Baltimore's Child Baltimore's Child
I started nursery school at age 3. Since then, I have started a new school year each and every September but two. With an educator’s inclination to look forward, and an educator’s internal clock, I see September as a much better time for resolutions and new beginnings than January 1. This is particularly true if you have had a summer of novel routines, punctuated with exciting adventures.
This September, like the others, demands new resolutions and goals, makes its own unique needs known and calls for its own set of intentions.
There are incredible differences between your child one year ago and your child today. The younger the child, the more dramatic the changes that have taken place in a year that seemed to pass in an instant. This year’s goals for your child will be very different from last year’s. There is little in your child and little in his or her new classroom that warrants resolves based on someone you knew at the beginning of last September.
A new school year, when we are full of hope and confidence, calls for new resolutions. Now is the best time to stop and take stock. Look closely at your children as they are today and as they will develop over the next nine months. Walk into this year grateful for a new beginning and consciously choose to live by and honor your parenting priorities just a little more consistently.
I encourage you to make New Year’s resolutions now and to keep them close to your heart throughout the upcoming school year. I invite you to join with your child’s new teachers in their own excitement and anticipation of the wonderful things the students will learn.
I also invite you to determine to stay focused on what is truly important — the nurturing of each child as he or she grows into a kinder and more capable person. Just as my own Septembers — many, many of them — have been unique opportunities for me to grow and change in a way that was right for me, your child’s teachers are excited to have an opportunity to develop and achieve goals for a newly formed classroom of individuals.
We can all deliberately resolve to see in each child a unique potential to be recognized and honored, not for what we want, but for what is best for that child.
Create a partnership with your child’s teachers that will offer everyone in the classroom community the best combination of nurture and challenge that will bring you to June with pride — a time when you will look back with a little nostalgia and a sense of incredible growth and change. By then, the fruits of your new resolutions and goals will lie in a child who is familiar, but new.
