Tools to Build your Family

Recently, I posted my first video of my new video series, "Tools to Build your Family."

The first in the series is the key tool, "Be Consistent." Many of the moms and dads I've interviewed stated this was the wisdom they learned when their children were young.

I have so much to say! With all the research done in areas of behavior, time management, decision-making, etc. to help parents, it will be easy to make short videos of helpful advice.

The series will complement the 7 small books, only 59 pages each, I've written to reach today's parents and grandparents raising children.

So check it out, subscribe, sign on to Google to leave a comment. Let me know what you think. We all have wisdom to share to make parenting easier.

Today, I watched the television show CLEAN SWEEP. I had heard of the show but had yet to desire to see other peoples’ clutter and the problems accompanying it. The feature was the winner of the Messiest House contest in 2008. Unfortunately, I easily related to the three women living in the house, a mother and her two adult daughters.

Unwanted change can be difficult to accept. Clutter is created when we fill up our lives to replace something or someone. We replace our emptiness through shopping, furniture and other stuff. In one year’s time, my mother’s life underwent several changes:
• She lost her mother to cancer,
• her oldest daughter (my sister) moved from California to Germany (military husband) taking my mother’s only grandchild,
• my other sister, and only other sibling, married and moved hundreds of miles away, and
• I married and moved a couple miles away, same town.
By the end of that year, my parents’ three-bedroom house filled with furniture. You could barely walk around the rooms. Most of the furniture came from my grandmother’s home attached with sentimental value. It was many years before the furniture began to leave the house (to make room for visiting grandchildren).

A few months after my mother died, I moved to another town due to my husband’s job transfer. I welcomed the excuse to remove myself from the memories of a lifetime. Until then, I had always lived in the same town as my parents. The move provided a great opportunity/excuse for my husband and I to declutter. We had previously maintained a home for our blended family of five children. A few times a year we might have all five, plus a daughter-in-law and grandchild. By the time we moved, we only had one permanent, half-a-week child living with us (shared custody). I maintained supplies for bedding for the possible blizzard that would find us all housebound (never happened, although the blizzards did). Donating the bedding to the Goodwill pulled at my heart, but I followed through.

I’m still a packrat when it comes to my office and all the print outs of Internet research to help me with my books. I can’t just keep the files on the computer because computers crash and are unreliable. Paper is forever. That’s what my husband fears.

What a great dad!

Did you see the video of a recent Philly's baseball game? A foul ball was knocked into the stands. A man caught it then gave it to his very young daughter who promptly threw it towards the baseball game.

Some dads would have been angry and shouted at the child. This dad laughed and hugged his daughter. That was the best response.

Congratulations, Dad, for following Number 2 on Single Parent Wisdom scale of advice: Be Patient and Loving. Way to go. I'm proud of you and your daughter is fortunate to have a loving dad like you.

For my book series, Single Parent Wisdom, I asked over 50 single parents with children now grown to reflect on what worked and what didn't while raising their children. Compiling their answers and adding mine, I found 7 areas of advice recurring from their answers:

1. Be Consistent.
2. Be Patient & Loving.
3. Time is Short.
4. Be Age-Appropriate.
5. Reduce the Chaos.
6. Be a Role Model.
7. Live in the Present.
   

I list these at the beginning of each of the 16 books, starting with "25 Ways to Encourage Good Behavior."

Introducing Single Parent Wisdom

Wow. Setting up this blog is easier than it looks. I can't say that for parenting, though -- especially single parenting. This blog will be used to discuss the many facets of parenting and a few more about the world of single parenting. I ask that you bare with me as some day's I will probably write a lot and some days, nothing at all.

Hopefully, there will be much give and take between others. I like sharing of ideas and viewpoints. To begin: I was a single parent for 11 years of my 3 children. After they became adults, I started writing about the experience seeking answers to the questions and problems I faced as a young single parent. Now that I'm older, I believe young people need to listen to those who have gone before them with similar experience. We have much to teach each other and can make parenting easier. You do not have to go it alone.