S2 Ep 33: Set Your Family's Intention for the Year
Darlynn: [00:00:02] Hey, welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host, Darlynn Childress, a life and parenting coach, and it's that time of year again. There's new backpacks, new teachers, new routines, and I want to do something with you today before we get into any of the logistics of the new school year. I want to help you set an intention for the school year, because most of us jump straight into schedules, rules, and to-do lists, and we skip the part that actually determines how the year feels and how it goes for us.
Darlynn: [00:00:43] So today's episode is all about setting your family's intention for this school year, starting with your mindset and your goals before you start with all the logistics. Now, this can be kind of hard, because once we get to the end of the summer and the school year starts, a lot of us are really tired. We just came off of a summer that required a lot of camps to coordinate, kids to entertain, and our own work to keep up with, and now here we go right into a whole new set of demands: homework, activities, carpools, forms to sign.
Darlynn: [00:01:12] It's tempting to just put your head down and get through it. But I want you to know, if you don't decide on purpose how you want this school year to feel, the year will just happen to you. The years go by really fast, and you're going to end up reacting the whole time instead of steering the ship for yourself. And I don't think that's actually less effort — it actually feels harder when you don't have power or intention over your life.
Darlynn: [00:01:51] Reacting is more exhausting than spending 20 minutes now with me getting clear about what you actually want. So that's the invitation today: a little bit of upfront thinking that's going to pay off all year long. So what am I even talking about? I'm talking about mindset. I'm talking about intention.
Darlynn: [00:02:12] The way I think about intention as a life coach working with parents is I think about chasing feelings. I want to start with how you want to feel this school year, instead of what you want to do. I want you to be able to pick a couple of emotions that will help define you this year, define your family, and define what you want your whole emotional experience to be in your family.
Darlynn: [00:02:42] When you create an intention for how you want to feel about an experience before the experience even starts, you get to actually chase that feeling. Most of us go into a new school year reactively — we just respond to whatever comes at us day by day. But if you take a few minutes now to decide how you actually want to feel this year, you'll have something to come back to when things get hard. It's like a compass.
Darlynn: [00:03:12] So here's the exercise. It's really simple: what are the top three emotions you want to have during this school year? Not what you think you're supposed to feel — what you actually want more of. Common ones that moms pick are wanting to feel more calm, more connected, more confident, more peace or ease, more gratitude, more content, or more clarity.
Darlynn: [00:03:42] There's no right answer. It's just about thinking about what you want to create more of in your family this year, and for yourself. Maybe you want more joy, more fun, more ease. I've talked about this before when I talk about summer mindset and winter break mindset, but this time we're talking about it when it comes to the school year.
Darlynn: [00:04:03] How do you want it to feel in your family? What are you chasing? I was thinking about this when I was writing this episode, about how I want to feel this year. My kids are in college now, and the end of this summer happens as this episode comes out. So how do I want to feel while I know my kids are at school?
Darlynn: [00:04:23] I want to feel productive this year, and I want to feel more free. I want more freedom and more productivity, because my kids are older. When they were younger, I wanted calm — always calm, calm, calm. For years I was just chasing that.
Darlynn: [00:04:43] That's why this podcast is called Become a Calm Mama, because I've been chasing calm for basically the whole time I raised kids, and learning more and more how to create that. So that's what I want for you to figure out: what do you want more of this year? And the cool thing is you can ask your kids the same question.
Darlynn: [00:05:03] Ask them what they want to feel this year. You might be surprised by their answers, and it might give you clarity about how you want to guide or coach them this year. And when things start to go sideways, you can check in with each other — you can say, "How's it going? Are you feeling more confident, like you said you wanted to be?"
Darlynn: [00:05:23] Or if they're struggling with something and they said they wanted to build more confidence, you can talk about it. You can say, "This is what confidence looks like — it looks like overcoming hard moments and building belief in yourself that you can manage it and handle it." So this homework assignment, or this project, or this new coach, if you want to feel confident, we have to struggle and get through to the other side. That's where the confidence is.
Darlynn: [00:05:52] It's really helpful information to find out what your kids are chasing and what feelings they want to feel. It also gives them the concept that you get to feel on purpose — that you get to be intentional about your feelings. And how that works is your thoughts create your feelings.
Darlynn: [00:06:12] So if I want to feel more free in my life, I need to be thinking thoughts like, "I get to do what I want. I have a lot of free time right now, and that's great, and I'm enjoying this. I love this." Instead of feeling a little bit depressed or sad or meaningless because I don't know what to do with my kids being away at college.
Darlynn: [00:06:33] So for you, I want you to believe that peace is possible. Calm is inevitable. Calm starts with me. Whatever thoughts you need to think will help you chase the feelings that you want to feel.
Darlynn: [00:06:43] Okay, now I want to talk a little bit about goals, and I want us to think about goals in three areas of our lives. So you have your feelings sorted, and now we're going to think about these three categories: of course your kids have academic goals, but you as a parent, as a family, also have your home to manage.
Darlynn: [00:07:03] That's your job, your work-life balance, your chores and how they're divided, quality family time, balancing screen time, getting enough sleep, getting enough movement. So think about how you want the house to feel, or how you want your home life to be — whether that means improved connection, better hygiene routines, or better sleep habits.
