Family Meetings – How to Talk, Listen, and Strengthen Your Family
family meetings
A family meeting is a group discussion of events, feelings, changes, plans, intentions, rules, expectations, praise, support and whatever else the family can think of to discuss. Some teens will balk at having to spend their time with younger siblings, or having to discuss family issues that don’t directly relate to their immediate needs. But if you establish this as a routine part of your family life, the objections and obstacles will diminish with time as each child and parent realizes the advantages.
Advantages of Family Meetings
Family meetings strengthen families by helping each child and each parent learn how to appropriately express feelings and concerns. It also gives family members an opportunity to practice listening and talking skills and to learn the arts of negotiation and conflict resolution. As well, family meetings are a concrete demonstration of the importance of your family and they give each family member an opportunity to provide, or to seek, shelter with one another.
As they grow older, children and youth learn that they can broach difficult issues in a non-hostile manner. And, parents learn that their children have important issues and can offer solutions when given the opportunity to present them appropriately.
Organizing a Family Meeting
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” – Jane Howard
In today’s busy and complex world, focusing on family communication is very important. In essence, sound family communication is the foundation of trust in the family and hence the quality of family decisions that get made. What ever the level of wealth in your family, the life and financial decisions that get made and how they impact family members are very important to family unity. How can you have sound family communication if your family never properly gets together as a family unit? Why are you holding back from organizing a family meeting? More importantly, are you concerned about some “hot” issues that may get raised? What happens if someone gets very emotional? If yes, the key then is to start planning a family meeting and hopefully make it an annual event. Remember, every family has some level of dysfunction so you need to realize that but not let it deter you from having a meeting.
In planning the family meeting, whatever your place in or relationship to the family, you need to have a positive mind-set. The meeting is more likely to be successful if every one comes to the meeting wanting to enhance family unity and achieve a positive outcome. Choosing what you want to talk about as a family unit is also very important. This will somewhat differ for each family depending on the state of family dynamics, the circumstance the family is in, the opportunities and the problems. Certainly, it is safer to choose areas to discuss that will minimize the potential for confrontation. This is particularly important until the family is used to meeting and handling conflict together. You also need to ensure that the whole experience of the family meeting is warm and exciting, even if there are large and/or financial issues to discuss.
