Empower Your Child With Vision Boards

A daily practice of setting intentions (as described in the June 23 posting) will lay the groundwork to help your child focus on the core desires that are behind desiring specific things. Parents are often reluctant to encourage children to visualize the manifestation of things. In workshops for creating vision boards with children, I have seen parents try to discourage their youngsters from putting pictures of desired things on their boards. But there is no need to resist a child’s desire for things. There is nothing wrong with desiring things. The important thing to learn is to connect our desire for things with the core desires behind them so that we can visualize what we want while being open to receiving it or something better.

For example, let’s say a child has a desire for a new bike. We can honor that desire and also ask the child, “Why do you want to have a new bike? What feeling or experience do you think having a new bike will create for you?” To those questions, you might get answers such as, “I will feel happy” or “It will be fun.” Now you’ve gotten to the core desires. So the vision board can have the words “Happiness” and “Fun” on it, with pictures of new bikes and anything else the child thinks may create the experience of happiness and fun. Then, on the bottom of the vision board can be written something such as, “I gratefully receive this or something better.”

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that the universal imagination is much bigger than my individual imagination. How wonderful it would be to learn that at an early age! You can give your child the opportunity to learn this by helping him/her to create vision boards in this way. Then, encourage your child to be on the lookout for surprising ways that happiness and fun may show up. And to make the experience even more powerful, ask your child to share, at the end of each day, any experiences of happiness and fun that were manifested that day. How marvelous it will be for your child to grow up empowered to recognize ALL the abundance that shows up, rather than missing it because it doesn’t look the way they expected it to.