As a mother, there are various roles, responsibilities and duties we have towards our children and our family. In managing the daily routines and getting through every day with alive, healthy and intact children can sometimes feel like a challenge in itself.
However, recently when discussing motherhood and mom life with other working mothers, it led me to the realisation that in finishing short term tasks, we often overlook the bigger picture. We give our kids happy and healthy childhoods, but we can fail in thinking about their character, their personality and their careers.
On the other hand, we often also overlook our own lives, be it our personal goals or professional goals, when taking care of our kids. This is why, in this article, the motivation is to give a gentle reminder to all the mothers out there, that life is more than getting the lunch packed or doing the dishes. By following this guide on goal setting, we can learn to plan our lives and our children’s lives, in order to make them more impactful on this world and its people with the help of mom goals.
What Does Mom Goals Mean?
Let’s start from the basics, what are even mom goals? Goal setting is the practice of designing an action plan on an established end result, which is preferably a desired state. Being a mother, when you conduct goal setting to improve yourself, your home and living style, these goals reflect the kind of life you strive to live. Your future end goal is reflective of the goals you set for now, therefore mom goals are meant for you to spend time on planning your dream life.
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Within the concept of mom goals, the first step is to understand how to manage your kids, so that you can constructively grow your skills. The idea is to find time for own health and own goals. Here is a summarised game plan to help you out:
- Plan baby’s naps to give yourself breaks when the baby is asleep
- Use the children’s school time to run errands and plan upcoming activities
- The time before bed is when children are most energetic, therefore use it as a family planning and goal setting time.
- After they have gone to bed, you can catch up on chores or plan out milestones for your goals.
Self-Care and Personal Development Goals for Moms
This aspect of mom goal is to stay focused on yourself, by taking out a few hours in planning activities for the family as well as time alone for yourself. This can include working on your mental health or meeting other moms, whatever helps you relax.
A huge difference between personal goals and family goals, is that in your own self-care, you focus only on things that make you happy, even if they are connected to your kids. To help you reach meaningful goals that help in personal development, here are a few considerations to make:
- Don’t Think Too Long Term
In life, it is normal that you will face new challenges with each new turning. This is why, pre-planning 10 or 15 years down the line is simply unrealistic because life will change by that time. This is why, set health goals or goals like more sleep that are short term and can provide benefits in the immediate.
- You Can Learn At Home
When setting goals, be mindful that smaller tasks that can be completed at home have as much importance as setting larger goals that can change your life. For instance, you can set goals of eating lunch at home to save extra money or invest in house clean services to spend more time with the kids. All these goals are centred around your home and can make your home life stress free.
- Mom Goals Focused on Raising Happy Kids
Like we discussed earlier, having self-care goals does not only mean setting goals for yourself. They can also include goals that make you happy, especially if they are making your children happy. For instance, you can opt for summer camps for the kids and they will have successfully joined sports activities, while you get time off or can focus on the new baby who is young. These kind of goals keep your kids happy and you stress free as well.
- Get Help for the Early Days
Having a new born can be a challenging time, this is why self-care goals can reflect ideas that make your life easier. For instance, you can set goals of chatting to a trusted friend about your challenges or become a part of the subscriber list for mental health and wellness,
The Benefits of SMART Goals
Within goal setting, there is one type of goal setting that can be productive and relevant at the same time. It stands for
S: Specific
M: Measurable
A: Achievable
R: Relevant
T: Time Bound
The purpose of SMART goals is to set meaningful goals that are super important to you, can make a big impact and at the same time setting stay to relevancy with your life and personality.
For example, if you have two toddlers, your SMART goal for them can be to follow co-parenting tactics, in which one parent is responsible for different aspects of the daily routine. Such goals breakdown roles into specific, measurable and time-bound activities, while at the same time provide you self-care time as well.
Goals for Stay At Home Moms Can Be Divided Into Five Areas
The next step to establish successful home mom goals is to understand the different areas, in which goals can be set. These five areas are:
- Financial Goals
Financial area of goal setting is related to money matters. To set stay to your monthly budget, financial goals for moms can help cut costs and save you from struggle with spending.
- Educational Goals
The second area is education. As moms, our goals can be to improve children’s education by giving enough time to their homework or like most people, working on your own knowledge and education.
