Morning Mantras and Bedtime Blessings

To start off with, I want to give credit that the phrases Morning Mantras and Bedtime Blessings came from a class I took with parenting coach, Mary Van Geffen. (Disclaimer:  if you go follow her, I don’t agree with all of her personal faith beliefs, but her parenting advice is so helpful!)  As she was talking about one way to cast vision for your family utilizing morning mantras and bedtime blessings, I realized, we actually already do this!!

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Why should we cast a vision?

So much of our parenting work can feel like small mundane tasks.  Change the diapers.  Do the dishes.  Take them to practice.  Cook the meal.  Nothing about any one of these single tasks would be considered extraordinary.  And I think our kids probably feel the same way about their daily tasks.  Eat the food.  Go to school.  Do the homework.  Follow directions.  Go to bed.  Nothing all that extraordinary. 

And yet, when we as a family see that we can work together through these ordinary tasks and create something bigger than ourselves, our feelings about these tasks change.  If I am honest, this is an area, I am still in need of growth!  But I want to cast a vision for my family so we are aware that our actions and words in both big and small create our family.  We can choose to love God and let that love flow through us as we talk with each other, serve each other, and love each other.  Believe me we are far from this peaceful version of family, but it is the vision of what I want my family to see before them.

 Morning Mantras

As my kids have gotten older, they have started to be away from our house more.  They may be at school during the day, or at various activities at night, but as they grow older, they continue to interact with the world outside our family more and more.  A morning mantra is a reminder of who they are as they walk out your door.   

In our family we go through a list of reminders of who we are such as I am loved, I am forgiven and  I am beautiful.  At the end we have actions and we say, I can do hard things and  I can do ALL things, through Christ who strengthens me.  Then we all put our hand in the middle and say 1, 2, 3, Go Team Hambek!  Even my 2 year old who can’t say the words will do the actions with excitement and put his hand in for our cheer!

There is nothing magical about exactly what we do or say.  I have a friend who always reminds her kids they are brave, kind and strong.  You can decide what to include in your morning mantra, and in different seasons it may change too!

Let’s keep it real, I know that not every day are these words really sinking deep into their hearts, but my prayer is that through these simple words they would see who they are in Christ and see that our family is a team.  And at the very least on days when the world is so hard, they at least heard the truth of who God made them to be once.  And we stood together as a family on those truths. On the easy mornings and the rocky mornings.  We still end as a team.

Bedtime Blessings

Most of us probably have some type of bedtime routine with our kids already.  Maybe you take a bath, read some books, and pray together.  A bedtime blessing can be part of that routine too.  While our morning mantra is more of a team building group activity, bedtime blessings are individual.  In order for our kids to function well as part of our family team, they need to be individually loved.  

At bedtime, I spend a few minutes with each of my kids.  I pray with them every night.  I have special things I pray for each of them.  For one I pray God would use their compassionate heart to love Him and love those around them.  Another I pray that they would have a love for God’s Word and for sharing it with others.  I pray that God would use the determination of another child to follow hard after Him.  In each of these prayers I have intentionally taken one of the characteristics I see coming out of them and call it out in prayer.  Sometimes these characteristics can be seen negatively, and I believe it is even more important to let our child see those things as strengths and bedtime blessings is a safe and simple spot to affirm who God made them to be.

Bedtime Songs

One last bedtime idea for you, is a bedtime song.  Each of our kids has their own song that we sing to them before bed.  We picked a song for each of them when they were newborns and they love their songs.  They love them because it is theirs, and it shows they are loved.  Not because of anything magical about the way we sing it or the words in the song.  Even my tween still requests her song at bedtime, and I would guess it will forever be a song tied to these special bedtime moments.  

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