Lindsey's Substack

I Choose to Like Things

Lindsey Maestas — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:59:55 GMT

In a world filled with constant distractions, negative news cycles, and everyday challenges, it’s all too easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of stress and negativity.

So how do we regain control of our emotions and choose a brighter outlook on life?

Think about it.

How often do we find ourselves dwelling on the things that go wrong or the obstacles that stand in our way?

It’s so easy to get caught up in what’s wrong, what’s missing, or what we wish were different. But we get one life, y’all. One life that God has graciously given us.

So many of us are living in things we once prayed for, and somehow we still find reasons to feel discontent.

We’re human. Of course we do.

But sometimes we need to look around and remember just how much goodness is already here.

Positivity is contagious and flows out and onto our homes. As mamas, we want to be the best example to our little ones. When we choose positivity, it then uplifts our kids, which creates a ripple effect of joy.

When we choose to notice what is good, it changes the way we show up:

We complain less.

We become easier to be around.

We encourage people more.

We say thank you.

We check on the friend who has been quiet.

We stop assuming the worst. We make our homes feel lighter. We become more generous with our words.

Gratitude does not mean ignoring what is hard. It just means refusing to let what is hard become the only thing we can see.

So what are some simple ways you can think positively?

Choose to like things and find the things that you like.

(It’s pretty simple when you think of it this way, but I know it’s easier said than done!)

It’s a practice that has genuinely made my life abundantly sweeter.

For example:

I’m at a restaurant, and the food is just “okay” and service is slow.

While it’s definitely easier to get in my head and pick things apart, instead, I choose to find the thing that I do love. I search for something in the restaurant that makes me happy and set my focus there, I focus on a flavor that I do enjoy, and that becomes my experience.

I have very few negative feelings about anywhere I’ve been because this is a practice that helps me to find joy.
When I’m stuck in traffic, I could slam the steering wheel, honk and swerve through lanes, but I know that will only decrease my joy.

So I choose to see it as a time of rest, a time to talk to God and pray for my heart and the people I love, and to choose thankfulness for a moment of reprieve. ⁣
When I’m grabbing a coffee and see a pretty street, I go out of my way to drive through it, to admire the trees, flowers and pretty houses while listening to music that I love. ⁣
When someone is rude to me, I choose to believe that they’ve had a hard day or that they are hurting, and even if I’m annoyed, I force myself to pray for them.⁣
Philippians 4:8 says, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable… think about such things…and the God of peace will be with you.”

This verse is so powerful to me because it says that once we focus on the good and lovely, then we will experience the peace of God.

We are responsible for our thought life and that directly impacts our relatonship with Jesus and our peace.

Some other ways to find joy in your day-to-day:

Do one small thing that makes your environment feel better. Make the bed, light a candle, clean the kitchen, open the windows.
Call someone who makes you feel like yourself. Sometimes you just need real, human connection that doesn’t come from your screens.
Make something. Cook, bake, write, garden, paint, or rearrange a room. Creating can help remind you who you are.
Serve someone else. Bring coffee to a friend, send an encouraging text, help a neighbor. Joy often grows when we get outside of ourselves.
Notice what is still good. You don’t need to deny what hurts. Life is freaking hard. But finding the good helps to keep pain from becoming the only thing you can see or feel.
Give yourself something small to look forward to. A favorite meal, a movie night, a weekend plan, a morning coffee somewhere you love.
Get outside and move your body. A walk, sunlight, fresh air, even ten minutes can interrupt the heaviness and literally turn your entire day around.
Worship before your feelings catch up. Put on music, pray honestly, or read a Psalm out loud. Sometimes joy starts as an act of faith before it becomes an emotion.
Do something playful. Play cards with your kids, dance in the kitchen, throw a football, watch something funny.
Let yourself enjoy something without guilt. Hard seasons do not require constant sadness to prove they matter.

I love joy. I love it enough that I choose to seek it out, even on the days it feels impossible.