- Health Goals
These goals are set with the hope that you can sustain healthy diet and lifestyle to overcome any diseases as well as manage any mental health illnesses is an efficient manner. In difficult times, health goals can be collaborated with family life to work on health goals together.
- Spiritual Goals
By putting emphasis on spiritual goals, you work on your mental wellbeing and spiritual values. To save money is a highly objective approach to life, but spiritual goals can help you in regards to personal development and make you more comfortable with your circumstances and surroundings.
- Personal Goals
Finally, the area of personal goals as mom goals is a highly centred approach and some might even call it selfish. However, if there is anything that I have learned about parenting, it is that taking time out for yourself is better in the long term for family life.
So, instead of focusing on saving money or other family goals, work on your own wellbeing. This can be to earn money on your own, taking a course, meeting friends or even to exercise. Irrespective of the kind of goal, remember that:
It’s important for moms to contribute to their own personal growth!
What Kids of Goals Should Moms Set?
Contrary to the topic of personal goals, you can also set goals with your kids to spend more time with them. As part of the new year plans, sit down with your kids and plan on activities that can be done together, and help all of you grow as a family. This can include big goals that focus on career or education, while personal goals like exercise, healthy lifestyle or to accomplish a new skill can be set as well.
However, when setting goals with the kids, the foremost thing to realise is that your kids must be interested in the goal as much as you are. You can achieve this, by planning goals with them and asking for their opinion on these goals as well.
One way to do so is by:
Assessing Stay at Home Mom Goals to Set
To assess the feasibility of your goals, plan a brainstorm session with your kids, share your ideas with them, ask for their opinion and mould the goals to reflect their interests as well. The end result will help you accomplish better communication with your kids and helping them achieve their dreams.
25 Powerful Mom Goals to Add to Your List
Now that we have an idea about home mom goals and parenting goals for mothers, here is a list of few goals that mothers can set for themselves in the New Year. To make the goals easier to implement, we have divided them into three areas:
Goals with the Kids
- Spending More Time with Kids
As parents, time always seems to be going too fast and before you know it, your kids will be leaving for college. This is why, instead of focusing on big goals, form goals to spend with your kids as well.
- Goal Setting
To spend more time with kids, an example for an activity is to conduct goal setting sessions. Call a family meeting and invite friends as well, with the intention of reflecting on your past and developing your future.
- Household chart for all
Parents can also set goals to increase communication. Household chart is an effective way of tracking your activities and communicating with others about your progress
- Time to declutter
Often at night, when the kids have gone to bed and you take a look at your house, everything feels cluttered. This is why, a good mom goal is to set a time for your children to declutter toys, pencils, pens, colours etc.
- Break from social media
In one study the objective had been to how much time we spend on social media. The study found on an average, each person spends upwards of 2 hours every day scrolling through their feed. In such a scenario, we overlook our body health or mental wellness, and seek gratification from social media. Inadvertently, we teach our kids the same lessons. So, a good mom goal for your kids is to rest from mobile phones and put a lock on social media apps.
- Spend Short Quality Moments Together
Another mom goal is to make moments out of mundane days. For instance, fill more water in the swimming pool and turn a boring summer day into fun. As a result, you spend hours with your children having fun and in those hours, you make lasting memories.
- No yelling challenge
When managing toddlers, asking them to behave can be tricky. So, a mom goal can be to use it as a challenge with a reward in the form of a toffee or chocolate. Come up with new ideas on like no yelling challenge and turn learning into fun.
- Family movie night
An easy way to have fun with the family is movie night. Before sleep time, ask your child to pick a movie or pick one for them, and then spend your night watching a movie.
- Being grateful
As parents, we must teach our kids to be grateful of what they have and understand their privilege. To do so, family activities can be conducted to focus on their accomplishments from the week, take a course along their toys, health and other things, to make them realise that they must be thankful for a lot of their stuff.
- Family puzzle night
Another fun mom goal is to arrange a puzzle night with the family. Before the holidays, you can buy a Christmas themed puzzle, then spend hours doing the puzzle. Your children will be happy to make a puzzle and they can be persuaded to take time off their screens.
Goals for Yourself
- Making Money
If you want to earn money as a home mom goal, then look for freelancing activities on the internet and pursue your goal. As a freelancer, your work time can be adjusted with parenting tasks, and allows more flexibility.
