Our New Year’s Parenting Resolution

We love the idea of a clean slate and starting anew in 2016. Earlier this week, we asked you to tell us your New Year’s parenting resolutions (it’s not too late to add yours in!). Stop eating your kid’s leftover fish sticks while doing the dishes. Stop eating while standing. Do more. Play with the kids more. Listen better. Find more patience. Take more pictures. Read more books. Find more time. The list goes on and on.

Your resolutions were funny, inspiring and thoughtful. But there is one parenting resolution that you forgot to send us. This one is hard to keep in mind when you’re in the middle of a frenetic day of drop-off, work, pick-up, homework, dinner, bath time, bed time and alone time. But we know it’s one of those important ones. We’re parents, too. We get it.

Whether you moved up bed-time to sneak in a good book, snuck vegetables into your mac so the kids wouldn’t know, let the cat ride the Roomba vac or told the kids to dress themselves because you needed that ten minutes for primping, all of the parenting mishaps, cheats and mistakes of years past are about to be behind us.

This is our resolution for 2016 and we wish it for you, too: celebrate yourself and celebrate who you are as a parent. Parenting is sometimes the most challenging, however rewarding, part of our lives, but sometimes we can be so hard on ourselves day-to-day, that we forget to celebrate the good job we’re doing in raising our children. In 2016, we hope you’ll celebrate the good job you’re doing and all of your parenting accomplishments, as we will.

Here’s to another year of making all the right mistakes, worrying less about everything and celebrating ourselves as parents more often.

Happy New Year, from your Kiddie Academy family.