A Simple Way to Create a Lasting Legacy

What will your kids still have from you when you’re no longer there to guide them?

So many of us spend years chasing accomplishments, careers, and milestones.  We think we know what success looks like. But when you slow down and really think about it those aren’t the things your children will treasure most.

Here’s the hard truth:

 If you don’t intentionally capture your stories they will disappear.

Busy parents often assume journaling takes too much time, requires great writing skills, or just isn’t important enough to prioritize. So we put it off.

But the cost of “someday” is huge for you and for your kids.

Today, we’re sharing simple, realistic solutions that makes journaling doable in minutes a day, even for the busiest families, and how this small practice can become one of the greatest gifts you ever leave behind.

✅ BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• How 5–10 minutes of journaling can improve your mental health, clarity, and stress levels right now
• Easy, practical journaling methods that work for busy parents (voice memos, planners, apps, or pen & paper)
• How capturing your stories creates a lasting legacy that strengthens your children’s identity, resilience, and connection for generations

Easily improve your intentional parenting efforts at mealtime with our FREE resource, Dinner Conversation Starters.

Download our FREE resource, 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids, created for busy parents like you who need easy, actionable ways to have daily meaningful connections with their kids in less than a minute!

Parenting Questions? Email us at parentsmakingtime@gmail.com (Please note, your question may be featured on the show).

For parenting inspiration, time management ideas, and encouragement for families, follow the hosts' individual accounts:

Anthony Craiker: Instagram | LinkedIn

Jennifer Craiker: Instagram

Interested in joining our free online parenting community? Send us a DM to receive an invite!

Enjoy the show? Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify

Transcript

Parents Making Time Ep. 22

[00:00:00]

Jennifer: Hey everybody. Before we get started today, we wanted to remind you of a free resource we have for you on our website. We have created a list of dinner conversation starters that we wanna share with you to help you have better conversations with your kids over dinner. You can get that by going to parents making time.com/dinner conversations.

Go there now so that you can start having those great conversations. 

Anthony: I've been thinking a lot lately about legacy, not in the sense of accomplishments or career or the things that we often point to when we talk about success, but what I'll actually leave behind for my kids, that truly means something. One day I won't be here to guide them, to offer advice or to help them think through hard decisions.

And that reality has a way of sharpening the question. What will they have from me when I'm gone? I want to leave them more than just memories and material things. I wanna leave them something that can still [00:01:00] speak when I can't, something that can remind them of who they are, what matters most, and how deeply they're loved.

And because of that, I've started a simple practice that I believe can continue to guide my kids even when I can't. One day. And today, we're going to share that practice with you.

This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Jennifer: The simple practice that Anthony is talking about is journaling. Now, I have always loved journaling and when I was a child and a teenager, I was actually an avid journaler and I've got a really cool story of how journaling has been a blessing to my family, but.

I think I'll save that for the end of the episode. First, let's discuss maybe what keeps us from doing this right now. 

Anthony: Yeah. I think what keeps us from doing it a [00:02:00] lot of times is just time we think. We don't have the time. We think it's gonna take up too much time to sit down and start journaling regularly, and we tend to diminish the importance of journaling and the potential impact that it has, and also maybe we're not confident in our writing skills and maybe that holds us back. Those are some of the mistakes that I think we make when we think about journaling. So why do we do this? We might think that others just won't care what we have to say.

So what's the point of journaling? Or we might think that we don't have anything important to say for future generations, but nothing could be further from the truth. And today we're going to share some easy ways to keep a journal. 

Jennifer: So the thing that's really cool about journaling that I've learned. Is that there are direct benefits, not only for those that read it later, but for the person who's journaling right now.

So the consequences of not doing it actually come now and later. So first, let's talk [00:03:00] about the person who's journaling. Let's talk about us, right? So there are benefits for us, and it's a long list. So journaling boosts our mental health. That reduces stress, it reduces anxiety and depression. It creates self-awareness, and it aids in problem solving.

It enhances our clarity and our creativity and our goal achievement. It fosters gratitude, memory, and even physical health benefits like a stronger immune system. Amazing. And then for those that are gonna read it later for our posterity. It fosters connection to their roots. It gives them understanding, it gives them a sense of identity and purpose.

It even creates or increases self-esteem. It inspires, it increases resilience to face their challenges. There's just so many things that journaling does. 

Anthony: Yeah, it's pretty amazing what can come out of the simple practice of journaling. I've started doing it in a really simple way and I'm using technology to, to aid me.

In that [00:04:00] process, what I do is I take my phone and I have an iPhone, so I use the notes app on Apple or Apple Notes is the app, and now in that app you can actually. Do a voice memo. So like before you could do a voice memo on Apple, it was a separate app and it still is, but now that feature is also embedded into the Notes app.

And so what I do is I just turn on the record a memo feature and I talk for a few minutes and I talk about whatever's going on that week or what my thoughts are about how things are. Going in our family or concerns that I have, or spiritual experiences that I've had, anything that I think is relevant or important.

And I talk into the voice memo and then it transcribes that recording into the Notes app. And then I sometimes will [00:05:00] even use AI or Apple Intelligence to just clean it up a little bit. So it looks a little bit more like a journal entry, but it takes me like 10 minutes or less to do that. It's.

Pretty remarkable. 

Jennifer: That's. Actually quite amazing. So it actually dictates what you say. You don't even have to write anything, 

Anthony: right? I don't have to type, I don't have to write in a journal and certainly those are options for if you like doing those kind of things. But I was just, I'm super busy and wanted to find a way to make journaling a little bit easier where I don't have a lot of time to do that and I can just sit down.