- Taking a Course
To try out something new, you can take a course in any activity that is of interest to you. You can take an exercise course, to learn more about your body or financial course to learn tips for saving money.
- Balancing Family and Work Life
When parenting, we can overlook our need to maintain balance between our professional and personal. As a mom goal, you can rest more, if you achieve the balance between family and work. So, set yourself the goal of balance in your life and work towards achieving it.
- Dinner out
Pick out any day in the week and book a restaurant to spend one-on-one time with your partner. Post dinner, your will feel more connected and will learn to focus on your relationship with your partner away from the children.
- Journaling
A good home moms goal is to reflect on your life, your achievements, losses and everything else. It gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes and plan ahead.
- Pick a book
That time before bed, when you are about to sleep nut aren’t ready to go to sleep, is perfect for reading a book. It can help you from endlessly scrolling and improve the quality of your sleep.
- Self-care session
If you feel like you need a break from the chores and vomits, then book a salon or spa day for yourself. If that’s not possible, then take out a few hours and give yourself a manicure/pedicure at home.
- Something for yourself once every week
A good way of keeping yourself sane through the various responsibilities as a mother, is to do something once every week just for yourself. This can be a self-care session or you can watch a movie or buy something nice, whatever makes you happy.
- Set an exercise routine
To set goals for your health and achieve them, the best strategy is to include them in your routine. Every other day, after school runs, take out time for exercise. Whether it is 15 minutes or an hour, get your body moving.
- Set healthy dinner plans
To save money, an effective plan is to make healthy meals at home and consume home cooked food. Your parenting will then also help your kids develop healthy habits and you can achieve your goal body as well.
Goals for the Entire Family
- Committing to mental wellness
An activity to do with the entire family is to work on mental health. You can choose to journal or conduct heart-to-heart conversations, but work on your mental health and do it as a family.
- Being active
The chances of exercising more is when you have your partner or your kids also being involved.
- Collaborating on household chores
Divide chores to kids and husband, and then work on them together. This will help your kids develop skills and you will get to rest.
- Learning a new language
Learning a new language is an effective way to spend more time with the kids in a constructive manner
- Saving for a trip
Saving money can be a team task, when you tell your kids that it is for a holiday or to buy something nice.
Why Setting Mom Goals Can Change Your Life
Now that we know what kind of mom goals can be set to improve family life and to reach personal or professional aspirations, it is time to take a look at the justification for doing it. Goal setting and milestones for achieving an end result is commonly told in professional and career oriented thinking, however we do not consider these things in our personal lives. However, below is a list of exactly why we should be following the same format of goal setting and milestones of achievement in our personal lives as well.
- It Keeps Us in Check
A goal setting approach to mom goals will help you keep yourself in check. Let’s take two examples of taking time out to journal for mental wellbeing. In one scenario, you have set aside a time slot from 10pm to journal for 30 minutes and in the second scenario you have no plans on how to journal but you want to do it. Out of these two situations, it is obvious that the first one will get more journaling done, simply because they have a goal and a pathway to reach it.
- Keeps Us Focused
Often in life, we forget what our inherent interests are from our personal life. This is why, when you set goals, they can act as reminders that this is what you want to do and this is what makes you happy.
A goal, therefore then essentially serves the purpose of keeping yourself accountable towards your action and reminding yourself that working on your goals will result in a well spent life.
- Setting Goals Gives Moms Focus and Drive
One benefit in particular of mom goals is that it keeps you focused. To prove this, one research can be included, in which participants were assigned tasks in two ways. In one, the participants were tracked and their milestones were recorded, while the other group were only told to achieve the task, without a timeframe or justification for why it should be done. The group which were given a plan through goal setting proved to be more motivated and involved throughout the entire process.
Apply this to your own life and it is clear that setting goals gives you a clear vision, which keeps you focused and accounts for motivation to get the job done. Other benefits of mom goals are:
- Stay At Home Mom Goals Help Keep Your Household Organized
- They Can Structure Their Days and Focus On Goals That Matter
- Stay At Home Moms Have Time to Think About What They Want
The bottom line after this whole discussion is that if you are a mother, then you have as much right to evaluate your life and take steps to improve it with the help of mom goals. Keep yourself focused on your kids, your family or you own personal goals. Irrespective, it is critical to constantly work on improving your life and surroundings, and that is the only way we can become better versions of ourselves in the long run.
