Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you’re trying something new and it seems to work in the beginning, then after a while it doesn’t and you give up, thinking it was all a load of rubbish anyway?
What if it’s nothing to do with the idea? What if you’ve started off great and then simply forgotten a small but key element that makes it work?
It might not be the only reason, but sometimes, when new habits go wrong, it can be down to something as straightforward as simply forgetting.
There’s a lot to remember with parenting and with all the day to day pressures taking up most of our headspace it’s not a surprise that we often forget things.
As with trying any new habit there’s a lot of forgetting involved at first. Years ago, my husband and I tried to go a week without using anything that we’d have to throw away (if it could be recycled that was fine). Half way through the week this was blown when we went out for the evening and decided to get a kebab on the way home. As we watched them serving up our food in disposable only containers, we suddenly realised with horror that we’d completely forgotten and we’d broken our perfect record. It was a real insight that one of the barriers to developing good habits could simply be forgetfulness.
Sometimes we do things for a while, then it slips off our radar and we forget about it. Other times, we start something new but keep forgetting. It’s only over time and with practice that we remember more often. If we notice this, we can prepare for it and get back on course. Every time we forget then re-remember we make that habit stronger. It’s like mistakes; and as they say, ‘mistakes are how you learn.’
It’s happened often enough to me that it’s now become the first thing I check for when things get out of kilter at home. Sometimes when I forget to spend enough time connecting with my children it shows up in their behaviour (this is such a good starting point for solving so many parenting crises and it’s so easy to overlook). In the past I’ve looked for all sorts of complicated solutions when it turned out to be nothing more difficult than remembering to spend more time with them. When I have, often within a few days I’ve noticed a difference and before long, things have settled back down again.
Of course, it’s not always going to be the solution we’re looking for, but it can be more often than we think and sometimes it can be quite a relief to know that there was no magic solution hiding out of reach; we’d simply forgotten.
Oak and Acorn 