Crafting your family's culture 👨👩👧👦
Taking the time to be intentional about raising a family based on the values that are important to you.
This week we’re getting out of the weeds of the everyday and focusing on being intentional about the kind of families we want to build.
In the hectic day-to-day, this is the biggest worry I’ve heard - this idea that we’re doing so much but is it amounting to the right stuff? So we did a little digging on how families tackle this and what we’ve found is surprisingly familiar.
Because it comes down to building culture.
For all of us used to building thoughtful cultures at work, this won’t come as a surprise.
The definition of culture from MIT professor Edgar Schein:
“Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.”
Seen through the lens of our family, this resonates deeply with me: this idea that we’re a little unit that comes together to achieve shared goals.
So this week, we’re breaking down how to get started on the idea of being intentional about building your own unique family culture, living it day-to-day and building regular family check-ins.
Crafting your Family Culture ✨
Figuring out what you want your family’s culture to be comes down to 3 things: Values, Norms+Traditions and Goals+Check-ins.
1) 🏆Start with Values. The first is identifying the core values your family is all about. These can be things like generosity or adventure or creativity. Whatever they are, they’re the backbone of everything else. Come up with a list of 6-8 that most represent your family (we’ve shared a starter list of values in the worksheet below).
2) 🕺🏻Establish Norms and Traditions. The next is how you bring those values to life in your daily life. They’re both the everyday way everyone behaves plus the rituals and special things you do. How you deal with conflict or discipline or even celebrations should be inline with your values, for your kids to see the consistency. It’s also helpful in challenging times like when your kids are acting out or you have a major decision to make, to refer to your values.
3) ✅Check-in around your Goals. To make sure you’re living up to the values, it’s important to do regular reviews. We’ve seen families do anything from quarterly check-ins to once a year “family retreats”. Find a cadence and a structure that feels fun and right for your family. Maybe it’s a family movie night with popcorn, with a quick check-in over dinner. Or maybe it’s a weekend away, with activities all around the themes of your values.
The key here is to just check-in and see if you feel you’re focusing on the right values and if your day to day life is aligned with them, through your norms and traditions.
Bonus: Write a Family Mission Statement. For those of you that love this stuff (🙋🏾♀️), you can even go so far as to craft a mission statement. A short, descriptive set of statements that bring your values to life.
Though it can seem like overkill, I find there is value in clearly articulating in detail your intention, especially in areas where there’s a lot of gray area in the interpretation.
Here’s a worksheet to make it easier (right click, save image):
On a personal note, this week’s topic was personally really meaningful. Our girls are ~8 and 5.5 which is still fairly young, but the idea of “what our family does or believes” is starting to come up a lot - everything from why we love to travel to why our family doesn’t eat meat or why we donate toys we don’t use.
I’m looking forward to sitting down together and explicitly articulating our beliefs and values. To be honest, I think this is something we probably could have done before now, to make sure my husband and I were on the same page about how we thought everything from little things like approach to meals or what play looks like to the big things like discipline and our role as parents.
The bright side is now, our girls can have a say. So we’ve scheduled a little family meeting for next Saturday with a little Leap Year party afterwards, because well, that’s what our family does.
Want to read up more on this topic? Here are a couple of great resources:
Last thing - we’re still in the early days of gathering these “best practices” of busy parents and sharing them out. I’d love the honest feedback - how is it helpful? How is it not? Email me at avni@modernvillage.com with the 😍, the 😕 and the 😫.
Until next week.
Let’s parent forward.
-avni
Coming up:
💰Family finances. What are the biggies that we should all be thinking about and what are the tools and services making it easier?
🥰Relationships - it can be hard to figure out how to find the time and energy to invest back into our relationship with our partner. How do others do it?
🙋🏻♀️Build your Back-up Bench - for those of us that don’t live near family or close friends, it’s a lifesaver having a Back-up Bench of people we can count on in a pinch. We’ll walk through how to build one that works for the long haul.
Do you have tips, tricks or tools that you think could help everyone? Share them here: https://themodernvillage.typeform.com/to/CpIfhT