I wish I was the kind of parent that provided nap time at exactly the same time every day; that had a sit down dinner with the whole family every night; that had everything organized every day in a neat little box. But I’m not. As a working mom – and let’s be honest, is there really any other type of mom? – I find myself juggling a myriad of commitments and activities that has my calendar looking anything but orderly. I do however, recognize the value of consistency and predictability in parenting and there’s nothing like New Year’s Eve to remind us of the power of tradition.

We count down the days and the dropping of the ball not just to mark the end of one calendar year and the beginning of another, but also to provide meaning in an otherwise chaotic world. At a time in history in which there is much uncertainty – the economy, public education, food safety, the climate – the certainty of ritual provides an anchor and stability important for adults and children alike. In today’s world, the New Year is akin to what older cultures call a Rite of Passage: a ritual event that marks a person’s progress from one status to another. It is a universal phenomenon reflecting what social hierarchies, values and beliefs are important in specific families and cultures.

While modern times and modern family life allow fewer of us a June Cleaver predictability in parenting, children thrive with consistency and the holidays, New Year’s in particular, provide ritual, tradition, and an anchor for our children that allows them to grow and evolve with a solid sense of place and belonging.

“Ritual inevitably carries a basic message of order, continuity, and predictability. New events are connected to preceding ones, incorporated into a stream of precedents so that they are recognized as growing out of tradition and experience. By stating enduring and underlying patterns, ritual connects past, present, and future, abrogating history and time.” – Barbara Myerhoff (2006).

It’s not so much that holidays and rites of passage actually change things as much as they give meaning to changes that are occurring.

As parents, we can use tradition and rites of passage at any time of year to help our children grow up with a sense of purpose, integrity, and responsibility.

To wit: birthday parties, weddings, funerals, holidays.

Last month, my father – a clinical psychologist who has spent his career studying the traditions of indigenous cultures as they may be applied to meet the challenges of modern life – took my son, who had just turned ten, on a rite of passage with five of his buddies, also just ten or about to turn ten. The boys were assigned a task of reflecting on what kind of person they hope to be over the next decade of their lives. “Over the next ten years,” my dad told them, “You’ll learn how to drive a car. You’ll be able to vote. You could be drafted into war. You could become a parent. What kind of teenager – what kind of man – do you want to be?” Throughout the course of an overnight hike and a sunrise ceremony, the boys completed a series of undertakings designed to instill self-confidence, respect, and a sense of peer responsibility. The morning after, there was not a parent or child who had not been positively effected by the experience.

There are as many family traditions celebrating the New Year, as there are families. The commonality is the intentional experience and annual ritual. With New Year’s we remember that which for which we are grateful and look toward that which we hope will be different. We honor the passing of one chapter and the beginning of another. And it’s important not only to the well being of your family, but to our global citizenry.

How we progress as a society depends largely on how we maintain tradition and utilize ritual to meet the demands of modern life. Explains noted psychologist and author of five books, including New Traditions: Redefining Celebrations for Today’s Family, “Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are and provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.”

How you celebrate the New Year is not as important as recognizing and repeating a tradition that is meaningful for you and your family. So whether you write out resolutions as a family, go on an annual ski trip, make yearly time capsules, bake New Year’s cookies, or watch the ball drop together with hats, streamers, and noise makers is not the point. Rather, follow – or establish – yearly rituals that help your family grow, learn, celebrate and honor that which you value and cherish. For whether you realize it or not, the traditions you share with your children today will be passed on for generations to come.

I believe trees have magical healing power. If you’ve ever read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, you know what I mean. If you have fond memories of sitting in a tree fort as a child, or climbing trees to look out and ponder the view from above, you know what I mean. Maybe you used to pick plums off trees in the backyard with your grandma or grandpa and just recalling the warmth of the sun on your back and the scent of the ripe fruit relaxes your shoulders on a busy day, all these years past. There’s just no question: trees are good, and they’re also good for you.

Trees minimize the effects of global warming by trapping CO2 emissions. They also cool your home naturally, reducing cooling costs. A potted tree within your home can improve indoor air quality almost immediately.

If you’re feeling anxious, watching a tree for a few minutes can reduce blood pressure and nerves. When my son was a baby, I could always count on taking him outside to stare at a tree as a balm during those newborn crying phases. The soothing was instantaneous for both of us.

