Big 6 Youth Sports is committed to the goal of encouraging and training life excellence on and off the basketball court. B6YS believes in the amazing task of being an outstanding parent. Everyone aspires to create a happy family but what can be more complex than parenting? It could be one of the most complex tasks people face on earth. Today, the complexity of our world adds to the potential stress and frustration in parenting. Leo Tolstoy in his famous novel Anna Karenina said it well, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
In happy families, the mind is at ease, the home is restful, the relationship build and give joy. There is space to learn, to enjoy, to delight in life together.
In unhappy families, the mind is in turmoil, there is frustration, confusion, anger, isolation and sometimes violence. There are so many entailed reasons for this escalation of unhappiness and the web of finding solutions becomes tangled in blame, hurt, silence, fear, bitterness and all the pain of unhappy relationships.
The best way to create a happy family is through the disciplined work of prevention. Creating a strong habit of how the family will navigate with each other and following through every day on these habits creates a structure of peace and love.
Discipline ways to talk about tough topics that brings the family together instead of a part. A good resource on how to build this kind of way of relating is in the book, “Crucial Conversations.”
Discipline ways to navigate ways we hurt each other. If you are around anyone for any amount of time, there are going to be ways we let each other down. Forgiveness is an important healing tool and a habitual part of a happy family.
Create meaningful moments filled with laugher, joy, and love. Trips can’t bring this if your internal space is unhappy, you will be as unhappy as a family at Disneyland as you will be in your house. Each person has to come to the family with an inner drive to live with joy, love and kindness from the inside out. If you can’t access this joy, gratitude and love then there is bitterness, anger, resentment that is piled up inside. Start to ask forgiveness for the ways you hurt others, you will find all the bitterness you hold against other people will naturally soften and lessen.