With my phone or on my laptop even, and use that app's feature and just record right into the app and it transcribes it and I've got a journal entry. 

Jennifer: That's really cool. So another really simple idea, and this one isn't technical, it actually comes from my mom and she has done this for as long as I can remember.

She goes and buys a yearly calendar. So like one of those planners. So it has like. Two pages equal a week and you have, I dunno, five, six or six seven [00:06:00] pages lines for a day. And you just enough to write like maybe 2, 3, 4 sentences at most and every day at some point. I don't know if she does it in the morning about the previous day or in the evening, about the current day, but she sits down and she writes a few sentences about that day and it gives you just enough space to write what was really important.

Can't. Ramble on or anything, you just have to get to the heart of the matter. And she's done that for years. And one year I actually did it and it was quite easy. I don't know why. I haven't continued it. I should restart it. She like, it was quite easy to not miss a day because it was so easy to go backwards.

If I had to, if I missed a few days, it was not hard to say, oh, what did I do Wednesday? Let me write that really quickly. But I have this whole full calendar of the Journal of my Year and it has everything that was important in that year, wrapped up in two to three sentences a day. 

Anthony: Yeah, that's a great way to just keep a record.

Jennifer: Yeah. So, as I said earlier, I had a really cool story to share with you on this topic, so I'm gonna share it now. Mother's Day and [00:07:00] Father's Day, about 2020. I had this idea to talk to my siblings. I'm the baby of six kids, and suggested that we gift to my parents a subscription to a weekly journaling platform.

Now, there's a few of them out there, but we used one called StoryWorth. And for one year what happens is they receive a weekly email and they received them separately each. My mom and my dad separately received a journal prompt once a week in the email, and all they had to do was reply to that email with their answer and they could answer the prompt or they could select a different or their own idea to, to respond with it.

But then StoryWorth would. Save these stories. They would even weekly email them out to any of us that had subscribed to their feed, so their children and their grandchildren who subscribed to their feed. And then at the end of the year, you had this really cool option to have all of that bound in a really nice book, which then my parents gifted to us and for Christmas of 2021.

So once they were [00:08:00] completed with it. So I knew this was a really great idea when we gave him the gift, but it became this. Really tender gift from God when my father passed away just eight months later from a really brief illness. So I'm gonna read just a little bit from his journal for a minute and let you hear.

Some of the stories. And let me just preface that by saying he's writing this about 50 to 60 years after it happened. So this is when he wrote it in 2020 or 2021 about something that had happened, I think in like 1966. So he'd been dating, he'd just explained in the story that he'd been dating someone named Julia who had broken up with him, and then this is what he says.

So let me read that. Okay, he says, in late November, I purchased tickets at the Valley Music Hall to see a stage show Shenandoah in early December. At the time of the purchase, I did not know who I was going to invite to go with me. Since stopping dating Julia, I had dated a couple of other girls, but no one special.

The [00:09:00] question of who to invite was on my mind almost constantly. I clearly remember one evening I prepared for bed by kneeling in prayer and asking for guidance as clearly as if a person was in the room speaking to me, a voice came to me that said. Invite Julia. It had been nearly four months since we had spoken.

However, with that strong impression, I determined that I would call Julia the next day. I made the call and extended the invitation and she accepted. When I hung up, I recall thinking it was so good to hear her voice and so grateful that I had followed that prompting. So those were my dad's own words, and Julia is my mom.

And so it's such a sweet story to have now, in his own words of the story of how he and my mom fell in love, dated, she broke up with him. He got the courage to call her again, and the rest was history. They got married I think four months after that. That impression that he had to invite her to that [00:10:00] show.

Anthony: Yeah. It's a beautiful love story. And now you have it preserved for posterity. 

Jennifer: Yeah, so all of his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, everyone can know that really sweet story about my parents. So we had no idea when we gifted that to him that we would have less than two years left with him.

We had no idea the urgency of getting his stories written down and now we have them and they are a treasure to our family. It's something really tangible that I have to remember my dad and I can look at whenever I want. 

Anthony: Yeah, so we wanna encourage you to start journaling if you're not already doing so.

And remember, this doesn't have to be difficult and it doesn't have to take a lot of time. You find what works for you. Whether you use voice memos like I do, or Jen's mom's calendar idea. Or use some kind of journaling app or platform. There's so many options out there. Or you just go old school and you use pen and paper.

It's a practice that's worth [00:11:00] your time. You know, we have this amazing journal from Jen's parents and I realize, I don't have anything like that for, from my grandparents. All my grandparents who passed away. And I wish I had something like that, that I could look back and read the stories about their lives and what they were thinking and what was important to them.

You know, all I have are my memories and so a great way to leave a legacy is to journal and leave something for your posterity. It does matter what you have to say, and it is worth your time. 

Jennifer: Yeah, it really is. So if you liked what you heard today and you got something out of it, please leave a rating or review for us.

Wherever you've listened and actually. Share it with a friend, pass it along. Help us get this message out to others to help them be better parents. 

Anthony: Yeah. And next time on parents Making time, we're gonna have an honest conversation about parenting adult children, something that Jen and I are still pretty new at.

We're gonna talk [00:12:00] about navigating boundaries, staying connected, and learning when to step in and when to step back. Nothing really prepares you for this transition. And like I said, we're going through it right now and so we wanna talk about it. And until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be.