I’m a strong minded-woman but when it comes to parenting, I often second-guess myself. I feel like I’m not being the best mom I can be, because I’m busy, overwhelmed, and so on. When it comes to behaviour that is not bad, just irritating, I am guilty of occasionally opting for the status quo rather than expending energy and time to make the necessary change. This is especially true when that change involves me 
changing and sticking with a new plan.
I knew my son needed to improve his self-organization skills. This skill set has been on my parenting “to do” list for a while, but I hadn’t got around to it yet. There were always so many other things to work on, and my “to do” list usually exceeds my capacity on a daily basis. As well, it is easier to do the simple but less important, short-term stuff on the list – the stakes are lower, the effort less.
So when my son’s report card came home, I suspected that it might contain a comment or two about my son’s lack of organization skills. We’re lucky that he has a fantastic grade one teacher who notices not just the performance of a child, but what attitudes and behaviours are holding the child back from achieving more. Reading comments from someone else, but someone who spends a significant amount of time with my child, provided the motivation I needed to make a serious, long-lasting change in my son’s behaviour.
The skills my son needs to learn can be summarized as doing “first things first.” To help him with this, I’ve developed a list of what needs to be done in the morning to get ready for school. I then had my son add a picture for each item to increase his interest in the chart and to help him “read” it by himself. He then checks off what tasks he does, in whatever order he chooses to do them, but he is responsible for making sure all of them get done before he plays with his toys. When I told the teacher about this at the parent-teacher interview, she said she would make a similar one for him that lists the activities he needs to do to start the school day.
By being a parent of a school-aged child, I’m learning that I can use the report card. It doesn’t have to be a judgment of my child’s abilities; rather, I can use it to assess my parenting “to do” list to see if something lower down on it actually needs to be the priority. While helping my son with his reading and writing are very important, so is learning a way of being at school and at home. Taking care of first things first is a good motto to carry throughout life, and an excellent lesson for my son and I to learn from this particular report card. By focusing on this particular skill set, I can remove some of the judgment, second-guessing and stress that parenting can cause me. And that means a happier me – and a happier mom is better for everyone.