Written by guest contributor Renee Tougas of FIMBY.

Change is a part of life. We give our children an amazing tool when we teach them to adapt to change.

Sometimes we undergo a personal or family transformation that calls for major upheaval in our lives. Mom or Dad takes a pay cut to have more time with the family. You downsize your belongings and house to live debt-free. You choose to adopt a child, rescuing them from poverty and extreme suffering.

Life-changing beliefs and convictions call for life-changing decisions.

In just three short months our own family will be trading our current life for another one. We are leaving our home and moving out of the country. Downsizing our belongings and living with family for a season. And then making home again in a province where we don’t speak the dominant language.

You can read the whole story here at FIMBY. It’s safe to say, there’s a lot of upheaval in our family life right now.

Photo by Renee Tougas

We are making this move during a stage of parenting where our children are not just tag-alongs.

Our children are eleven, ten and nine, well beyond the years of “pack the crib, toddler beds, and toy bins.” In order to maintain a peaceful, happy and contented home we need them on-board with our plans.

You might not be making huge life altering decisions right now; you might just want to live more simply and with greater intention.

Whether you want to cut out stressful extracurricular activities, de-cluttter the kid’s rooms, or are just trying to eat dinner together every night as a family, if you have children past toddlerhood you need everyone’s participation to be successful.

Here are the techniques we have used to help our children embrace lifestyle changes, both big and small.

Common Vision

The most important piece in helping children embrace a major lifestyle change is to communicate your overall family mission. As they get older, it is even better if they help craft that vision.

Here at Simple Mom Tsh has written about making a family mission statement. She also gives direction in her book, Organized Simplicity. You should check out these resources to help you get started.

Before your family embarks on any significant changes (homeschooling, downsizing, moving, adoption, etc.) you need to clearly communicate to your children why you are doing this.

“What’s in it for me?”

Let’s be honest, everybody asks this question — children especially.

There are two parts to answering this:

1. Immediate and tangible rewards

There should be immediate and tangible rewards for your children as you make major lifestyle changes.

In our case, we need to downsize our household possessions. There have been rewards along the way for our children as they have let go of things. A family experience, treats or purchasing one special toy in exchange for a bin of less desirable toys are a few examples.

2. Long-term, individual growth

This point is especially important for older children.

One goal of large-scale family change is to help everyone reach their personal potential.

The change should encourage the development of your children’s gifts and skills, and maximize how they can uniquely contribute to your family’s mission.

Photo by Renee Tougas

For example, let’s say your family is about to embark on a more back-to-basics, homesteading lifestyle. If age appropriate, your children’s interests and talents should be a part of the decision making for how to build your home, what animals to raise, and what crops to plant.

If your children know you are in their corner, that your goal is to help them develop, they are more likely to come on-board.

Be the Primary Influence

I’m the first to admit I think it would be hard for our family to make our upcoming change if our children were going to school and had strong attachments to peers.

As it is, we homeschool (because of the freedom it gives) and are able to determine our own family culture because of that. Our intention is not to withdraw from interactions with other people. We truly value forming relationships outside our family.

However, as the parents, we want to be the dominant influence in our children’s lives during their formative years. Not their peers, school, sports teams, or even church.

The time will come when they will spread their wings and make choices for themselves about where to live, what to eat, what to buy and how to worship. But in their younger years, we are responsible for those choices.

This doesn’t mean you have to homeschool — but the stronger your influence on your children, the more likely they are to embrace a family lifestyle change.

Photo by Renee Tougas

Find a supportive community

Being part of a community of people with similar values is so helpful when making big life changes. Especially when those changes take you further outside the mainstream culture.

We all want to feel like we belong, and children are no different.

For years our family has invested a lot of our time in pursuing outdoor adventures together. It’s part of our mission. We hike most every weekend and backpack also, but haven’t found many families around us who do the same.

However, we recently met a family who enjoys these same pursuits and went winter camping together. The adults had a great time, but our children LOVED it, having fun and connecting with other kids like them.

