Each day is a new account

If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400.00; carried over no balance from day to day; allowed you to keep no cash in your account; and every evening canceled whatever part of the amount you had failed to use; what would you do?

Draw out every cent, every day, of course, and use it to your advantage!

You do have such a bank – it’s called TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night, it writes off as lost whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose.

Time carries over no balance. It allows no overdrafts. Each day, it opens a new account for you. Each night, it burns the records of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow.”

Our seconds as parents can be thought of in the same way. At the end of every day, have we used every moment well? Do our children know they come first and always will?

Sometimes we encounter obstacles as parents that seem insurmountable. This is especially true when our children become adolescents. We can feel “stuck” like a car in the mud with its wheels spinning. Stuck is seeing few or no alternatives for our current situation and relationship with our child.

The key to becoming unstuck and to take advantage of every moment of every day as a parent is to take a parenting class. The Hillsborough County/University of Florida Extension Service conducts parenting classes each month. For more information go to: http://urlmin.com/HillsboroughParenting.