Darlynn: [00:07:32] I want you to think about one or two things in your life at home that you would like to change. Pick something that matters to you — maybe something from last year that you didn't like, or that you just wished you had more of. If it's dialing in sleep, dial in sleep. If it's dialing in diet, say, "I want to dial in diet."
Darlynn: [00:07:52] If it's your own self-care and creating more work-life balance or home balance, say, "That's what I want. I want to create more time for myself. I want to create more equity in my partnership with the person I co-parent with" — whether that's your partner, your spouse, or whoever it is. Maybe that means deciding you want to change the way you structure your family life and give that person more responsibility.
Darlynn: [00:08:23] So think about a goal in your personal, home life that you want to prioritize. Then I want you to think about an academic goal for your kids. In general, it can be hard to figure out what our kids need to work on, because it feels like they have to work on everything.
Darlynn: [00:08:43] I'd love for you to think about it like this: over the course of the next several years, your kids are going to learn a bunch of academic skills — math, reading, writing, or maybe time management, motivation, personal responsibility, general work habits, study habits. There's a lot of different academic goals. So think about one or two things you want each kid to work on, and dial it in — decide where you see a gap and want to work on it this year or this quarter.
Darlynn: [00:09:13] It could be organization, concentration — not all of it, just what's actually relevant for your kid this year. What do they need to work on? Then I want you to think about social-emotional goals: do you want your kid to build self-awareness, like recognizing their emotions? Self-management, expressing emotion in ways that work? Social awareness, maintaining and building relationships?
Darlynn: [00:09:41] Self-agency — setting and pursuing goals? Resiliency — bouncing back from setbacks? So think about these different areas you want your kid to grow in. Let me go back and say those again, because I think it'll be helpful.
Darlynn: [00:10:02] Self-awareness is one — recognizing their emotion. Self-management — expressing that emotion in ways that work. Social awareness — building and maintaining relationships and knowing what's going on in the world.
Darlynn: [00:10:12] Self-agency — being able to set and pursue their own goals and manage themselves, especially as they get into middle school; we want them to feel like they have power over their lives and can work toward goals. And of course, resiliency is so important — being able to bounce back from setbacks. So thinking about your kid and your family in these three buckets:
Darlynn: [00:10:43] your home life and how it's run — if you feel like screens were over the top last year, fix that; if sleep was out of bounds, fix that; if diet needs work, fix that. If you felt like all three of those were terrible, just pick one. If you felt like you were doing all the invisible labor and mental load and want to share that with your partner, talk about it — that's going to take time to transfer some of that responsibility.
Darlynn: [00:11:03] Giving yourself a goal in an area for the next three months will help you feel less overwhelmed by your family: a home goal, an academic goal, and a social-emotional goal. These are the buckets you're working with as a family — picking your priorities across these buckets for the first few months of school. And just like we ask our kids what feelings they want to chase, I want you to also ask your kids what they want to focus on.
Darlynn: [00:11:42] What's one thing around the house they'd like to improve? What's one thing in their academics? What's one thing socially or emotionally? You can just ask them that. If they ask what social-emotional means, give them examples like managing your feelings or managing your friendships.
Darlynn: [00:12:02] You might be surprised. It's so interesting to ask your kids these questions to find out what they want to work on. And what a gift, as a 9-year-old, to be asked what they want to work on, or what they're interested in learning about or growing.
Darlynn: [00:12:11] So let me give you some down-to-earth, practical examples, because picking your goals can feel kind of abstract until you see it in action. Say you've got a family where mornings have been chaotic and everyone's frazzled by 7:45 — your home goal this year might be peace and harmony, specifically around mornings. Your academic goal might be simple, like homework gets started before dinner, not after.
Darlynn: [00:12:42] Your social-emotional goal for your kid might be resiliency, because you noticed last year that they fell apart at the first sight of a hard math problem. Or say you've got a family with a strong-willed middle schooler navigating new friend dynamics — your home goal might be improved connection, carving out even 15 minutes a day of real conversation.
Darlynn: [00:13:02] Your academic goal might be organization, because backpacks and planners have been a disaster. Your social-emotional goal might be self-management — helping them find better ways to express frustration than shutting down or snapping. Notice that neither of these examples has 10 goals, just a handful — one from each bucket, specific enough that you'd actually know if you were making progress.
Darlynn: [00:13:41] So I want you to think about your own family and decide, in these areas, what is one or two things you want to work on. Again, this isn't to add homework to your list — I know you already have a lot going on. But what I think happens to us as women and moms is we have so many goals that we get overwhelmed, and everything feels like a mess and a disaster that we need to fix, especially at the beginning of the school year.
Darlynn: [00:14:11] I don't want you to get stuck in that overwhelm trap. This is the way to prevent it — by taking back some agency within yourself and deciding, "I know there's stuff to work on in my family. We're going to work on this in home life, this in academics, this in social-emotional. And we're going to check in three months from now and see where we're at" — all the while chasing that feeling of joy, or calm, or purpose, or gratitude, whatever it is.
