Defining Values for Your Family

  Motivated by this "Blink" parenting series, I realized that much of what we have been doing as a family has been reactive or we've simply been "winging" it.  Mark Beeson mentioned the idea of having a Values Statement for your family.  What are things you value in your family?  Where is it that we want our family to be in 5 years? 10 years?  Are we thinking of leaving a multi-generational legacy for our family?

Here were some of the questions we asked our 11 and 9 year old as we started to define who we were and who we wanted to be this past week:

• What makes our family a family?  Why is it that when you look at your sister or brother, it's different than someone else at school?
• What kind of people do we want to be?
• What do we think it important?
• What are things we choose to do as a family we consider important?
• How will we treat each other?
• What things are unique just to our family?
• What times did we have the most fun as a family?  What are things you'll always remember?
• What do you think it will be like in 5 or 10 years?  What kind of parent do you want to be?
• When do you feel most hurt?  What should we change or be a value in our family?
• Are there examples when you feel like we haven't been a good family?  What did we learn? 
• What kind of family should we be to others that are not part of our family?

We've filled up 3 sheets of a large flip chart so far as we explored these questions... the kids had a great time taking turns writing the answers...  Really the questions are to simply explore what's worked, what hasn't work, what we remember, etc...  In the next few weeks we hope to actually put this in writing and have something to point back to as a family.

Have any of you done this in your family?  What did you come up with? 

If you haven't already checked it out, here's a place where people are sharing their parenting ideas, successes, and learnings....  there's some great information here from the lessons of others:  http://gccwired.com/parentExchange.asp

"Short term parenting is focused on changing behavior, long term parenting focuses on changing the heart."- Rob Wegner  3/7/10