Every four years in the weeks, and even months, when our country struggles with the responsibility of shared decision making to choose a new president through voting, we get to hear again and again about the passionate values of individuals and groups. This is the way citizens in our country exercise their freedom of speech and their desire to participate in active debate.
You and your children may have been involved in discussing how our elections work, why voting is important, and what issues you feel are crucial in the election. On a more grounded, everyday level, it is practice putting one’s values into words and listening to the points of view of others respectfully that prepares children for the important work of collaboration in the world.
Your children may not be old enough to understand what an election means right now, but they probably aren’t too young to hear about your family’s beliefs about how to treat others. As we digest the results of our elections over the next days and weeks, we might take this as an opportunity to initiate conversations with children about what your family thinks really matters.
Focusing on one’s own family can produce healthy feelings of empowerment during times of divisiveness and change. In his bestselling book The Secrets of Happy Families, Bruce Feiler devotes a whole chapter to the unlikely topic of coming up with your family “brand” or “mission statement.” The process isn’t designed to make your family more like a business but to make family members more aware of and committed to shared ideals.
The idea of family mission statements grew out of the work of Stephen Covey, who wrote the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989. The book was enormously successful, but Covey’s real passion was his family motivating him to publish a subsequent work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families. The habits included “Be proactive; be an agent of change in your family” and “Begin with the end in mind; know the kind of family you want to build.”
Covey reported that creating a family mission statement was a transformative experience for him, his wife, and their nine children. The parents began asking the children question after question, like “What makes you want to come home?” “What embarrasses you in our family?” The children offered their own ideas of what was important. The Covey family mission statement evolved over time into the following:
The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth love, happiness, and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for reach individual to become responsibly independent and effectively interdependent in order to serve worthy purposes in society.
After reading Covey’s work on a family mission statement, Bruce Feiler initially thought the process sounded a little corny, but he also felt inspired. He and his wife, Linda, invited their daughters to come to a pajama party with popcorn, where they took turns coming up with answers to questions like “What words best describe our family?” Adventure was high on their list. The first sentence in their family mission statement was “May our first word be adventure and our last word be love.” The last sentence was “We are joy, rapture, yay!”
If it sounds too time-consuming or complex to come up with a family mission statement, you can start by having discussions about what the family’s favorite activities are or what family rules should be. Family meetings are a wonderful place for these discussions, and Fieler has devoted a whole chapter to how to pull them off successfully. Even preschoolers can participate in family meetings about what they like and want to have more of at home.
Children are used to discussions about rules and values in their classrooms, and over the next months, we will hear more about our mission statement leading up to our 50th anniversary. This is a good time for all of us to renew our ability to articulate what’s most important to us and to bolster our ability to listen respectfully to others.
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