What About Family Meetings?

One of my sons decided to try a parenting approach we developed at the Legacy Foundation to help promote achievement in school. This approach is based on the idea that family leadership should include providing a structure for children and the way to do that is for parents to meet with the whole family. He and his wife have four children, three great boys and one marvelous little girl. When they started, they met together and decided they would work out arrangements for work, for their relationships, and family rules. One son is fourteen, the other is ten, the the other is five. Everyone in the family had some work assigned. They talked over new ways to improve how they treated each other. They all agreed to start work each summer day before nine thirty and have it all done by noon. They had other rules and other relationship ideas, all organized to make themselves into a very good family.

As he told about what happened he said the very next week they all worked better and his wife felt like she had a wonderful new tool to use in organizing the family where all the kids are home for the summer. The next week the work didn’t go so well, but they had a family meeting and talked over what was done well and what was not. Some improvements took place the following week, but still there were areas that could be improved. As they went along they made appropriate adjustments to account for special events and so forth. But, he said, when the boys know we are going to have a family meeting they feel much more responsible. He had discovered a way to promote accountability without yelling.

I have worked in this non profit foundation for the last few years and have worked to develop this parental approach and tested it in hundreds of families. We were apprehensive it would not work in some families where there was little leadership or where cultural conditions did not allow for this form of democratic approach. We were wrong. This method of using family meetings softens autocratic parenting because meeting with kids and organizing to create a “great family,” works better and takes less parental pressure to get kids to implement what was agreed upon. Where there is too little leadership parents have found the simple structure to be within their motivation and skill set. It only didn’t work when parents did not care what the kids did.

It is interesting to see how important families are to the children in them. They will work hard to make certain they do their part to create a good family and avoid the consequence of hurting someone else. They will adjust and improve how they treat each other in order to accomplish the same goal. Rules, an appropriate number of them, come to be seen as useful guidelines rather than coercive devices. Probably the most important thing is the fact that all family members are working together to achieve common goals. This strengthens the feelings of attachment that are often missing when families do not eat or talk much together.

Many of us need a sudden about face when it comes to our families. It is heartening to hear how more men are becoming more invested in being parents. And, it is no longer so socially regressive to want to be a mother and wife full time. I believe it is possible for everyone to get more of what is important to them and still have a great family if families work together, communicate together, and develop work, relationships, and rules which they apply.