Trees give us clean air to breathe, reduce noise pollution, increase property values, decrease water runoff and capture dust particles (so you have to do less dusting!). Make sure to plant trees that are native to your area so they’ll use less water, and support native wildlife. If you don’t have a yard, contribute to community tree planting efforts, or ask your local school, church or neighborhood center if they’d like a tree planted on their grounds.

During the holiday season trees take on an even greater poignancy as they pop up in households and storefronts around the world, warming the hearts of children and adults of all ages. With visions of sugarplums and Norman Rockwellian landscapes, we gather ‘yee round to string popcorn garlands around Noble Firs, place angels atop Virginia Pines, and even play dreidel games next to the newfangled Hanukkah bush. We hang “Baby’s First Year” decorations alongside family heirlooms from whom we can’t quite remember but we know it’s an anchor to years past, and ancestors perhaps long gone.

Planting a tree has become part of my family’s holiday celebrating. Every New Year’s we plant one together and share our dreams and goals for the coming year. But planting a tree is a great way to mark special occasions all year long. Like the start of a new school year, a birthday, or anniversary. You can save trees by purchasing items made with recycled, post consumer waste paper.

When buying a tree for holiday decor, look for locally grown trees, or trees that can be planted after the season. Avoid chemically sprayed trees. If you prefer a plastic tree, purchase used ones from eBay to avoid off-gassing of VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) into your home. Compost trees that cannot be planted, or chip them and use as mulch in your garden. If you don’t yet compost, here’s a video to help you get started.

Growing up in my family, most dinners began with the Lakota prayer,  “Aho. Mitakuye Oyasin,” which translates roughly as “To all my relations.” It is an expression of gratitude, and a reminder that we are all connected. This understanding of global interconnection plays a critical role in creating a healthy world for our children and I believe it can help many a mom too.

In my work with EcoMom®, speaking at countless mother’s groups, conferences and the like, I meet so many amazing women who feel unacknowledged for the path they walk in life. I see many moms struggling to juggle work as a mother with work as a professional; and stay-at-home moms struggling to find meaning and purpose in the seemingly mundane chores of keeping a home and family alive and well (and by the way, I hate that term, “stay-at-home” mom because as any mom will tell you, there is no such thing!).

I would like to suggest that in order to restore greater health in our selves, our families, and our world, we must restore a sense of the sacred to our daily acts. We all have the power to make a difference and everything matters. Everyone matters. Each of our collective choices adds up to positive change, and it all begins at home, with our selves. As a mother, walking through life with this sort of understanding brings a deeper sense of joy, and holistic health and well being to days that often feel like a daze of meal preparation, carpooling, cleaning, emailing, con calls and consoling of bruised knees and egos. The wheel can feel like it is turning very fast and the cage can feel quite small.

Realizing that we are all part of a greater whole, brings a deep sense of joy and reward to even the smallest of acts. The food we eat and where if comes from, has an impact felt round the world. What kind of cleansers we use in our homes affects the availability of fresh drinking water for generations to come. I find this immensely exciting. It means we all have the potential to leave a legacy of which we can be proud.

So when someone asks me what being an EcoMom® means, there are many levels to my answer, but ultimately it comes down to experiencing great joy in making simple, safe, and smart decisions. One of our early campaigns, The EcoMom Challenge, lists 10 Simple Steps for A Sustainable Future. One of my favorite steps is to play more in nature. Hanging out in a meadow with my son, watching birds fly by and clouds fight for cool shapes in the sky, relaxes me and makes me a better person the rest of the week. The vitamin D is good for my health too. Another step is to flex my by buying power. Knowing that every dollar I spend is like a vote the world’s largest democracy (our economy), makes me feel good about taking the time to choose companies and products that reflect my values.

Being an EcoMom® means making the best choices I can for my family, laughing at myself when I don’t, letting go of trying to be perfect, and just plain old enjoying myself more in this cool journey called life because I know that the energy I bring to my choices ripples out. It’s an amazing gift, this journey of parenthood. It feels even better as an EcoMom®.

