The Ordinary Magic Of Family Meetings
Year’s end can feel like a natural time to look toward the future with renewed intentions and fresh goals, while reflecting on what matters most to our families. One way to strengthen communication, connection, and problem solving is through regular family meetings. This practice can begin with children as young as four years old and will serve our families well, especially as we collectively sharpen our skills over the years.
From a behavioral perspective, this format for communication within families can be an especially powerful tool for inviting cooperation and participation from our children because it can put us as parents in more of a curious listening role as opposed to a lecturing role, thereby offering our children more opportunity for active engagement. Many of these conversations can also be guided by specific family values and an explicit family mission statement.
During any given week in my family, you may find us using meeting times in one of several different ways: as a prelude to family game or movie night, as part of an ‘Ice Cream Sunday’ ritual that includes sharing gratitude notes from the week, and most always as a venue for collaborative problem solving. How you sprinkle fun into the process can be uniquely your own; its magic comes from repeatedly modeling the skills of clearly communicating and working together to compromise, solve problems and reflect, and asking our children to practice flexing their neurological muscles to do the same.
Steps for building an effective family meeting routine:
Dedicate the time. Aim for weekly, to set the rhythm. You may not always have problems to solve, and that’s ok. You can use the time for gratitudes, celebrations, to check-in about the week ahead—whatever works for your family.
Focus on problems to solve. Problems can be written down throughout the week, and solutions will be discussed at the meeting. When you notice problems during the week you might suggest, “This seems like a good one to add to our list."
Brainstorm solutions collaboratively. Everyone can offer solutions to the identified problems, no matter how seemingly wild or ridiculous—this is a key part of the brainstorming process.
Select one solution for each problem. Each solution should be trialed for one week, its effectiveness to be evaluated during the next meeting. If necessary, a new solution will be selected, trialed, and evaluated. Selected solutions should be reasonable to all and related to solving the problem.
Commit to the process. Any routine takes time and intentionality to refine. The focus for family meetings can be on the process and on being encouraging and patient with our children and ourselves as we practice these skills together.
Through the process of family meetings, the big picture skills that we’re building (effective communication, finding more joy and connection together, focusing on solutions) will last our children a lifetime and will serve them well in every relationship that they enter into.