The C Basket

The C Basket is the basket that teaches me when to let go.  Everyone has habits and things in their personalities you aren't gonna love.  You can't control everything that your kids (or spouse or anyone for that matter) does in life.  The C basket helps remind you about what we can and can't (should/shouldn't) interfere with in life.  C basket items are ones we should just learn to let go of.  If they say "like" every third word - does it really matter? Do you think they'll still be doing this when they get a real job and are adults? Unlikely.

You may be surprised how many things fall into the C basket category.  So often something seems so important in the moment but when we take a step back we realize it is really not something worth making an issue about.

Lets take small kids as a simple example.  They love to dress themselves and often their wardrobe choices really don't align with what we feel is publicly acceptable.  Let's think about this for a minute - who is the one caring about clothing choices?  Is it me, the parent, worried about what people will think when I take my kids out looking a certain way? If kids would be allowed to control these types of choices and instead of them being battles they were just looked at as C basket issues - how happy could our home lives be? Small things so often get magnified and take on a life of their own but with a new magnifying glass we can better sort out which items are significant and which are really not worth the time and effort.  We hear so often in life to pick our battles but sometimes it takes a bit more clarification and thinking to know what really is a worthwhile battle.

Baskets change by the family and by the stage and there are always exceptions on top of that.  They are a framework which helps us make choices about when and how to approach our children's behaviors.  Big Picture and Baskets go hand in hand.  Together, they can hopefully help you build a framework to appraoch parenting.

At this point I think I may just dive into topics of interest and go back to philosophizing over parenting theory when the time seems right.