Did you start the New Year with a list of intentions, promising yourself that this will be your year?

How’s it going?

We’ve all done it. We wait for a moment in time to start a clean slate, and what better time than a new and exciting date on the calendar.

We keep making promises to ourselves, keep failing and then starting again the next new year. Rinse repeat. We don’t need a therapist to tell us that this is a recipe for disaster.

What if the greatest gift we could give to ourselves, or indeed others, is the gift of hope. A true belief that things can get better.

You only have to open any social media app, watch or read the news, listen to the news bulletin as you’re driving along, to believe that the world is broken.

When we are born, we are encouraged. Encouraged to meet milestones and encouraged with love, excitement and reassurance to be able to do this. Most parents cherish these moments and no matter how small the step, it is celebrated with huge excitement. How else could we explain the ecstatic celebrations of potty training!

This early development, whilst often fraught with many worries, is joyous just for the sake of it.

Do we pass our emotions onto our children without thinking?

Throughout a child’s early years parents are everything and their emotions shape the child’s.

If a toddler stumbles, and the parent reaches out to protect them each time, does this help the child? Or does it relieve the worry of the parent?

Parents will obviously want to protect their children from dangers. However, if we protect them from every danger, and we share our anxieties too freely, then we are passing on anxieties that they don’t need.

When children start school, it’s a new challenge bringing with it a mix of emotions. As a teacher, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to parent’s anxieties as they drop their child off at school. Their child may be crying, but this soon stops when they see their new surroundings full of interesting things to explore.

In the past parents would have had to drop their child off at school and wait until the end of the school day to interrogate the teacher with questions. Now, schools can send messages or photos to share what their child is doing, what they’ve eaten for lunch and countless other updates throughout the day. Is this helping or feeding parents’ anxieties? Can’t we simply trust that everything will work out?

Are we telling our children too much?

As we try to reason with our child and explain a range of scenarios, are we giving them too much information that they are not yet able to process?

Is the news preparing our children for the real world, or making the world seem more scary than it actually is?

George Orwell’s Big Brother terrified me when I was at school. I didn’t read it at the time but we were all very aware of it. Everyone was talking about it. We scared each other with it, and we joked about it. The main idea we took from it was that the world was going to end in 1984 and so all this talk about doing well in our exams wasn’t really worth it. Or so we argued.

That book, or the messages we were receiving from the book was that there was no hope, No hope of a good future, even with good grades. Many of us felt that we might as well mess everything up if the world is going to end soon anyway.

We need to think about the world that our children are exposed to. If we are exposed to a world where it seems that there is no hope we risk giving up.

One of the best gifts that we can give to anyone is hope.

We could start by trusting that it will all work out. What if wherever you are right now is exactly where you need to be?

Acknowledge that there are dangers everywhere and put plans in place to mitigate as many as you can, but understand that wrapping our children in cotton wool and hiding them from every danger isn’t preparing them for the real world.

Create a safe space at home so that children can come to us with their fears and concerns. Validate their feelings without trying to fix everything. This shows that they can get through difficult feelings.

If you’re always eager to help, acknowledge that you trust that they will be able to work it out. This is so empowering.

If someone is struggling, instead of criticising or explaining where they’ve gone wrong, try to offer hope instead. Let them know you hear them and are willing to sit with them.

Find ways to acknowledge mistakes and make every effort to learn from them. Making mistakes is human, but repeating the same mistakes is a recipe for disaster.

Let youngsters know that while grades are important, there’s still a bright future ahead. Schools frequently cause our youngsters a great deal of anxiety. They continuously emphasise that grades are so important. Targets, targets, targets are the mantra in schools right from early years settings. Pupils are measured and tested and set targets from the moment they enter school.

Trust in yourself more.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re doing pretty well, but hope can offer new ways of thinking.

When we start to see hope, we start to see a way forward. We may not know the answer but we start believing there is a solution.

Give that gift of hope today.

How else can you offer hope?