I thrive off of beautiful things, sweet relationships, and exciting adventures. And while I share a whole lot about my mess on here and on the podcast, I also have a lot of joy in my life that I fight to find.⁣
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I really do believe that when we look for the bad or choose to see patterns of negative things, we will absolutely see more of it. I see my boys with so much light, love, and passion and believe that cynics are made, not born. ⁣
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I want to raise my boys to find joy in the smallest things and the beautiful life that Jesus has given us.

What is one way that you seek out joy on an average or hard day?
Comment and encourage others!

5 Ways to Raise Children Who Can Tolerate Boredom

Lindsey Maestas — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:06:07 GMT

It wasn’t too many years ago that I realized my boys (now ages 8 and 11) actually had no idea how to be bored.

”Mom, I’m bored,” they would whine over and over again. It was my immediate reaction to start scanning the room for options or solutions.

I’d encourage them to grab their bike. I’d text one of their friend’s moms to see if they were available. I’d go outside with them and play basketball. I’d essentially give them 25 ideas. But then then they’d still respond with, “nooo, that’s boring!”

Since that day, I have learned a lot about the importance of boredom. I have come to realize that if I solve boredom for my children every single time they experience it, they never have to learn how to solve it themselves.

And I desperately want them to learn.

I have become increasingly convinced that the ability to tolerate boredom may be one of the most underrated skills we can give our children in a world specifically designed to ensure that they never feel it.

There’s always something available: another video (I am so anti-15-second-videos, I cannot begin to tell you), another level to reach, another game update, another notification, another person across the world doing something more entertaining than whatever is happening inside of the living room you’re all currently in.

Our children have access to more stimulation in an afternoon than many of us had during entire weeks of our childhood. I’m not saying that we should romanticize the 90s as though everything was healthier and every childhood was wonderful. From the stories I’ve heard, many of you were locked outside for most of your life with workaholic parents, and that isn’t great, either. There’s a balance.

However, we did experience things that our children in this generation have far less access to:

Empty space.

We could sit in cars without watching screens.
We could wait in restaurants without tablets.
We stood in grocery-store lines without phones.
We stared out windows.
We wandered around outside.
We made up completely ridiculous games because there was literally nothing else to do.
We used our imagination.

Boredom eventually forced us into creativity. It also pushed us toward discovering our gifts and talents.

This is the childhood I’m trying to preserve pieces of for my boys. Let me be very clear: I am not doing this perfectly. Sutton and Saxon play Minecraft far more than I would like and have watched nearly every cartoon movie known to man. We’re working at it every day. And also, I don’t believe that technology is inherently evil; it can be useful, educational, creative and fun, but all in moderation.

But the issue is what the screen is replacing. It is the possibility that we’re raising children who become deeply uncomfortable once life stops entertaining them. They’ve never learned how to just sit with themselves.

Boredom is Not an Emergency

There is actually emerging research around children’s ability to experience and respond to boredom.

A 2024 study of children ages four to six examined what researchers call ‘trait boredom’, or the tendency to experience boredom frequently and struggle with it. The results showed that children who didn’t experience boredom often had a much more difficult time regulating themselves.

Children need opportunities to practice managing uncomfortable internal states like frustration, waiting, disappointment, and restlessness. The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically warns against routinely using screens to calm children when they’re frustrated, sad, or bored. Why? Because those uncomfortable moments are opportunities for children to practice regulating themselves with support. If a screen consistently removes the discomfort immediately, the child gets fewer opportunities to develop those skills.

So what do we do?

Let Them Participate In Your Actual Life

One of my favorite books, Hunt, Gather, Parent, discusses how modern parenting creates unnecessary stress and conflict by making the child the center of attention, whereas in other cultures, children are raised calmly and cooperatively by naturally integrating them into the shared, daily life of the family community.

It encourages the TEAM method:

Togetherness: living life alongside your children rather than entertaining them
Encouragement: acknowledging a child’s helpful contributions simply and naturally, avoiding excessive external praise that can undermine intrinsic motivation to help
Autonomy: trusting children to govern their own actions, make choices, and learn from natural consequences without micromanagement
Minimal Interference: stepping back, talking less, and avoiding long, escalating arguments or nagging during moments of misbehavior.

