Family Meetings
A family meeting is a great place to hold conversations where everyone’s voice is heard. It’s also an opportunity to mark a subject matter as important, and affecting everyone.
If your family is big, the meeting will be big. If your family is you and your son, it will be small. This makes no difference whatsoever. Calling one means we’ve got to sit down with a pad of paper and discuss what’s going on and share ideas so that we can come up with how to do things differently.
You may call one when bedtimes have gotten unruly. Or when you have fallen out of your regular rhythm due to ‘life/pandemic/travel/etc’ and want to reestablish what the routines are. You might call a family meeting when there’s been a breach of trust and it needs talking through. Or when tubby time isn’t working out the way it used to. The reasons are endless. Even the kiddos can call them.
The most important things to remember when you sit down (ideally at a table for less squirming and distraction), is to share the reason for the meeting, and why whatever it’s about is not working for the family. Then, it’s a true brainstorm session.
All ideas, even if they are seemingly ridiculous, are written down. Eventually, solutions are narrowed down and the best ones discussed in detail. Lastly, a new plan of action is put into place. Sometimes I hang the notes / new agreement on the fridge as a visual reminder that the family meeting was important and we will all be trying our best to implement new behaviors.
I started these when my daughter was only two years old. Never too early to look at how we can work, play and exist most happily as a family unit. It reminds our children that there are choices, that everyone has a voice and that we have needs too.
