100 Family Media Literacy Activities, Ages Pre-School through Teen Years

Are You a “High Hopes” Parent?

Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span

Building the Foundation for Resiliency Skills

Live and Play in Your World: Stimulus Addiction and the Growing Brain

Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places

Parenting Today: The World Has Changed, Have We?

Parenting as a Living System

Reading the Screen

Screen Time and Obesity

Screen Violence: Impact on Self as Relational Being

Teaching Children Gratefulness

Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places (cont.)

Start Something New
One mother Debby knows said that she has the children write letters of appreciation to each other and then puts them into their stockings. They read them on Christmas Day after they open their presents, being reminded of everyone’s wonderful qualities. She has shared this idea with other parents who want to start it as a tradition. It can be fun to find out what others' do and adopt a new activity that will further the meaning of the holidays for us.

Opportunities for meaning making, whether at holiday seasons or during the routine days of our lives, are ways to teach a belief system. In guiding our children in meaningful beliefs that honor family, contribution, care for our neighbors, and support for one another, we are actually infusing our society with future adults who can respond well to our many challenges. Willis Harmon gives us food for thought when he writes:

"What you believe determines what you perceive as reality. What you believe determines what you feel you can do about it. What you believe determines the exhilaration and joy you get out of life. Some beliefs are wholesome; others are definitely unwholesome.
Beliefs can be changed. In a life that is constructed around an inadequate or erroneous set of basic beliefs, it will include a lot of problems and pain. If a society is guided by an inadequate or erroneous set of basic beliefs, it will tend to foster a great deal of human misery. At the level of society, too, beliefs can be changed." (3)

My belief is that the best way to change society's erroneous beliefs is for parents to help children find meaning in all the right places—with us as their primary guides.

References

1.         Television Violence: A Review of the Effects on Children of Different Ages, Wendy Josephson, editor, Ottawa: National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, 1995, p. 19.

2.         Parenting Well in a Media Age: Keeping Our Kids Human, Gloria DeGaetano, Personhood Press, 2005.

3.         "Metanoic Organizations in the Transition to a Sustainable Society," Charles Kiefer and Peter Senge in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 22, pp. 109–122, 1982.

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