Family vision boards for the new year

Kick off the new year with a family-friendly art project that will encourage your children to dream big. Break out the children’s scissors and glue sticks, and put the magazines cluttering your house to good use.

Family goals

Adults set resolutions and businesses set annual goals. So what can families do to invite abundance into the year ahead?

Studies have shown the power of visualization over and over again. An exercise psychologist found that a group of participants who completed virtual workouts in their heads increased muscle strength by almost half as much as the participants who actually went to the gym (13.5 percent versus 30 percent).

Say your family wants to take a beach vacation. Research shows that it’s more likely to happen if you visualize as well as act (i.e. research and save). But visualization is a somewhat abstract concept for children to grasp.

Enter the vision board

Depending on the ages of your children, you can make individual boards or one shared family board.

A vision board lends a concrete manifestation to dreams. Hang it where you see it often and the collages will serve as reminders and incentive — beaches and sandcastles and palm trees waving out of the corner of your eye.

The promise of possibility

This project can last an afternoon or a week or a month. We dedicate one corner of our home to the cause, slowly choosing our favorite pictures over the course of several weeks. It’s something my whole family loves to come back to. We don’t rush it. We have no deadlines.

There are also no rules as to what the vision board can or cannot contain. Include any picture that resonates. Don’t try to direct your children or understand why you want to cut out a picture of a well-dressed woman on a horse.

Creating the board

After gathering a healthy stack of pictures and words, arrange them on a large sheet of construction paper or poster board. If you have more images than you can fit, edit first, then glue and admire your creation.

The more magazines you have, the more delights you can depict. Ask your friends for old issues, post on a neighborhood information board and browse the thrift shops. There are more magazines out there than you could possibly use, the trick is finding them.

And there is more beauty than we could possibly digest in a year — the trick is attracting it. The vision board serves as the lighthouse, alerting and guiding our minds to possibility.

You can follow any theme or no theme at all. I have vision boards for my dream house, my dream wardrobe, my dream yoga practice and my dream life. When I look at them, I get all warm and fuzzy on the inside. I hope you and your children feel the same.

Image credit: Lucy Miller Robinson

More about inspiration and dreams

Dream on: How daydreams make your kids smarter
How to create a vision board
Chasing the Dream: You need a dream board