Simply put, if they’re bored while you’re cooking dinner, they can help cook.
If they’re bored while you are cleaning, they can fold towels.
If they’re bored while you are gardening, they can come outside.
If they don’t want to help, they are welcome to find something else to do.

For most of human history, children participated in the life of the home. They learned by being near their parents. That is what I desire to continue doing as I raise my two boys.

I love this reminder in Deuteronomy 6: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

It’s relatable to me in that we need both word and action to raise our children in the way that they should go. We live out our faith in God, our relationships with others, and the excellence in which we do all things.

They experience that by living life alongside of us.

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Stop Answering Boredom Immediately

One of the simplest things we can do is to stop reacting the second our kids are bored.

One phrase I use often is, “I love you, but your boredom is not my concern. You are responsible to find something to do.”

You can also say, “It’s okay to be bored” or “You’ll think of something”. And at first, y’all, they’re going to hate that. They will absolutely hate it, especially if they’re used to being their ‘cruise director’ and providing every activity. They will complain, wander around, whine, and repeatedly tell you how bored they are.

That’s okay. Let them. You don’t have to make their discomfort disappear. Allow them to be bored. They will eventually find something to do.

Give Them Fewer Options

If your children genuinely struggle to initiate play, you can help them without becoming responsible for entertaining them.

Stick to three categories: You can ride your bike, read for 30 minutes, or bake something". And that’s all you need to give them.

It obviously also helps to create an environment in which independent play is not difficult to figure out. Keep your art supplies accessible, leave books out where they can easily grab them, have balls, bikes, legos, puzzles, dolls, dress-up clothes, cards, board games, chess sets, baking ingredients, or building materials available.

If they refuse to do any of these things or continue to complain, I have a short list of chores or physical exercises that my boys will be required to choose from if they can’t find something to do on their own.

Resist the Urge to Fill Every Silence

Our culture has come to fill silence immediately because noise is so easily accessible to us. We listen to music in the car, play a podcast on our walk, look at phones will we sit and wait for literally anything, and keep the T.V. on in the background.

But silence and stillness are a gift that we often take for granted.

Some of the most important moments in scripture happen in quiet places. Jesus withdrew to pray, Elijah encountered God not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a gentle whisper, the Psalms repeatedly call us to stillness, reflection, and meditation.

If our children never experience quiet, how can they learn that quiet is not something to be escaped?

This thought has convicted me so many different times. I cannot honestly and reasonably tell my boys that they don’t need external stimulation while checking my phone every ten minutes.

They learn from what we act on and what we normalize.

Don’t Confuse Happiness with Good Parenting

I love my boys so much, as you love your own children, so this one is tough for me. I want them to be happy. I want their life to be full and joyful and exciting, so when they are disappointed with me or my parenting, it makes me sad. But Hebrews 12:11 reminds us that discipline “seems painful rather than pleasant” in the moment, but later it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace.

Parenting is full of choices our children may not appreciate until they are much older.

Sometimes our love is displayed when we create joy, other times it’s when we refuse to remove every difficulty from their lives. Our job is not to simply give our children a happy childhood, but to help build and shape them into adults who can wait, who can create, who can tolerate discomfort, who know how to be truly present with other humans, who know how to participate in a family instead of constantly needing to be entertained.

We get to be parents who give them something better than constant entertainment. We are teaching them how to be fully alive in an ordinary, beautiful, God-given life.

Don’t forget to subscribe for more family-focused content to help you feel less alone in the most challenging moments of life and parenthood.

When Closure Doesn’t Come

Lindsey Maestas — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:39:24 GMT

As a child, I expected a lot of things to change when I became an adult.

I knew life would get more complicated. I knew there would be bills and responsibilities and decisions that I wouldn’t feel ready to make.

What I didn’t expect was how much adulthood would involve learning how to survive changing relationships, complicated people, and versions of l…

Coming soon

Lindsey Maestas — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:52:10 GMT

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