In Arianna Huffington’s book, On Becoming Fearless , she reminds us of the importance of sleep. I wish someone had read me that chapter. As a woman and Mompreneur, I find sleep is often the first thing to go when the To Do list gets too long. Which it seems like it is every day, except for the days I forget one of the To Do’s, in which case I pay the price later, with even less sleep. So to the question of what advice I would give other moms who are considering starting their own business, I offer the following 5 tips:

• Be realistic. You do need to sleep. You cannot do everything. You don’t want to do everything. Your husband, children, and friends will resent you if you try to do everything. You are not good at everything. And you can’t do it alone. So don’t even try.
• Underpromise and overdeliver. Over the years I’ve learned that with motherhood, the doo-doo hits the fan even more often than it used to. Sometimes quite literally and most often when you most need it not to. i.e. the day before a big report is due. Even if you’re the type who used to be ready for final exams a week early, you’re early for every meeting, and you’re always the first one on a conference call, being a mom assures that that simply will not be the case anymore.
• Know what you want. It sounds simple enough but really it’s not. Are you starting a magazine because you want to live like Anna Wintour, or because you just love writing and editing so much you won’t mind sitting in a home office in your sweats at three in the morning editing under a deadline? Are you starting a cute little clothing boutique because you love shopping, or because you love being at the same store seven days a week, surrounded by purchase orders, tradeshow receipts, and color swatches? How about when you know the rest of the family is sitting down to dinner while you’re still working away? I am not trying to sound discouraging but it is easy to fantasize about having one’s own business, without realizing what the daily duties entail and a lot of suffering can be avoided by knowing what it is you really want to be doing every day and making sure it is in alignment with the realities of the business you are considering.
• Be fearless. As Huffington explains in her book, fearlessness is not an absence of fear, but the courage to keep going in the face of fear. If you start your own business, you will face fear every day and you will have to decide what you’re going to do about it. That insecure, naysaying, finger jabbing voice of doubt can get pretty darn loud. I try to respond as I do when Corbin is scared of something – with compassion, acknowledgment, and let’s-pull-up-those-boot-straps-can-do action. Life is not a dress rehearsal.
• Collaborate. Before getting too deep in your own grand plan, do some research. If someone else is already doing similar to what you envision doing, and you think you can make it better, see if there’s not some way to join forces rather than re-create a wheel or start an unfriendly competition. Some of my most rewarding experiences as an entrepreneur have been the result of reaching out to potential competitors and saying “Hey let’s talk and see what we could do together rather than apart.”

Moms are cool. My mom is a pediatric nurse. One day she saved the life of a little girl named Kyleigh. Kyleigh’s mom is Heidi Kuhn, founder of Roots of Peace, a non governmental organization recently awarded a $30 million grant for their peace work in Afghanistan. Heidi kind of took me under her wing. She introduced me to The Earth Charter, and it became the foundation for EcoMom®.

Drafted in late 2000, The Earth Charter is a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the 21st century. It is a vision of hope and a call to action, with the following tenets set forth for all whom would read:

• Respect  Earth and Life in all its diversity.
• Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
• Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.
• Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
• Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.
• Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.
• Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth’s regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being.
• Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.
• Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.
• Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner.
• Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity.
• Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.
• Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.
• Integrate into formal education and life-long learning the knowledge, values, and skills needed for a sustainable way of life.
• Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.
• Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace.

I dream of living a life, and running a business, that meets all of the standards set forth above. But I am also a realist. As a mom (indeed as a human being), things fall through the cracks. When my son needs me, I go. So EcoMom® is not quite Earth Charter perfect yet. But we’re heading in the right direction, having re-launched EcoMom.com with a new vetting process we call EcoMom Approved®.

Just as our children must take small steps before they can walk or run, so too must we all take just one step at a time as we navigate the journey of parenthood and healthy living. Our principles evolve as research unveils new information and our amazing team of women – and men, by the way – have become an integral part of the EcoMom® family, making sure that our principles stand strong. In fact, the Co-Founder, and indeed the CEO of EcoMom.com, is a man named Jody Sherman. To live in a healthy way, one that reflects the values of the Earth Charter, we need the balance of the masculine and the feminine, and it feels good to walk that talk in our company.

Ok, I admit it. I’m a bit of a Type A. It’s not that I feel compelled toward great accomplishment, or that I can’t sit on the couch enjoying brownies (organic!), a trashy magazine (recycled out of my mom’s stash!), and a reality show all at the same time (I really can do all three at once!), it’s just that when I see something wrong I want to fix it. That old adage about “ ‘what can I do?’ vs ‘something must be done!’” was seemingly ingrained and entrenched in my brain at an early age. So starting EcoMom® was not really question of if, but rather how.

