Welcome to week 5’s Family Meeting! This agenda is to help you organize your meeting and family practice session. Â It includes skills to practice from the week’s lessons, plus SFP activities each person did during the week. You can print this agenda, or have it on a phone, tablet, etc. to look at during the meeting.
Family meeting rules:
- Use an agenda.
- One person talks at a time.
- Everyone gets a chance to talk, if they want to.
- No one puts anyone down.
- Keep it short and sweet!
Each week, during your Learn & Earn Lessons, each family member is asked to share ideas. The Family Meeting is a time to review those ideas.
At every meeting:
- Compliments: Say something you like about each person
- Calendar: List activities or events each person has scheduled for the upcoming week
- Past Business: Discuss your SFP activities progress and rewards
- New Business: Discuss current SFP goals and practice skills
- Value Message: Share pro-social family beliefs
- Have Fun! Games and treats
Power Phrase:
Punishment creates resentment and doesn’t produce lasting change, while Positive Discipline produces long-term good behavior, and better family relationships.
Agenda Item #1: Positive Practices
Review
“Positive Practice” is the foundation for all the other 6 steps of Positive Discipline.
Positive Practices Chart
Negative Consequences. A negative consequence is effective when it helps bring about long-term positive change in a child’s behavior, while still preserving a loving parent/child relationship. The difference between punishment and positive discipline is intent: the intent of punishment is to inflict pain; the intent of positive discipline is to train a child in positive, pro-social behaviors.
Punishment is ineffective because it does not bring about long-term change and it harms relationships so children don’t want to please you.
Choosing consequences ahead of time enables you to be fair (kids know what to expect), fit the consequence size to the misbehavior, and teach missing skills to help your child improve long-term behavior. Consequences should include a “response cost”–the time, effort, or money the child needs to give to “make it right.”
Chore Jar. You might have done an exercise of writing down ideas for “extra” chores for mild consequences. We’ve added the Chore Jar Activity this to the Bonus Family Activities list, to practice if you have time this week!
Calm Corrections. When a kid makes a mistake, adults may provide negative consequences. The negative consequence helps the child know they made a wrong choice, and helps them change behavior to have a happy, successful life.
The consequences should be given kindly and calmly, and the child should stay calm, demonstrating self-control. The kids are tracking their responses to corrections to make sure they stayed calm. Adults will also be tracking corrections to be certain that they are giving calm corrections. The attitude and skills below help adults remain calm:
Attitude #1: I want to be a personal trainer for my child, not a punisher.
Attitude #2: Anger makes my brain less effective, distracts my kids from what I want them to learn, and harms relationships.
Attitude #3: I can choose to not be angry.
Skill #1: As soon as a child misbehaves, take a deep, calming breath before saying anything.
Skill #2: When a child misbehaves, think of it as a teaching moment, and ask yourself, “What skill is my child missing in this situation?”
Skill #3: Use this pattern to help you give calm consequences:
   1) “I understand you feel . . . ” (Express empathy.)
   2) “Just now you . . . ” (Use “Just now…” to say what they did wrong; never use the word “but”.)
   3) “What you need to do is . . . ” (Tell the skill they should have used instead.)
   4) “By choosing to . . ., you have earned a negative consequence of . . . “
   5) “If you want to practice the skill of . . . right now, we will reduce the negative consequence to . . .”
Directions
Discuss, as a family, how calm corrections have been working out. Are kids taking corrections calmly? Adults giving corrections calmly? We’ll continue to monitor these in later meetings, so keep using the form until it becomes a habit for ALL family members to give and receive corrections calmly.
Family members have been suggesting Minor, Medium and Major consequences that they think will be effective in their Family Activity. Here are the entries to date. If there are none listed, you can create them now.Â
Your Family's "Our Consequences" Entries
Agenda Item #2: Targeted behaviors and consequences
Review
This week you learned about how setting aside “My Time” for parents to spend with children leads to happier family relationships.Â
Directions
What behaviors are you specifically targeting for correction? Don’t try to correct them all at once! Everyone can be more successful if you start with just a few specific behaviors.
Warning Cue: As a family, decide on a simple warning cue. It can be a single word or phrase, like “you MUST …” The word MUST is the warning cue in this example. If a parent asks a child to do something (or stop doing something) the first request should be a polite “Child, will you please … ?” After a reasonable time to respond has passed, then the parent can use the warning cue “Child, you MUST…”
Right now, agree upon a warning cue, and write it down for the family to remember.
Our Targeted Behaviors. Type in the behaviors and consequences you are targeting. These will be available in the Family Activities for modification as your family needs change. If you prefer, write these on a sheet of paper instead: you just need the behavior, and the resulting consequence. Chose a few specific behaviors that you hope to have kids stop doing (and only when positive practices are not working!)
Agenda Item #3: Rules, Rewards and Consequences
Review
Together as a family, we create rules that establish rights and responsibilities, teach children pro-social values, and keep them safe. When children help make rules, they are more likely to obey them.Â
Directions
Use this form to add rewards for following family rules, and consequences for breaking them. Rules that are fair, firm, and consistently reinforced and enforced, help children feel more secure and develop better self-control.Â
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BONUS ACTIVITY: Pro-Social Skills for a Successful Life
(How to get along with parents and everyone else)
Social skills (see below) help children function well in society. It helps them develop “emotional intelligence” — the ability to manage emotions and respond in a pro-social way. If you have time in today’s Family Meeting (or some time during the week), help kids memorize the steps of each skill and practice different pretend situations using them. Reward them for practicing, and track and reward real-life performance. When kids forget to use the skills, have them do “Positive Practice.”
SOCIAL SKILLS
