Monthly Family Meetings

In our house, we have a monthly family meeting. I know, it sounds very corporate.

We learned about this from our child's school, and honestly, at first, we thought, "really? a meeting with agenda?" We thought at 6 years old our child was too young, because he couldn't participate anyway. But we decided to try it out because the school uses the Socratic method, focused on feedback and democracy.

Since we believe in the Socratic method and experimenting, the natural thing to do is give it a go.

In the first meeting, we had no expectation of our son participating, but he actually sat through a half-hour discussion about our household routines. We were impressed he managed to stay focused, considering his attention span is usually no more than ten minutes.

Since then, in the past 2 years we only skipped 2 meetings due to being abroad.

Family meeting is something we highly recommend all families try. If it doesn’t work the first time, don't judge too quickly. Try again in a different format, at least three times over three months then you decide. Some families do it every other month, or they try again the next year when the child is older.

Here are some tips to give a higher chance of successful family meeting. Definition of success: everyone feels heard and there's no meltdowns. Whether your agenda gets approved or not is a different thing which we'll cover later.

Tip 1: Ensure your child isn’t hungry or tired. They need to be physiologically in a good place to focus.

Tip 2: Don’t do it just before something exciting happens, because they’ll just want to rush through it to get to the next thing. Agreements may be half hearted and you may win your agenda now but its not a long win.

Tip 3: I know some families do this but we personally don't. They would have a reward like pizza after the meeting. Personally, I’m not a fan of using food as a reward but I get that it’s an easy all-rounder option.

To get your agenda approved is similar to how a corporate meeting work: no surprises. Prepare the stakeholders ahead of the meeting with persuasive arguments that benefits them. Best case scenario is to get buy in so that you know what the outcome will be, the meeting is just a formality. If you can't get agreement ahead of the meeting, at least the stakeholder is prepared on both sides of the argument and has some time to mull about it. I believe people think in two ways. Current present moment and during reflection. Both ways of thinking surface different reasonings.

Definitely give it a try, guys!