An email I sent to family and friends confirmed that in the face of global warming, increased incidences of cancer, asthma and allergies likely caused by chemicals in the environment, moms want to make the right choices for their families, they just don’t necessarily know what, when, why, where or how.

A little research into what I had long suspected to be true – that many moms experience depression and overextension – was backed up by some very frank conversations with friends, relatives, new acquaintances in my community and a CDC report that upwards of 90% of American mothers experience loneliness, isolation, and stress. My gut hypothesis that moms needed more personal connection and acknowledgement, no doubt imbued by my own struggles as a single mother, had been confirmed.

A mentor of mine had planted the seed that real magic happens when the best practices of both non-profits and for-profit businesses come together. Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus’s book, Creating a World Without Poverty , further cemented this idea. So I founded EcoMom® as a hybrid entity: EcoMomAlliance.org a non-profit educational outreach organization with a mission to inspire and empower mothers in the movement toward sustainable living, and EcoMom.com as a healthy lifestyle resource. A hand to hold in this quest for healthy parenting.

Anchored by the belief that one of the strongest forces in nature is a network of mothers, EcoMom Alliance took off. I looked toward biomimicry, and the way a Queen Bee runs her hive, as comparable to how a mom runs her home, and knows her community. With a hard working Board of Directors and an incredible group of volunteers, we started training EcoMom Community Leaders to host fun and educational events called EcoMom Parties – thus addressing the need to bring women together for social connection and support, while at the same time, providing information on topics of environmental health and wellness, parenting, and healthful living. The power of mom-word-of-mouth led to some incredible press; the world wide web didn’t hurt either. The little idea was born and as with one’s child, watching the development and growth has been nothing short of miraculous. The right family has come in to help grow and raise both EcoMom.com and EcoMom Alliance, and I’ve been trying to catch up ever since.

In almost every interview I’ve given since co-founding EcoMom®, I am asked how I got the idea. I answer that it came to me in the summer of 2006 on a mountaintop above my home, just North of San Francisco. But I don’t feel like I got the idea per se; Rather, I feel like it was given to me.

As a newly single mom, trying to find my way in a situation I never expected would be my life, I was literally up on a hill crying for a vision. The Vision Quest tradition had been introduced to me as a child, through my father’s work with native elders. I knew that if I went to nature with great sincerity and humility, I would be gifted with the answers I sought. And boy did I need some answers. Several weeks before, an “aha moment” with a group of mom friends had led to the realization that mom s are not only role models (duh!), but also a tremendous market force (duh, duh!). So I knew that whatever I embarked on next, it somehow had to tie together the power of mothers and the global challenges of the day. You know, little things. Like how choosing healthier laundry detergent reduces pollution of groundwater reserves. Or how feeding children locally grown, organic food reduces both CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming, and exposure to toxic pesticides.

I thought I was going crazy. Now I know I am just a typical mom. As if it weren’t enough dealing with the ramifications of a nasty “divorce,” I felt the weight of the universe on my shoulders and knew I had to do everything in my power to help make the world a better place for my son…for all the world’s children. So there I was sobbing away, wondering what the heck I was going to do that would both support my son and I, help me take care of my parents down the line, and oh yea, save the world, when suddenly the term EcoMom came to me. EcoMom.com and EcoMom Alliance, to be exact. If every mom could begin to think of her self as an EcoMom, I thought to myself, the world would become a better place. Empowered women, called EcoMoms, effecting positive change via a natural tendency toward stewardship. An “army” of EcoMoms! It could be amazing.

I stood up from the ground on which I had been laying and looked down to the neighborhood below, inspired, invigorated, and terrified. I had been given a vision, and the vision was clear: help moms become EcoMoms and in so doing, you will help create a healthy and sustainable future. How I would do this, I did not know but the assignment had been given, and I knew I had to step up. The idea was much larger than me, and I knew that it would require the right people to bring it to fruition. Indeed, that has been the case, and meeting those people, the most rewarding part of the journey. EcoMom.com merged with another company and I am now part of an incredible team. We even have a great guy as our CEO, and it’s so nice to feel the balance of the masculine and feminine. EcoMom Alliance recently joined forces with Green Halloween, bringing this wonderful campaign begun by two cool moms, to an even wider audience. As we grow, I still feel moments of fear, wondering what the heck I am doing, but the vision of moms coming together to make our world a better place has never wavered, and I know I have to just keep showing up.