Parenting is full on, right? It’s constant and messy and noisy and stressful and rewarding and fun.
But with the incessant acceleration in the pace of modern life, it can be too easy to get through a week and completely miss all the good stuff. We race from one task to the next, one activity to another, and rarely take the time to slow down and simplify.
Here are 5 easy and practical ways to add some simplicity to your parenting journey.
Stay Home
Seriously. Just pick a day that you had planned to go out, and stay home. All day. Do some gardening, have a picnic, play in the sandpit, build cubbies, bake, watch bugs, snuggle on the couch. Just be home and enjoy being there, in the moment, with your little ones.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of overscheduling our lives and those of our children, so take a day and call it YOURS.
Plant a Garden
Spending time outdoors – unplugged, creating, growing, playing, getting dirty – is crucial to our emotional and physical health. Planting a garden is a wonderful way to create something with your children and to spend more time outdoors with them.
You don’t need a big yard to make it happen! Just grab a pot, some soil and some seeds.
Stop Listening
Silence the noise in your life that makes you feel like you’re failing. Stop listening to those people or reading those blogs that make you question your parenting.
Unsubscribe from emails that don’t sit right anymore. Unfollow social media accounts that just make you cringe. Remove yourself from situations in which your parenting is constantly undermined or criticised.
Parenting is tough. Really tough. Make an effort to surround yourself with the people who lift you up.
Go Tech Free
Pick one day of the week and enjoy a tech free parenting experience.
If you can’t quite stretch it to a whole day, just enjoy set periods of time throughout the day when your phone is on silent or switched off. Refuse to be interrupted by notifications, ringtones and message beeps. Just enjoy those little people and your own parenting journey without the tech distractions.
Get More Sleep
Sleep is one of the key ingredients of a simpler life. It helps us to function properly, make clear decisions and maintain calm in less-than-perfect circumstances.
Although getting more sleep is easier said than done, we must commit to try.
If you have babies and toddlers, sleep when they sleep. Everything else can wait.
Now over to you. What would you add to this list? What do you already do that helps to simplify your parenting?
PS. If you want to get serious about simplifying your life and parenting, check out Simple Life, Peaceful Home – we launch next week!
I absolutely agree with #3 stop listening. I used to look at all sorts of things on social media that made me feel depressed, sad, inadequate. I don’t do that anymore.
Completely agree. We have Sunday as our tech free day, we aim to have a day a week we can simply relax, sleep is huge! We also switch our tech to ‘do not disturb’ from 10pm at night until 7am the next morning, although I often forget to switch it back on.
A big thing for us has been stepping back and simply doing our own thing, what works best for us and not listening to everyone else like you suggest in step 3.
Thank you for those, Eva. Staying home can be so good when you have been out one too many times. I love the tech free day idea. I’ll have to work on that. Oh, I struggle with the sleep one. My daughter is an awful night sleeper. I am constantly being told to nap when she does, but that is the time everything gets done! Love the sleep quote all the same!