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Wellness Wednesday for July 16, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm a huge supporter of it in moderation and conjunction with sincere appreciation and encouragement. I thank my kids for everything they do to help out, I let them know what teasing is and how to respond to it. If I'm shaming them for lack of ability, it's only because I know they can.

It's far too critical a tool in building a high-trust family to leave behind. Shouldn't a kid be at least a little ashamed of screaming or slamming the door to wake up a sibling? Wasting food they asked for and had someone prepare? Talking over someone telling a story?

I feel like we deal with way less BS than other parents because we are comfortable having calm corrective conversations with young kids. Maybe that's rose-colored glasses, maybe it'll be the wrong play long term, but right now it feels like a cheat code.