Resource: Gather: A Parent's Guide to Thriving in the New Year by Dr. Deborah MacNamara
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Dr. Deborah McNamara offers a downloadable reflective guide, Gather 2024: A Parent’s Guide for Thriving in the New Year on her website.
In Gather 2024, Dr. Deborah McNamara has created a tool “designed to help you collect your memories, insights, feelings, perspectives, and understandings from 2023 and use these to work towards creating intentions for 2024. Gather isn’t about parenting perfection or perfect planning. It is about anchoring into something substantial inside of you that will help you face what lies ahead with dignity, integrity, and wisdom.”
Questions addressed include:
What do we need to focus on to grow and to face adversity?
How can we show up with confidence to lead the ones we love?
When is it hardest to show up and what do these times teach us?
How is our growth tied to our role as parents?
How can we use parenting insight to form intentions?
The guide is “based on developmental and relational science, and distills to the essence what we need to flourish.” The gentle design of the guide allows space for private reflection and note-taking on one’s parenting practice, to help parents use their own practice and personality as tools to build intentions.
The guide includes three step-by-step sections:
The first section is Gather Ourselves; Gracious Parenting/Four Needs for Well-Being. It starts with thinking about the previous year of parenting, what insights have been gained and feeling experienced in order to answer these two questions:
What of your parenting experience do you intend to leave behind in the previous year?
What do you intend to take with you as you move forward in your life as a parent?
As the guide moves on into the second section, Dr McNamara notes, “Parenthood brings us full circle back to our childhoods. The emotions we struggle most with in our child(ren) are often the most underdeveloped in us. The stimulus for emotional growth lies in want to be our kid’s best bet and to not revisit the challenges of our childhood on them.”
The second section reflects on our own emotional responses to parenting and helps look at when we find our own sources of caregiving to support us as we parent.
The third section of the guide looks at the Four Irreducible Needs: Attach/Feel/Play/Rest by exploring how we meet these needs for ourselves and ends by allowing space to note the image and the word or sentence that convey and embody the image of the insights we would like to carry forward into our ongoing experience as parents.