Family Meeting – Lesson 4
Each of you should bring these tracking sheets with your entries:
- Family Rules Idea Sheet
- Family Rewards Idea Sheet
- BONUS: Family Rituals, and Family Jobs
Welcome to week 4’s Family Meeting! This agenda is to help you organize your meeting and family practice session. 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.
NOTE: We recommend you open Family Meeting Agendas on a laptop, computer or tablet during your meeting, so the whole family can follow along.
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
Repeat This Week’s Power Phrase:
Rules, Rewards, Responsibilities, and Routines help create order in a home and train children to become responsible, thoughtful adults.
Agenda Item #1: Family Rules
Review
This week you learned about how having well defined family rules makes it easier for everyone in the family to know what is expected of them. Rules that are fair, firm, and consistently reinforced and enforced, help children feel more secure and develop better self-control.
Directions
Directions: Together as a family, create rules that establish rights and responsibilities, teach kids pro-social values, and keep them safe. When kids help make rules, they’re more likely to follow them.
This week, we’ll focus only on the positive consequences, the “rewards” for following family rules. Next week, you will add negative consequences for breaking them. Rules need consequences, both negative and positive, to encourage people to follow them!
Review Your Family Rules Tracking. How well are all members of the family doing in tracking following the rules? Here is a tracking form (Online Rules Tracking Form) you can use to keep good track of when you follow rules this coming week!
Here are the family rules selected by your family members, for you to review, edit and discuss during this meeting:
Print-Friendly Family Tracking Sheet:
Your Family's "Family Rules" Entries
Oops! We could not locate your form.
Agenda Item #2: Rewards
Review
Kids like working for rewards. Rewards are like pay for doing a good job. Research shows that linking a reward to a behavior-change goal is the best way to improve a child’s behavior. It also shows that positive consequences bring about lasting behavior change more powerfully than punishment.
This week, we will focus only on rewards; next week, we will discuss negative consequences.
For reference, here are some guidelines for rewards:
There are three types of rewards:
- Social rewards: Compliments, praise, or hugs
- Privileges: Fun activities, trips, outings, or special events
- Material rewards: Clothes, treats, money, or games
How should you use these rewards?
- Child earns points towards the reward each time he/she does the behavior (even in practice).
- Reward a child with sincere, specific enthusiastic praise.
- After the behavior is firmly in place, switch the reward to another behavior.
Here are six rules of effective rewarding:
- Make sure the reward is rewarding. Rewards work better if they’re smaller and more frequent; or if a child can quickly earn points toward a bigger reward.
- Reward immediately. If it’s not immediate, it doesn’t reinforce the behavior.
- Show you are pleased with the child when you reward them. Smile, look at your child and include a kind touch.
- Tell your child exactly what you liked. Make it clear which behavior is being rewarded.
- Reward consistently and often. In the beginning, reward the desired behavior every time it happens. As the good behavior occurs more regularly, you can change the system to build toward a bigger reward. The challenge holds a child’s interest.
- Never offer a reward to stop bad behavior. (“Stop crying, and I’ll give you a treat.”) This trains children to misbehave for rewards.
Directions
Review the rewards your kids have selected (these can be discussed and modified now during the meeting, as well as later by each child.) If blank, you might need to add them during the meeting, or have your children go back and fill them in on their own devices and discuss this week during your Family Dinners.
Note: Next week, we are going to link the Family Rules with appropriate Rewards for following the rules as well as appropriate consequences for breaking rules. For now, just focus on Rules and Rewards.
Print-Friendly Family Tracking Sheet:
Your Family's "Rewards" Entries
Oops! We could not locate your form.
BONUS ACTIVITY: Family Chores
In this lesson you learned the value of children sharing in household chores. The Bonus Family Activity Family Jobs List has a list of common family chores and a way to assign them to family members.
Print-Friendly Family Tracking Sheet: