Structure Your Family For Summer Time And/Or When Children Are Out Of School

In our area most of the school children are out of school for the Summer. A minority are in year around schools and at most they are home for three weeks at a time. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for parents. The challenge of course is to figure out what to do with children all the time that is available and the opportunity is to use this time for important purposes. Many parents enroll them in special classes, sports, and etc. to occupy them. I would like to suggest a few other ideas.

There are two family principles parents can take advantage of and use this time to teach children some very important life lessons. The first is that children who can adapt themselves to different situations are typically more successful and healthy than children who cannot adapt well. Adapt means to adjust to a circumstance with positive emotions, correct language, and appropriate behavior and motivation. The second principle is the idea that parents can structure their family for different outcomes or purposes. This family structure becomes the environment or the conditions which children first adapt to and then use as a cognitive map in many of the situations they will face outside the family. For instance if you want children to be successful in school then structure your family for achievement, learning, and character. They will learn in the home each of these three important skills and then go to school better able to succeed there. (In fact fact, check out the new “Close the Distance,” which will soon be part of this website. You can have dramatic impact on your children’s school achievement). If you want your children to live your religion in a certain way then it would be a good thing to structure your family by applying religious practices and teach religious lessons that they will find in your religious activities. Social skills can be taught in the same way. You can structure your family for sociability, friendliness, inclusion, and mutual involvement. Important emotions can be taught in a similar manner. If you want your children to be good at love they will need to see parents love each other and feel loved and loving and do loving things. Failing this your children will learn something else, because family life is not neutral where nothing is learned.

Suppose then when you had more time with your children you limited TV watching and video games. You regulated cell phone use and text messaging. Create a starting time for chores and asked for chores to be completed well before any time was given to play. You might also suggest that children read a certain amount and practice a weekly character trait like “cooperation,” or “respect,” each week. In order to set this in motion organize a family meeting where every family member talks about having a “good family,” and all agree to set and achieve these goals in order to have a good family. Have a follow up weekly meeting, to ensure consistency, and review what has been done the previous week and praise achievement and request better work when that is needed. After a couple of weeks teach the idea that certain forms of behavior help the family and each other and other forms of behavior harm people, including the person and the family. Use that idea to help children apply what you are structuring.

Based on the research we have conducted with this model of leadership you will be amazed at how much easier it is to motivate children and influence them toward goals and values you aspire to. One lady said,”I love this, in twenty minutes a week I can create more order in my family than I can spending all of my time trying to get them to do what I ask.” If you want a sample of activities you can do with your children click on “the store,” on the menu bar and look at the “Family Solutions” book to see if that will help you. The book is inexpensive compared to most books that size and will show you how to implement this model of family leadership.

The point of all of this is that we need to be much more proactive in organizing and leading our families. The concepts of parenting most of us were reared with placed parental actions after their children’s. This means that we are reactive to what our kids do and feel like we are spending most of our time trying to get them to stop doing something or trying to get them to do something we want them to which they do not want. Quite often this starts a struggle between parents and children that takes many different forms, most of them not happy. Family leadership is a better idea, in my opinion, because it lets parents plan, take the offensive, and exert the type of influence they want.