Photo by Renee Tougas

Nothing replaces a rock solid family foundation, but finding community makes new experiences and transitions easier and more enjoyable.

Be inspiring and enthusiastic

It’s fine and dandy if one of your family goals is to live more simply, but if there is no joy in doing so don’t expect the kids to embrace your philosophy.

Your life should be enriched with better family time, deeper relationships and more joyful living because of the changes you’re making.

For example, if your family decides to pay down debt, your own attitude should be inspiring to your children. Be realistic — it may take some time to win them over to a new way of doing things, like cutting back expenses to save more money.

Encourage them with your own enthusiasm.

Start young

Making big changes that mark your family as different than the norm is easier when your children are too young to know the difference.

Some people think “Oh, these baby years are so hard, let’s just wait till the kids are sleeping through the night, out of diapers, fill-in-the-blank before we make any major changes.”

I say, go for it now. This is the ideal age. If your dream is to become vegetarians, live like “Little House on The Prairie,” or sell most of your belongings to live overseas, do it now while your children are little and you won’t have to go through most of what I’ve shared above!

Has your family made any big lifestyle changes? What techniques do you recommend to help children with change?

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• Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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• Encouraging Children To Embrace Lifestyle Change
• Back to the Basics: Share Your Family Mission Statement
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It’s been almost one week since I stared my email inefficiency in the face, and I have to say, I’m already doing better. Here are some of my thoughts since I devised a new plan:

Photo by Coco Sunday

• Problem #1: My husband and I share one particular e-mail account (it’s work related), and we were always back-tracking and marking emails as “unread” when we knew the other person needing to see one. Very annoying. Solution: I’ve now redirected said email account to my Gmail account. I delete any emails for him because I know he’ll see them in iMail (the mail client he’s still using); he deletes any emails for me on his iMail. We just take care of our own emails. So far, this system works fairly well.

• Problem #2: I would check iMail anytime I heard it “ding,” telling me I had received a new message. It would distract me from whatever I was doing. Solution: I am forcing myself to close Gmail whenever I’m done using it, so my email isn’t up at all. It’s helping me curb distraction when I’m focused on something else, and I’m actually better at managing my email time, knowing I’ll close the window when I’m done.

• Problem #3: I’d read emails, then wait until I had more time to reply to them. This resulted in a backlog of too many emails to ever have time for responding. An in-box full of emails needing a response is not a pretty thing. Solution: I only read emails when I can give them at least a five sentence response. If I don’t have time for that, I leave it unread. If it seems urgent, then I’ll close out what I was working on and give that email my full attention. If it’s not urgent, then it can wait. The world won’t stop.

Initial Observations - It’s much harder to close out my Gmail account than I thought it would be. I don’t really consider myself an email addict, yet it was difficult to not just leave it up in case something “important” landed in my in-box. That was surprising to me. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how freeing it is to see an empty in-box. Before, I didn’t think it was a big deal to leave emails in my in-box, but it just got overwhelming to see all those conversations vying for my attention. No longer.

I’m going to closely monitor my email habits for one more week, and then I’ll switch my focused attention on a new habit on my list – while still keeping up with my new email system, of course.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

• Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
• The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
• Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
• Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

© 2008-2012 Simple Living Media, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Simple Mom subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please contact hello@simplemom.net to let us know. Thanks.

• Getting a Grip on Email Chaos
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I admit it – I have let my e-mail inbox get the best of me. I like minimalism and simplicity, and yet I do not delete e-mails for some reason unbeknownst to me. Maybe I fear as soon as I delete it, I’ll need it. Maybe I think one day I’ll want to re-read certain e-mails, just for one. Why I think I’d do that (or have time for that) is beyond me – I must think that during late night nursing sessions.

Photo by Glynnish

I’m incredibly visual, so keeping something clean, simple, and clear calms me. Simply not seeing tons of text and requests to talk to me reduces my stress level.

So my current goal towards simplicity is really pretty basic: clear out my e-mail inbox, reply to e-mails that need a response, and come up with a system that keeps this from happening again.

