Small Steps Towards Improvement (Pt. 2): Family Meeting

It’s 5:30 pm on a Sunday night. Do you know what your family is doing? I do. Every Sunday night we have our Family Meeting.

Is there a consistent time each week where you and your partner, or your family, are all together for the purpose of discussing the week, celebrating achievements, exploring issues, and finding solutions together?

That is our family meeting, and one of the ways that we run our home like a business. We have an all family weekly status meeting every week, just like many businesses conduct on a weekly basis. Why? Well, “status meetings are intended to ensure a project stays on track and to give team members the chance to intervene early if problems arise.” Catherine Lovering, Houston Chronical

To take the analogy farther, you can view your life as a company. Your family mission statement and living will are what you use as your directions and destination. You are the boss, and your family members are your team. So the weekly family meeting makes sure that your canoe is heading in the right direction, and allows you the chance to course-correct or reaccess the destination as a family if needed.

Now that you have an anchor, or central location for all of your family’s essential information, it’s time to actually discuss it.

It’s great to have a visual, but if you don’t discuss the information, your family calendar will just blend into the background like a picture hung on the wall.

Our Family Meeting

Doing a weekly family meeting grew organically for us. I started changing the weekly white board on Sunday nights. This meant that I meal planned for the week on Sunday nights, and often I would do it as we were sitting around the table talking after dinner. Naturally, we would start to talk about the week and our activities, and plan meals around those. For example, we often hiked with a mom group every Tuesday, and I knew that I didn’t want to rush home to cook. So that day became a slow cooker meal day.

After a while of doing that, we decided to make it a little more formal. We have played around with the format over the years, adding in and taking various rituals out. For now, the following family meeting agenda is what we do every Sunday at dinner:

Call to Start

This is exactly what it sounds like: we announce that we’re starting the family meeting so that everyone is on the same page, focused, and ready to participate. We used to do this by lighting a candle which was quite lovely, but then we had arguments over who got to blow it out all the time, so we just let that ritual slide by the wayside.

Along with this is also deciding on a regular time to have your family meeting. Sunday’s work best for us because it’s the evening before the start of our week. Also, Zachary and I do our Business Meeting Sunday mornings and we can discuss any needed issues together before bringing them to the family.

Discuss Upcoming Schedule and Meals

Here we cover the nuts and bolts of the week: what happens each day, who needs to be where and when, who has the car, who will be home for dinner, etc. We go through the whole week (Monday — Sunday) so that there are no surprises.

Requests for Support/Needs

After we review the schedule, we have time to ask for help and/or support if needed. So the big questions here are, “Who needs help with something this week and who can provide it?”

This often involves juggling schedules, meals, child-care, household tasks, or our car. But really, it can be anything! Some examples are: we have company coming so we all need to help to get the house ready, or one parent won’t be home for dinner on Tuesday so we all need help with getting dinner ready, or even I lost my favorite stuffed animal, please help me find it.

It’s basically a way of us acknowledging that we’re all in this family together and we help one another out because we want to show our love and support. If one of us is in the weeds, the family will all know and be there to help.

Address Any Important Discussions or Issues

This is the time to raise any issues and have conversations about family decisions that need to be made, such as about upcoming activities and/or disagreements. For example, some things we have discussed in the past are disagreements over toys or house rules, planning family vacations, or even discussing school issues.

There are meetings when we have lots to discuss, and then there are times when we don’t have anything to discuss. But this is a time where everyone can feel like their voice is heard.

Throughout the week, if one of the children mentions something that’s bothering them or that they’d like to add to the schedule, I tell them to bring it up at the Family Meeting. They know it’s a safe place where they can bring up important issues and be heard.

Review the Family Monthly Goal

Each month, we have a goal that we work on as a family. We set a goal and a reward, and so each Sunday, we check in on the goal to see how we’re progressing.

Add Items to the Memory Jar from the Week

We will often do this throughout the week, but on Sundays we like to review the week and write down any memories that we want to remember in our Memory Jar.

Give Out Compensation

We sort of follow a hybrid system of compensation between Dave Ramsey’s idea of allowance and what we learned from The Opposite of Spoiled. That’s a discussion for another post, but at this point in our meeting, this is when we hand out compensation.

Say the Family Motto

We created a family motto, that we say as a family at the end of each meeting. Our kids helped us to write it.

How Do I Start?

Most importantly, a family meeting should not be a chore. We have fun, we laugh and enjoy our family meeting time together. We invite our children to participate, but it is not mandatory. We just know that continuously coming together at the end of the week will start to instill the habit of a family meeting.

If you have kids, especially younger ones, this actually needs to be quite quick! Our three year old will often not stay for the whole meeting, running off to do something, but our 6-year-old, who has been seeing these family meetings for years now, readily joins in the meeting and brings items to discuss.

A family business meeting will definitely not be a perfect meeting — allow it to develop in a way that works for your family. Don’t stress about it! Remember, we started with just going over activities and meals, and only as we have gotten certain aspects of the meeting down pat have we added more in.

So start where you are. Decide what are the important things to touch base on each week with your family. Take it slow, and soon, you’ll come to realize that the family meeting is a wonderful way to collect your family and come together at the end of a week. If you keep at it, I promise you’ll start to see your family dynamic slowly change over time.

Do you do family meetings? What do your meetings look like? Comment below — we’d love to hear about it!