Writing Letters to Your Child

In our birthday traditions book, one of the tradition ideas is to write a letter to your child on each birthday. Then 21 days before her 21st birthday, start mailing the letters, one everyday.

Writing letters can feel intimidating in today's world of quick emails and instant messaging. But for the same reason the printed books will not be extinct, letters written from people we love will have a special place in our hearts. If you've never written a letter to your child, here are some tips and ideas to get you started.

Start with a Positive Attitude - Writing a letter to your child or a loved one is not something you have to do. It's something you get to do. It's a gift you have the privilege to give, a means of expressing what's inside your heart on a written page.

A short note is still a letter - When we think of 'letter writing', most of us think of a full page of hand-written prose written in ink on a piece of crisp paper. How about a lunch box note, how about a one-paragraph journal entry, a card…

Choose the medium that's most natural to you - I write my letters to my daughter in a blank journal. She's 9 now and I'm on my second journal. Many moms I know choose fill-in-the-section books like The Mommy Journal. One father writes a blog of letters to her daughter Libby, or another busy mom I know prints her emails to and from her daughter and slips them into plastic sleeves in binders. Find something that fits in your lifestyle or it won't be sustainable.

Make it a tradition - Many moms tell me that the time between christmas and New Year is conducive to reflection, sense of gratitude, family togetherness - and that makes it a good time to write a letter to each of your child. Or make it a tradition to write at the start of a school year, or on her birthday. The idea is to establish a ritual to remind us to sit down and share our heart in print.

Get others to write too - Encourage grandparents to write, encourage your child to write back, save all these letters, they are a piece of history that makes your child the adult he will be. I take my child's journal when we travel on vacations. On August 17, 2001, there's a letter a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 pilot wrote to my son because I asked. A bunch of pages later, there's a letter from the first violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra written after their performance with the children's orchestra which my son played in. All I did was open the journal to a blank page, have a pen ready, and ask at a good time.

Write a letter from your dog - In the book, Lunch Box Letters the author talked about how when his daughter was at camp, he would write letters to her in the "voice" and "paw-writing" of her dog, Dynamite. It would be full of humor recounting events from the mindset of a four-footed animal and her daughter got a lot of giggles from them. Many years later when her daughter was in college she said how she longed for more letters from Dynamite.

I hope you've been inspired to write a letter today, in whatever form, whatever medium, whatever length. Leave a trail of your thoughts today to slip into your children's tomorrows.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

When an old man dies, it is a whole library which burns. ~African proverb