A Happier Labor Day: How to Ensure Your Student Has the Best Year Yet
Since its 1894 formal debut (thanks, President Cleveland), Labor Day pays tribute to the achievements, values, and contributions of American workers. To create a happier Labor Day for yourself this year, treat the holiday as a “reset.” Akin to making New Years resolutions, reflect on the symbolism of new beginnings, fresh starts, and purposefulness that Labor Day—and the unofficial start of the school year--can bring, as well.
Over the long weekend, spend some time reflecting on strategies, changes, and tweaks you and your student can make to make this a successful school year. Over smoked Gouda burgers and juicy watermelon (the send-off backyard fare of the season), facilitate a conversation with your student on how, as a family, you can ensure this school year is the best yet.
Some questions to consider:
How can you be happier at school?
Should you be in a different environment?
How can you strategize about where I should go next?
Should you try a new club, sport, instrument, leadership opportunity, volunteering outlet, or hobby?
We are so busy in the day to day that we don’t take the time to step back and consider the big questions—but they’re oh so important. Often times, we’re forced to deal with, execute, and finagle the urgent (the immediate fires of scheduling, logistics of weekly routines, or finally discovering the quickest commute from home to school in the mornings) that we neglect, bypass, and turn a blind eye to the significant. Maybe you’ve been putting off starting the conversation around school placement or academic advising for a while now. Perhaps college planning—and all the paperwork, forms, and files associated with that chaos--seems so far in the future. "Happiness psychologist" Gretchen Rubin asserts that things “that will happen at ‘sometime’ will happen at ‘no time.’
Don’t wait until you have a problem to address the topic at hand. This Labor Day, utilize an external prompt to guide your reflection—“What can I do to make my student’s school life more creative, more innovative, more successful, more fruitful, and overall, a more pleasant experience?”
Next, chose a one-word theme for your year. I’ve applied this strategy for the past several years (some favorites: Intentionality, Margin, Expand, Grace, Home, Faith). What’s a word that you’d like to shape your thinking and guide your direction this year? Propel? Thrive? Purpose? Achievement? Peace?
How you can your one-word mantra achieve just one new improvement in your school year? New school? New teacher? New service opportunity? Learn a new language? Join a new club? New sport?
Research shows that we are much more likely to achieve an aim when we identify it. When we put tangible keywords around the problem (or even equipment, strategy, routine that has become ineffective or even obsolete), it is far easier to see solutions.
If your student isn’t happy at school, how can you facilitate a change? Where is the dissatisfaction stemming from: Workload? Environment? Friend groups? Expectations? Be specific to see how you solve that problem or look for a different circumstance to see if that would alleviate the anxiety or stress that has been building around the problem at hand. With reflective monitoring, you and your student will be able to discover and follow patterns of victory.