Parents & Caregivers: We’re here for you!
At Girls Leadership, we want to support you and your girls.
More Resources
For more ideas on how to strengthen your relationships and invite joy into your home, sign up for our popular Girl & Grown-Up Workshops.
Here’s one tool that might help!
In the unique scenarios we find ourselves in, our unique needs have to be met. This is where compassion, patience and voice come in as caregivers. We invite you to ask the question:
What do I need?
Consider these reflection questions to get you started:
- How will you take care of yourself?
- What do you need each individual in your home to start or stop doing to make it easier on everyone?
- And what do those expectations look like for each individual?
Most of the time, we as caregivers have internal conversations around asking for what we need. For some of us, that comes with guilt or shame because we’re supposed to figure it all out and always place everyone else’s needs above our own. Yet, if we want our girls and children to have healthy relationships with themselves and others, we have to model respecting and asking for what we need.
Spark a conversation
Here are a few questions to spark a family conversation:
- What are things we need support around?
- What are our emotional needs? What are our physical needs?
- What kind of check-ins need to happen in our family and how often should they happen for our household to run as smoothly as possible?
And Remember
We’re all doing trying our best these days. It may be hard for any member of our family to express what they need. It may also be tempting to tell everyone what they need to do, instead of listening. Consider that each family member is dealing with their own challenges right now, and we may have to let go of our expectations for exactly how things will look. For example, if a family decides to split meal responsibilities, one person may decide upon cereal for dinner and another person’s meal may be pancakes, eggs and sausage. One person’s outside time may constitute sitting on the porch and another’s may be going to the park. The point is, support looks different, but if we don’t ask for what we need, it’s very likely that our needs will not be met.
Why it Matters
During this time where everyone is just trying to figure it out, asking for what you need may be one Girls Leadership tool that can help as we support our girls, children and families. As caregivers, we are juggling jobs, working with our children at home, sparring off sibling wars, supporting classroom teachers from a distance, and dealing with the anxiety of what’s going to happen next. Many children have returned to virtual learning, missing their in-person interactions with their peers and friends, and trying their best to process this unprecedented reality of hyper-vigilance and caution. When we, as parents, find ourselves in these spaces, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and just check out. However, we know we have little humans depending on us, and so the key is learning a better way to function within the unknown.
And above all, we want you to know that you and your children matter.
More Resources
For more ideas on how to strengthen your relationships and invite joy into your home, check out our post on Sparking Joy and sign up for our popular Girl & Grown-Up Workshops. Scholarships available.
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