Family
Family Meetings: A Helpful Parenting Strategy
The concept of family meetings has been around for a long time but mostly it was promoted as a problem-solving process as children reached adolescence. Now it is seen as having a much broader value and can begin with children as young as 3 years old. Contemporary family life is probably a close replica to the phenomenon of chaos theory. People moving every which way but with some overall purpose and nearly hidden order that assures most everything gets done. The problem is that there is much inefficiency when time is at a premium. In addition, for many families, there is a lost core sense of family, with few times when everyone is actually together and even fewer times when the sense of family membership is recognized as central to the progress in our personal lives.
Family meetings can serve many purposes. By establishing a meeting time that is strongly protected, it assures at least once a week that the family actually sits down for some purpose other than eating! It becomes a family ritual that provides some stability for everyone, an event that can be relied on, a special time that can evolve in ways that meet the unique needs of every family and changes as the family grows through different stages. It is not only for problem solving but can include reaffirmation of the meaningfulness of family relations, an opportunity to identify special events or challenges facing each family member, and to coordinate schedules and resources.
Let's start with the family with very young children. Parents will run the meeting. A large diagram of a week should be used as a prop. It can be a white board or felt board. There can be a row for each family member. Pictures can be used as symbols for events so young children can easily follow the process. Thus a meeting can begin by identifying the schedule of activities coming up that week, anything from which days a child is at day care or an after school program to activities' and sports' commitments and doctor's appointments.
But, this is not just about the children's schedules and this is one of the critical new variations for this concept. Parents' commitments should be on the schedule as well (this can be helpful to spouse's, too). It can go beyond parents' evening meetings and travel commitments (so children can see which nights a parent will not be around) but should also include work deadlines for important projects, conveying a message that this is a time when a parent may be working late, at the office or at home. It will draw into focus parental time constraints, something children need to learn to appreciate and understand, as well as identifying conflicts when it seems like people need to be in more than one place at a time.
But there is much more to such a meeting than scheduling. It can be a time when each person says something good about each other family member, reinforcing the special relationships of family. There can be other special rituals, as fits the needs and beliefs of each family. Storytelling can be a significant component, be it a purely creative expression or parents sharing stories about family history. (Oral history has become a lost art in most families.This becomes even more meaningful as the children get older.) Reading is another valuable ritual, anything from passages of the Bible to a few pages of Treasure Island. Another good process can be for each person to share something that made him/her feel sad, mad, and glad during the week. Having the parents participate is helpful both as a modeling and making children more aware of parents having feelings about different parts of their lives. Nancy Fuch's beautiful book about parenting as a spiritual journey, Our Share of Night, Our Share of Morning, contains some excellent examples of these types of family meetings.
The meetings can have the traditional problem-solving component as well, although with very young children that is likely to be less effective. But as children get into elementary school and especially as they reach third grade and beyond, the meetings can increasingly be used to talk about an individual's complaint and try for some creative problem-solving. As children get older, they can actually be asked to run the meetings and manage the agenda. A few of the many books that describe these types of family meetings include Siblings Without Rivalry (Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish), Positive Discipline for Teenagers (Jane Nelson and Lynn Lott), and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (Stephen Covey's latest). There is a well-established maxim that solutions work best when everyone participates in the solving of the problem.
But most important, to me, is that these family meetings (or "family time" as Covey calls it) are an important step in re-establishing stronger family bonds at a time when they are being weakened by the many diversions and pressures prevailing on each family member. It reinforces the concept of "we" when there is still too much emphasis on "I", or as Nancy Fuchs described the experience for one family, "The children learned that when they were hurting, the best resource in the world was their family".
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