Darlynn: [00:14:41] I want you to be specific in order to feel less overwhelmed. That's actually my goal — to help you feel less overwhelmed, not more. I'm not trying to add another thing you have to do as a parent; you're already doing this in your mind, but it's vague and hard to catch and there's too much going on.
Darlynn: [00:15:02] So we're being specific in order to feel more empowered. Now, of course, your goals are going to collide with reality. There's going to be days when you can't satisfy what the teacher or the school wants from your kid while also honoring the rhythm that works for your family.
Darlynn: [00:15:32] Your goals and the school's goals might genuinely be in conflict. That's okay, that's normal. In those moments, it's not about trying to do everything — it's prioritizing. When you're overwhelmed, when there's too much on the list and your kid is in the middle of big feelings, pause.
Darlynn: [00:15:52] Come back to your goals another time. Give yourself permission to focus on just one thing today — not all three priorities, just the one thing that matters most right now. Here's an example: it's 7:00 PM, homework isn't done, your kid is exhausted and starting to unravel, bedtime is approaching.
Darlynn: [00:16:02] The school's goal is homework completion, but your goal tonight might be connection and sleep. You're allowed to decide that tonight, sleep wins over finishing the worksheet. That's not you failing the school's expectations — that's you prioritizing on purpose, based on what you decided mattered back when you were thinking clearly.
Darlynn: [00:16:22] I really want you to feel like you have a lot of permission and power over your life, and over prioritizing what's right for your family at any given time. So one last thing: this isn't a one-time exercise you do in August and then forget. There's value in naming your feelings and goals, because you can actually come back to them in October, or in January when things feel off track.
Darlynn: [00:16:52] Write these down — these small lists of feelings you're chasing this year, three priorities or three goals. Then you can come back to it and ask, "How'd I do on that? How are we doing? Do I want to reset those, or did we master that? Should I pick new ones?"
Darlynn: [00:17:02] So when you're feeling off track, you can ask yourself: am I closer to feeling the way I said I wanted to feel? Are we making progress, or has something shifted that I need to revise? Maybe you said you really wanted to be organized this year, and then you worked hard at it for a couple of weeks and realized it's too much work — it doesn't actually bother you if the house is messy.
Darlynn: [00:17:32] That's fine — let it be messy. You get to decide. Maybe you thought you needed to focus on connection, but it turns out you guys wanted to focus more on social life and being out and about with friends than on family time. Maybe you'll want to focus on connection instead when the weather changes in winter.
Darlynn: [00:17:52] The point isn't to lock yourself in — it's to become self-aware and be intentional with your family. This is all about having something concrete to check in with, and knowing where you're going as a family and whether you're making the progress you want.
Darlynn: [00:18:12] You do not need to take it that seriously, but I do think it's useful to jot down a couple of goals so you don't feel so overwhelmed when your family is going cuckoo pants. Okay, so here's the recap: before you build your routines this year, take a few minutes to name how you actually want to feel.
Darlynn: [00:18:43] Decide how you want to feel, and ask your kids how they want to feel. Get clear on a handful of goals across home, academics, and social-emotional growth — for both you and your kids, ask them too. Then, when the priorities collide, which they will, give yourself permission to focus on just one thing instead of trying to do it all.
Darlynn: [00:19:03] And come back to this intention throughout the year, as a living compass — am I doing what I thought I was going to be doing? Am I living the way I wanted to live? If not, no problem, you can reset and go back to your intention, or change it.
Darlynn: [00:19:22] I'd love to invite you to do this with your kids — over ice cream, in the car, or sitting outside enjoying the last little bits of summer sun. Ask them how they want to feel this year, what their goal is, what they want to work on. Even little kids, like 4-year-olds, you can ask — they don't really know, but it makes for a funny conversation.
Darlynn: [00:19:41] Especially as they get older, this is a really good conversation to have with middle schoolers, even though they'll act like they don't care. They may actually enjoy it, and their English teacher might be asking them a similar question too, so you can give them a little prod to think about it before they get to school.
Darlynn: [00:20:11] I hope you like this concept. I'm curious to find out if you like this kind of mindset work or if it's annoying to you. I think it's really helpful when I spend time being intentional and thinking about my goals — I feel better about myself, my family, and where we're going.
Darlynn: [00:20:31] I feel less overwhelmed, less frustrated. It is useful, and I don't know if you'll like it or not, but I wanted to do an episode on this topic so you could get the support you need and have confidence going into the school year — that you don't need to approach it as an all-or-nothing situation.
Darlynn: [00:20:51] You get to pick what you want to work on, how you want to feel, and take it at your own pace as a family, being intentional about yourself and your kids and your family. I hope this helps you have a great, intentional start to the school year.
Darlynn: [00:21:11] In the next few weeks, we're going to talk about the practical stuff — mornings, screens, sleep, all of those routines, and handling meltdowns. I think you're really going to enjoy the next few weeks, because I'm going to get into a lot of practical, important things to help you manage your life in useful ways.
Darlynn: [00:21:31] So this was your intentional mindset episode, and we'll get into all of the details next time. I hope you have a great week, and I will talk to you next time.
