Party of Five: Parenting in the Next Generation

Yesterday morning, I woke up with an epiphany.

I'd had a dream.

That dream was directly tied to the fact that I constantly find myself saying to the kids....

"Change your attitude!"

I say that because I want the kids to understand that they are in control of their own attitudes, that even if bad things happen to them, the way they react to that is within their complete control.

In my dream, I was contemplating how I could get the kids to actually visualize that, at any given moment, they are selecting an attitude from a random list of any number of attitudes, and that they could feasibly decide to select a better attitude from that list.

I woke up having an ah-ha moment.

My first plan was to build an iPad app. I found a free app creator and got to work. I just wanted something simple, a literal list of "attitudes" from which to select.

I had the kids help me with the list, coming up with both positive and negative attitudes.

Building the app

A preview of our app during construction phase

Here's where I ran into a snag. Turns out, you have to pay the App Store $99 in order to get a developer's license to be able to upload. I love my kids, and I like this idea, but not a hundred dollars worth.

I thought I'd be able to create a personal app, and found some tutorials for doing just that on jailbroken iPhones, but I wasn't about to go that route.

So, we re-thought our plan. Instead of an app, I just created a second page on this blog titled Change Your Attitude! that has the same code as my app.

Then we created an icon on the home page of the iPad that links directly to the Change Your Attitude page.

Due to the length of the name, the iPad icon shortens its name to Change....itude.

Thus, Travis and I have lovingly nicknamed this program Changeitude.