Living With Live Wires

In general, a family legacy, includes….

The culmination of your history of experiences as a family. It includes your life experiences, ways of relating to each other, reactions to positive and negative events, family traditions and rituals, the family collective attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. It even includes your genetic code.

We all have a family culture and we pass down a family legacy to our children whether we are conscious of it or not. It forms the foundation to how we see ourselves and how we live our lives.  And it creates the filter for how we behave in relationships and how we feel about our lives.

As we mature and grow, we add to and change what we experienced growing up and create our own family culture, which then becomes the legacy to our kids.

It is possible for anyone who is motivated, to more consciously create one’s own family’s legacy.

What I will share with you in the course of these posts is a small portion of how I am creating a family legacy as it relates to a lifestyle of lifelong learning.

As I began to consider what I wanted for our family legacy, I hoped for my children, most of all, to pursue a life of meaning and passion as they choose what they want to do. But in the context of pursuing their passion, I hoped to instill and inspire ways to develop their talents in an environment of creativity and adventure.

In the midst of the constant information overload involved in their education, I chose three guiding principles to keep in the forefront of my mind as we go through our days together – as a guide to help me focus and keep priorities in mind:

I chose Mastery, Creativity and Adventure.

I explore each one in more depth in future posts.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]