Welcome to week 10’s Family Meeting!
(This is the LAST one for this course!)
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:
Our happiness is directly related to adopting pro-social values, giving service to others, and bonding with fun family traditions and happy family rituals.
Agenda Item #1: Fun Family Traditions
Review
Family traditions are ways of celebrating events or happenings that help kids have fun and feel a sense of identity, belonging, and connectedness. Traditional celebrations can happen once a year, like a family reunion or a holiday celebration, or take place on a monthly or weekly basis like a monthly Sunday dinner with relatives or a Friday night family board game. A monthly “Give Back to My Community” day of service helps kids develop empathy and respect for their community. This might be a day helping elderly neighbors, helping the less fortunate, or picking up trash in the park. A tradition can also be a “family cheer” to celebrate a success, like good grades, or a group hug for making it through a hard day. Regardless of how your family decides to celebrate or serve, it’s all about happy, healthy togetherness.
Directions
Below are some of the family traditions, and ideas for making them better, entered by your own family! Is there anything you would like to add?
Your Family's "Fun Family Traditions" Entries
Agenda Item #2: Planning a Service Activity
Review
You also learned about how giving back to your family, school and community can bring family members joy and purpose.
Directions
Below are the entries that were made by family members. Discuss these ideas. What would you enjoy doing? Are, or anyone in your family already doing any of these?
Your Family's Entries
Agenda Item #3: We can contribute!
Review
Like the air we breathe, the benefits we get from society are so prevalent that we often take them for granted. Discuss how so much of what you enjoy was paid for by the work and sacrifice of those who came before you. Benefits do come with a cost. Families have responsibility to pass on a stable, orderly, and well-maintained society to the next generation. Parents need to help kids come to a realization that they have an obligation to protect and build society. Everyone has the capacity within themselves to become a positive “agent of change” in their family, with their peers, and even their community.
Directions
Help your kids make a list of all the benefits they enjoy from society. Then write down the anti-social activities that tear down or harm society. Include the ripple effect of things such as using drugs, tagging others’ property, cheating on taxes, not voting, or drunk driving.
Then discuss and brainstorm what you and your kids can do to make society stronger. Every contribution helps!
Agenda Item #4: Family Motto and Shield
Directions
Here is another fun family activity: Invent your own family motto!
Your motto is a brief statement that expresses the values and beliefs of your family. For hundreds of years, families have created mottoes and put it on their family shield or crest to let people know what they stood for and aspired to be.
Some examples of family mottoes are: “All for one and one for all.” “In difficulty, win by patience.” “We are strong with love.” “No one gets left out.”
As a family, thoughtfully develop a motto and write it in the banner on the shield. Enjoy designing, coloring, and being creative with your family shield and then post in a prominent place.
WHAT'S NEXT?
Your family has learned and practiced a lot of new skills! Just because the course has ended doesn’t mean you can’t keep learning and practicing! Here are some of the things that you might consider:
- Come up with ways to encourage everyone in the family to continue Mindfulness Practices
- Remember that Family Dinners should be planned and provide a place for interesting conversations to happen
- Weekly Family Meetings, with an agenda and important topics to be discussed, will help keep everyone in the family informed and provide a safe way to discuss difficult topics
- Monitoring your kids is important as they grow, and especially during the teenage years
- Using positive discipline and rewards ALWAYS works better than any other way of shaping kids’ behaviors
- Practice, practice, practice your newly learned communication skills, as you will find them useful in every aspect of your lives