Photo courtsy of Daria Shevtsova / Pexels

Family meetings—very vividly I remember the first time that I told my husband that we were going to have a family meeting. He looked at me like I had three heads. See, at the time, I was interning at a school, working full time at our store and going to school full time. Our schedule was jam-packed and time was a precious commodity in our home. He still wasn’t fully on board with all of the “Montessori stuff,” as he called it, anyway.

Well, earlier that week, I had been called to the office of the Montessori school where I was interning. My mentor had asked to see me about my son, who was 3 at the time and in another classroom. Being a typical 3-year-old boy, he didn’t realize that I was very hopeful that he would have excellent behavior at the school because I hoped that they would offer me a job at the end of my internship and it didn’t look so great if the teacher’s son was a primary misfit. He also didn’t realize how disruptive it was to the other students during nap time when he would run around the room and use his mat to pretend he was surfing. Clearly, my expectations of my toddler were not really in line with his plane of development. Live and learn. Needless to say, I was anxious going into the meeting. My worst thoughts were that I was going to lose my internship or he was going to be expelled from the school. It was a very long walk to her office that day. . . .

To my surprise, my mentor was not upset. She was solutions-focused and more interested in finding out the root cause to his connection-seeking behaviors (notice here, I didn’t say “attention seeking”). During our meeting one of the questions that she asked was about family meetings. She asked me if we had them and if not, suggested we start immediately. At that time, I really struggled with the connection that his behavior might have with our family holding meetings. It just didn’t make sense to me. But I had so much respect for her wisdom and knowledge, I knew that we would absolutely try.

We started that very week! My mentor gave me some guidelines on how to begin. We started with 10 minutes every Sunday evening. During those early years, our meetings were very simple and fun, and kept us on track for the week and how things were going in our household. Over the years, the meetings grew longer and became a place where harder subjects and bigger emotions were explored. During the teenage years, I was glad to have already made the habits of sharing and connecting. I really credit those family meetings to being able to talk with our kids about the hard stuff. If we don’t listen to the small stuff when they are little, how can we expect them to share the big stuff when they are big? By creating the habit of the family meeting early in their lives, it became a part of our family’s culture.

So, how did those meetings actually help his behaviors? As the second child, it gave him space to speak up in the family and not be overshadowed by his more outgoing sister. It gave a place for the family to air grievances, solve problems and listen equally. It strengthened our children’s (and my hubby’s) listening skills, brainstorming skills, problem–solving skills and ability to cooperate. It gave us the opportunity to cool off before discussing a problem (problems are put on the agenda for the week’s meeting so that everyone could have time to brainstorm solutions). It gave each member of the family a sense of belonging and significance. I am going to repeat that one, because it is the most important: It gave each member of the family a sense of belonging and significance.

Jane Nelson, the creator of Positive Discipline, developed the foundation for family meetings and really articulated their purpose well. According to her, in addition to helping the children choose solutions that are respectful to everyone, showing concern to others and providing accountability, family meetings also offer the following benefits to parents:

– Helps parents to avoid power struggles by sharing control in appropriate ways

– Helps parents to avoid micromanaging their children, so children learn self-discipline

– Listen in ways that invite children to listen

– Respectfully share responsibility

– Create good memories through a family tradition

– Model all the skills they want their children to learn

She goes on to offer a Family Meeting Agenda:

1. Compliments (this might include improvements from last week)

2. Evaluate last week’s solutions

3. This week’s issues

4. Special event

5. Meal planning

6. Calendar (weekly essentials, rides)

7. Family fun planning (we called this family date night)

Having jobs that go with the meeting would also be a great idea. In our house, our son would help create the agenda and our daughter would type up minutes and distribute those to the other family members.

When the pandemic hit and both kids were home with us again, we started having family meetings again. Although we were not perfect with them every week for the entire time they were growing up, we did start the habit very young and it has served us well. Now, when I think back about that conversation with my mentor, I understand that her advice did have an enormously powerful connection to his behaviors, and her wisdom helped change the trajectory of our parenting.

Many of us have had our fill of meetings over the last year, but I promise that this is a meeting that you will value and will help transform your parenting. Book it today!

Next time, we will explore the concept of helicopter parenting and how to recover from it so that your child can independently soar with confidence.