Author by : Kathryn Marion

With all there is to do during the holiday season—parties to attend, menus to plan, the house to decorate, gifts to buy, cards to mail out—it’s probably the easiest season for letting the children in your house feel completely alone during the chaos. Here are eight dumb things to NOT do as a parent during the holidays:

1. Don’t involve your children in holiday preparations: decorating the house, yard, or table; baking special goodies; buying and wrapping gifts; and preparing for guests. Children feel like an important part of the season’s activities when they’re involved in these very visible holiday activities.

2. Ask your children for ideas about special activities or decorating ideas and don’t use any of them: Sure, the younger your children the less practical their ideas may be, but to feel like they’re adding some value to the family’s preparation, try to incorporate a few of them.

3. Go to dozens of holiday parties while leaving the kids at home with a sitter: this is a family-oriented season—don’t let your child’s most memorable activities be sitting in front of the television with a disinterested teenager.

4. Have no way for your children to participate in parties at your home: leaving the children out of parties in your own home deprives them of developing social skills and learning more about your family through your friends.

5.a. Take your child’s wish list to the mall and buy everything on it: are you trying to encourage greediness and self-centeredness in your child? What will they do when they get older and not everything goes their way? It may be tough to learn about disappointment as a child, but it’s a whole lot tougher to be forced to learn it as an adult.

5.b. Take your child’s wish list to the mall and buy nothing on it: unless, of course, everything on it is inappropriate. Don’t look at the list and decide that you ‘know better’ what they ‘need’—if a few of the items on the list are within reason (even if you don’t see the attraction to them), go ahead and allow the kids to be delighted with having made some of their own choices.

6. Hold your kids hostage in the car for twelve hours a day with no age- or location-appropriate activities: it’s tough enough for youngsters to be cooped up in a vehicle for a long day’s drive to Grandma’s—don’t make it tougher by not bringing along fun activities like crayons and paper on a clipboard, music and movies if you have the technology onboard, books, and games to play.

7. Serve no kid-friendly foods for your special meals or at your parties: kids’ tastes are not the same as grownups’ and even though there are ‘traditional’ foods for each holiday, few children feel that the meal is as special when the table is filled with these strange ‘delectables.’

8. Don’t share those golden nuggets of parenting wisdom that you’ve learned over the years: you may not be an award-winning parent, but you have figured out solutions to many everyday parenting dilemmas. Share your success stories at www.SmartestThing.com…or have some fun by sharing those dumb mistakes you’ve made on this new blog: http://DumbestThing.com.

The holidays should be a memorable time of year—make them happy memories for your children so they can continue that wonderful family tradition.

[tags]parent,parenting,child,children,kids,holiday,holidays,parties,gifts,activities,success,regret,dumb[/tags]

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