A Fine Parent

A Life Skills Blog Exclusively For Parents

The Ultimate Resource Guide of Family Bonding Activities

by .
(This article is part of the Close-Knit Family series. Get free article updates here.)

Family Bonding Activities: Quote About FamiliesLet’s fast forward 20 years. Let’s say it’s just before the holidays. One of your kids, all grown up, is having a cup of coffee (or a mug of beer) with a friend.

Do you think your son/daughter will talk excitedly about going home for the holidays — maybe introducing a “special” friend to you for the first time or bringing the grandkids over for quality time with the grandparents?

Or… will they be griping about how they could not get out of the family get together obligation, and can’t wait for it to be done with?

20 years from now, you can’t do much to change the situation. If you want to make sure it’s the first scenario, the time to do something about it is now.

Bonus: To tip the scales in your favor, click herefor our FREE mini-course How to Be a Positive Parent.

Home and Family… by themselves, these have no special draw. It’s the warmth that we associate with these things that make them special. So, this week, let’s focus on some simple family bonding activities. Here is a comprehensive list – pick 2-3 new ways that you can try out with your family right away.

OK, here we go –
[Read more…]

How to Stop Fighting and Save Your Marriage

by .
(This article is part of the Close-Knit Family series. Get free article updates here.)

Quote_the_most_important_thing_a_father_can_do_for_his_children_is_to_love_their_motherOK, show of hands.

How many of you worry that your marriage may be a bit on a downward slide?

It’s not like it’s on a deathbed. But you fight a little too much. You share tender intimacies a lot less. Everything, and I mean everything, is brisk and business-like.

You lay awake at night wondering what happened. How did you get to this point?

And how on earth do you get back?

Our Story

We found ourselves in that exact spot a couple of years back. I desperately wanted to change things but had no clue where to start. So I just let things be — sliding slowly down into the dreaded unknown that I didn’t want to face.

Until one day, a family medical emergency jerked me out of it. It was the kind that shakes you up and shifts the way you look at life. A lot of things in my life changed after that incident. Our marriage was one of the big ones.

Here are some of the lessons I learned along the way. I hope it will nudge some of you to stop fighting and start loving again. [Read more…]

How To Make Sure You’re Not Raising a Dysfunctional Family

by .
(This article is part of the Close-Knit Family series. Get free article updates here.)

Raising a Close-Knit Family Quote - If you don't take the time to work on creating the life you wantHow would you describe your family – Strong? Or, Dysfunctional?

When shit hits the fan (and it will for every family at some point or the other), does everybody in your family put their heads together to find a solution, or do all of you lose your heads and run around like headless chicken?

Twenty years from now, during the holidays, will the kids be making excuses at work so they can spend more time at the family get together, or will they be making excuses to you about work so they can escape the get together?

What makes some families strong and close-knit while others are dysfunctional? How can we make sure our families are in the first category and not the second?

As it turns out, at the core, every strong, close-knit family has the same set of uncompromisable rules that holds them together. Dysfunctional ones on the other hand… well, you know how that goes. To quote Leo Tolstoy –

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Before we can even start looking at these core rules however, we have to first tackle a very important question….

[Read more…]

Science of Happiness: How To Ensure Parenthood Fills You With Joy and Not Misery

by .
(This article is part of the Happiness series. Get free article updates here.)

Happiness is raising kids who have a head full of knowledge and a heart that dares to follow dreamsDid you know that there is actually a whole battalion of researchers studying intensely the question of whether becoming parents makes people happy or miserable?!

Many of these said researchers actually believe that we parents are a sorry lot! They argue that while having kids is good for the human species in general, at individual levels, having children makes most people miserable. And they have collected an exhaustive amount of data from surveying actual parents to support this claim!

A few other researchers on the other hand, counter this argument by showing that while having kids does place a lot of demands on parents, parents derive deep and immense level of joy from parenthood.

So, which claim is true?

Honestly, I don’t care.

What I’m interested in is finding out why some parents are happier, and how you and I can guarantee that we will be among those parents who report being filled with joy and not misery!

So, I dug into the research a little more and this paper in particular — a detailed meta analysis of literature referencing over 270 papers! — was very helpful.

It seems to me that there are two key factors that separate the “happy” parents from the “miserable” ones. By intentionally adopting these factors into our lives, we have a much better chance to be on the happy-to-be-parents side of the fence.

OK, here we go –

#1 Happy Parents Focus on What Having Kids Means to Them Rather than the Day-to-Day Highs and Lows [Read more…]

How to Cultivate the Attitude of Gratitude in the Age of Entitlement

by .
(This article is part of the Happiness series. Get free article updates here.)

Attitude of Gratitude: If you want to raise happy kids, talk about your blessings more than you talk about your problems.Close your eyes and focus on the darkness for a minute….

Please, seriously, just try it… what you’ll gain from this little exercise is well worth feeling silly for a bit.

For many people in this world, that is the daily reality. Every minute. Every day.

If one of them were to stop by and offer you a million dollars for your eyes, for your ability to continue reading, for your ability to see this world and watch your kids grow up… would you?

And yet, have you ever really appreciated your ability to see?

The Entitlement Trap and the Attitude of Gratitude

Like many of you, I’ve always felt jaded about sayings like “count your blessings” or “be thankful for what you have” and so on. When I heard or read that I should be thankful for my ability to see or walk or whatever, I mentally rolled my eyes.

I took everything I had for granted. Worse, I felt cheated when I didn’t get more of what I wanted. Even though I have a wonderful child, I felt sad about my inability to have a second one. Even though I’m married to a really nice guy, I nagged him constantly about what he was not. Even though I had a great job, I hated almost every minute of it.

I hadn’t quite realized it then, but I had defaulted to a person who was constantly unhappy about what I didn’t have instead of being happy about what I did.

And then serendipity brought me to the blog Money Saving Mom. At the outset, the blog is about saving money. And that’s how I found it in the first place. My daughter was just born and I desperately needed diaper deals. So, I found a whole bunch of “deal blogs” and this was one of them.

As my daughter grew older and diaper deals were not relevant to me anymore though, I dropped the other deal blogs. But somehow continued to read Money Saving Mom. There was something different about this blog and its founder Crystal Paine.

Crystal is a devout Christian and writes often about gratitude and grace and such. And even though I am agnostic, I was attracted to how her faith was bringing her happiness and making her a calm, very likeable person (even though I didn’t know her at all!).

Around the same time, during a conversation with some friends, the topic of prayers came up. One of my friends, the one I least expected, admitted that she says a prayer every night before going to bed. She said it was a “habit” that her parents got her into while she grew up, and it gives her a lot of peace, so she still continues it to this day.

I was going through a very rough season in my life then and often felt lost and confused. One night on a whim, [Read more…]