Mommy and Me Online Projects
Raising kids in this digital age means parents have a whole new set of challenges to deal with that they themselves didn’t experience growing up as millenials. These days, it’s important to monitor your child’s online activity to make sure she’s safe. Filtering content to keep it appropriate for your child, limiting screen time and staying involved can sometimes end up causing a riff between a child and mother if the child feels like the parent is just being difficult.
One great way moms can connect with their kids in a way that doesn’t make them feel policed is by getting involved in a collaborative online project. Encouraging your daughter to use the internet for the right things is a positive way to interact with her while also creating a bond. If you’re both working on something together, she’ll feel like you’re her partner instead of her always looking at you like the party pooper. Here are a few great mommy and me online projects that you two can enjoy and learn from.
Starting a Blog
What do you and your little one love to talk about? Do you both love movies? Are you fashion aficionadas? Maybe your little one has an interest in environmentalism. If you two bond over something, consider starting a blog together! These days, there is a community and an audience for everyone. This is an especially great idea for moms of writers. Working on a blog together means you’ll be encouraging your daughter to practice her writing skills on a consistent basis. With the consistency in practice, she’ll develop a style, tone and voice of her own - three very important qualities in great writers. She’ll also see what it looks like to write and maintain her own blog - a skill that is highly in demand now and will likely continue to grow. She’ll also see the rewards of seeing her work published, seeing an audience form around her words and see a growth in blog page traffic - all positive teaching moments for your young daughter.
Start a Storytelling Youtube Channel
If your daughter is always ready to tell stories, spices them up with entertaining details, grabs and keeps her listeners’ attention, and has the ability to make people laugh, cry and everything in-between - then a storytelling Youtube Channel is the perfect mother-daughter project. Encourage her to keep working on her story-telling. It’s a skill many adults have a hard time with these days but if you have the knack for it - it can be gold. You can take on the role of a producer and director, giving her prompts if she needs them and filming her telling them; you can get fancy and add graphics to make it a narration voiceover, or you can both join in and tag team the storytelling. Stay consistent and watch your channel grow over time. You’ll bond over storytelling and working on this project together while simultaneously teaching her about follow-through and giving her an asset she will be able to leverage as she gets older. Youtube is a platform that allows you to make money, so imagine starting this project when your daughter is very young; as you build the channel, you will no doubt begin gaining followers. By the time she is a teenager, there is a high possibility that you’ll already have helped her create her very own income stream.
Learning a New Language
Learning something new together is one of the very best bonding experiences you can have. Find out if there are any languages you and your daughter are both interested in learning. Then, take on the challenge and begin your journey. You can either sign up for formal classes, in-person or online, or you can start small with apps like Duo Lingo. There are a ton of online resources like youtubers that dedicate their channel to teaching their language. Add some shows in your target language to your watch list. Once you’re at a level when you can start picking out words, watch the show with the subtitles IN your target language so you can match what you’re hearing to what the words really are. Then make a spreadsheet of the words you hear and see that are new. Your vocabulary will start growing this way. Lastly, there are apps dedicated to connecting you with other people who speak your target language. Apps like Tandem allow you to chat with them through text, phone calls or Facetime. When you send messages in Tandem to the person you’re chatting with, they can make edits to your text so you can see where corrections need to be made.
Learning a new language together will give you both a new life skill and may even lead to some new travel destination goals. You’ll also have a wonderful bonding experience as you both learn together, encourage each other, motivate each other and hold each other accountable.
Building a Home Business Together
Over the past few years, there have been some incredible stories of very young girls who become entrepreneurs. We’ve seen girls launching their own lemonade brands and eventually getting distributed in major store chains, we’ve seen young girls launch their own production companies, author books, launch candle companies and more. Despite their age, these kids have leveraged the support of their family, what they know and the ability to find out what they don’t in today’s digital age. Starting a home business with your daughter gives her a huge head start in life. If you know a little about starting a business, then you’ll be sharing your knowledge with her and putting it to the test. If you don’t, you can both embark on the journey of the entrepreneur and learn together. This sets an example to your daughter that no matter who you are and what you know or don’t, you can learn what you need to learn and make it happen either way. She’ll learn lifelong skills like how to create and manage a business, how to create streams of income for herself and more. Even beyond skills, she’ll develop valuable traits that will become a core part of her character; commitment, follow-through, determination, resilience, resourcefulness, and so much more. When she gets older she’ll be ready to take on anything and she’ll be so grateful for pushing her in this direction.
