year. In my case, we found that our 10-year-old was sorely lacking in camaraderie on his soccer team; karate, on the other hand, is simply done with. The combination of these two factors meant that he did something almost every night during the week and at least once, if not twice, on weekends. So he’s going to be playing soccer again, and we’ll wait a bit before considering if he wants to add another less time consuming activity to his plate.
You might have guessed that instead of volunteering for three different organizations, you actually want to dive a little deeper and devote time to the organization that is closest to you. If you take the time to think about how you (and the rest of the family) spent their time earlier than now , you may find that certain things caused more mental, emotional and physical stress than they were worth.
Call a family meeting
I’m a big fan of family get-togethers where fundamental family values need to be discussed, and ultimately this is what it is. For everyone in the family who is old enough to be semi-critical, warn them that you want to talk about how you plan for the family’s time and activities in the future. Encourage them to reflect on what they missed the most during the pandemic and what they could get rid of the most.
Reiterate that this is not about taking away activities they enjoy or getting them to stay at home; it’s about prioritizing these things. Get together in a group and discuss what each person wants to prioritize personally and what the family as a whole considers important.
Protect for a while
It is easy to fill the calendar when the place is empty, everything is clean and clean and waiting to be filled. So fill it in with what you decide as a family, what you want to keep doing.
During the pandemic, our son developed a love of hiking – something he used to think was very boring, but I loved him for years. Now that we don’t have to devote every Saturday morning to karate, maybe we can schedule a couple of weekend hikes every month. If I write them now (weather permitting), this time will not be allocated to something less useful.
Things can always be moved later if needed, but if you start the next few months more consciously about how you allocate your free time, you can create a better balance that falls somewhere between “completely overfulfilled” and “stuck waiting.” … at home with nothing to do. “