Gratitude

​I hope everyone is doing well today. I wanted to take some time and talk about gratitude and being thankful. When we are thankful and able to show gratitude it puts us in an awesome headspace. We are able to separate the positive from the negatives in life and able to balance life’s ups and downs. 
 
Unfortunately, there are so many things that can get us down in life and make it difficult to show gratitude or even be thankful. When parenting a child with special needs it can be easy for us to become frustrated when things don’t turn out the way we planned or when our child is having difficulty, challenging us, or showing a negative behavior. When this happens the last thing we feel is thankful.
 
In this week’s blog post, I wanted to give you some simple tips on how to add some calmness to your day to allow you to be in a headspace of gratitude:

• Take time for yourself as a parent – Our children feed off of our emotions. If we are happy our child will pick up on that and that will impact their emotional state in a positive way. On the other side of the coin though if we are stressed, anxious, or frustrated a child will pick up on that as well and that will cause them to be stressed, anxious, or frustrated. It is important that we make taking time for ourselves as parents a priority. We need to do things for ourselves that make us feel calm and happy so that we can be in a place of gratitude. For more on taking time for yourself, check out our blog post here https://www.goflowoccupationaltherapy.com/blog/taking-time-for-yourself

• Even baby steps are steps in the right direction – When we are looking at big goals for our children – having them go to school, decreasing their meltdowns, improving their transitions, or having them become more independent with their self-care. It is easy to become hyper-focused on that goal. While this focus and drive is important, we want to make sure that we see our child’s progress in this process. For example, maybe our child still has tantrums, but maybe they only last 5 minutes now and they used to last 10 minutes. Or maybe our child can’t fully feed themselves independently yet, but maybe they require less assistance to use a fork or spill less food when eating. While these things may seem small or seem like “baby steps” there are steps in the right direction and we want to acknowledge and praise our children (and ourselves) for this progress.

• Tomorrow is a new day – It is ok (and normal) to have bad days as parents. We may wake up with the best of intentions but due to things that happen at our work, with our children, and with family members we may become frustrated or stressed out. It is ok and normal when this happens. Sometimes the best thing to do in these scenarios is acknowledge we are having a bad day and plan on having a better one tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with this.

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See you soon!
Michael Jankowski, MS, OTR/L