I’m hoping that by keeping an online list, I’ll better reach my goal.

This guest post by Leo Babauta on ProBlogger has a great outline on what might work for me.

Though I’m more of an e-mail avoider than an e-mail addict, this article makes some great points for me as well.

They say it takes 21 days of consistently doing something to morph into a habit. I’d like to see if it’s true.

How about you? Have you found an e-mail system that works for you?

CURRENT SPONSORS:

• Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
• The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
• Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
• Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

© 2008-2012 Simple Living Media, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Simple Mom subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please contact hello@simplemom.net to let us know. Thanks.

• Slaying the E-mail Inbox Dragon
• In box: Empty! Now – My 5-Steps to Email Efficiency
• Getting a Grip on Email Chaos

Alright, so this blog. It’s kinda new. My personal blog isn’t, however, and that’s where you can read our family updates, little cultural stories about life here, and generally whatever comes to my mind that doesn’t fit here.

So what does fit on this blog?

This blog is dedicated to encouraging moms to simplify their high calling. That means freedom from unnecessary complications, and free enough to do our job well.

Photo by Atimoth

And don’t think that by my penning this blog that I have this “simplicity” thing all figured out!  By reading, you’ll be following my journey as I learn what works and what doesn’t. 

I love exploring the practical sides of simplicity, so I highlight some of the many tools and resources available. Topics that interest me most are:

1. managing time as we manage the home – how on earth do we do it “all”?
   
2. budgeting and managing the family’s finances
3. cooking and eating well
4. filling our family’s minds with only quality books, music, and movies
5. cultivating the dying arts for the benefit of our family – sewing, gardening, and the like
6. keeping paperwork to a minimum, and organizing well the paperwork that is necessary
7. incorporating our children in household management – even the little ones can help out
   

I want to showcase the benefit of simplicity, that keeping things simple can free us to invest in the things that really matter – relationships with family and friends.

Interested? Then please stick around and explore! All suggestions and ideas are welcome. I’ll try my darndest to make even personal finance interesting and fun.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

• Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
• The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
• Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
• Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

© 2008-2012 Simple Living Media, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Simple Mom subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please contact hello@simplemom.net to let us know. Thanks.

• Welcome to Simple Mom
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Being a mom is anything but easy. Late, long nights feeding a newborn, potty training a toddler, quizzing for tomorrow’s spelling test, and comforting a broken heart are just a few of a mom’s difficult tasks in shepherding our children.

If we’re not careful, we can miss the priorities – and with them, the joys – that go with being a mother, simply because our world is too crammed with stuff. Stuff that is often good, but many times not the best. Very rarely does someone regret spending too much time with their children.

And yet, how often do we secretly hope our child will quietly watch that DVD so that we can finish blogging or reading e-mails? How often do we wish we could enjoy a relaxed evening at home with the family, but once again, there’s a pile of laundry calling our name, the dishes are still in the sink, and the dog threw up again? Too often, for many of us.

I am convinced that in this era of lightning-speed convenience, one of the best methods of being the moms God has called us to – and the mom we sincerely want to be – is by living a simple life. A life uncluttered, able to hear the birds outside, free to play hide-and-seek with the children, available to take a meal to our neighbors in need. Simplicity. Filling our life with the necessary excellences, and questioning all the rest.

A simple life is not easy to do – not by any stretch. Especially in this era and in this culture. But if we make it a priority, it can be done, and we can do it well.

I don’t mean being we should be anti-tech or deny ourselves of the aesthetics we love. In fact, we could use technology available to us to make the best use of our time, and we can surround ourselves with beauty and inspiration in order to create order and not chaos. These both could greatly simplify our life, if we use them well.

This blog is dedicated to encouraging moms towards simplicity in their high calling.

Welcome.
Art by Jana Christy

CURRENT SPONSORS:

• Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
• The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
• Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
• Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

© 2008-2012 Simple Living Media, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Simple Mom subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please contact hello@simplemom.net to let us know. Thanks.

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