Right Now is a Great Time
The easiest way to avoid disrupting your flow of thoughts, activities, and plans is to put off your children’s ideas for fun. Inevitably they seem
- impractical,
- expensive,
- messy,
- exhausting,
- time-consuming,
- and off-task.
We don’t want to seem “mean” so instead of saying “No,” we fudge: “That sounds fun. Maybe later.” Then later never comes, and pretty soon your kids run out of good ideas. When you ask them to fill time, they say they’re bored and can’t think of anything to do.
The habit of creativity is cultivated when we say yes and believe in the possibility (no matter how outlandish).
Your child will say: “Can we build a tree house right now?” And you imagine nails and blueprints and danger. Yet NOW is the moment of greatest commitment to the project. NOW is when your child is the most likely to problem-solve and imagine.
The best way to say yes and show your child you take her seriously is to say “Right now is a great time.” Right now when it’s inconvenient, hard to do, difficult to imagine. Perfect! That means your child will lead the way!
When my kids wanted to build a tree house, we gave them hammers, nails, boards we had collected in our basement, and pointed to a tree. It was no Disney Channel tree house. But the joy of boards to climb to get up a little higher and the thought process that guided the decisions and the hammer swinging and collaboration was worth those several days of creative hard inconvenient work.
Start small. Say “Right now is a great time” to the board game suggestion or baking cookies or turning on the sprinklers to run through them. Stop your plans for a fairy house project or making a blanket fort or learning calligraphy. Right now is a great time to peel the wallpaper so you can paint your room honey. Yes!
Begin dropping everything for a child’s idea once a day (or if you’re super type A, baby steps—once this week). Simply try it once. What would happen if you stopped pushing the day along, and found yourself doing origami tutorials right now instead?
Right now is a great time to find out.
This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!
