Imaginif...the spirit of Christmas lasted.

Doing things differently can make the difference between child terror and child safety. Family can be a tough place for a child to survive, even if a family is relatively functional. Mortgage stress, the usual arguments over toilet seat lids and competing demands across the life span development can make for some fiery family times.

Then there’s those who live their life to a social prescription that says good Mums and Dads rear their children in the time tested ways of suburbia. Problem – the time tested ways of suburbia have produced high rates of child abuse and high rates of marriage breakdown. How about we all start to do things differently then: let’s do things that take the pressure off and lessen the domestic terror that many 21st century children grow up with.

Over at Planning with Kids, the Planning contingency Queen herself has e-published a fantastic list of doing things differently in the interests of child safety and parental sanity: Free E-book – Planning With Kids Top 100 Tips, Volume 1. Full of tidbits to sooth the family soul rather than encourage domestic stress and child abuse, the sensible top 100 tips reminded me of one of my most successful family rituals of difference:

My second husband left me. I was devastated. I cried every day for two years; not just a hankie cry you understand, I regularly used a towel to sob my heart into. Our life was in shatters. The kids and I moved town, I went back to work for the Government and life sucked worse than a sour bug on a lemon.

Confused and struggling, we desperately sought for new family meaning and for a reason to all get out of bed in the morning. Being candle lovers (some have accused us of suburban pyromania) we wondered how we could do candles differently.  In our old family life when husband/Dad was around, we always had night time candles and huge bonfires where we watched and laughed as the fire fairies danced upward toward the moon. We wanted, and needed, something different now; something that said “this is our new family and we are okay.”

Together we decadently opted to have breakfast by candlelight – every morning. The kids found it hilarious – who has breakfast by candlelight – is it allowed – is it against the law to light candles in the daylight – let’s do it! Every morning for a good few years, we breakfasted with two taper candles on centre tray. We began talking together again, planning life, smiling, laughing and happily teasing each other. We healed thanks to the power of doing something differently.

As family life got easier, so too did every one’s conviction to do things differently when the going gets tough.

What’s your story about doing things differently and saving your children from the horribleness of life’s occurrences?