This week was a change as the kids actually begged for the family meeting. We had so many interruptions during the weekend that we ended up having our family meeting during dinner, but that worked out well as we decided on pizza (a favorite, rare dinner—YUM!). Although we need a lot of practice communicating, it seems like we are accomplishing something…though I’m not sure what! We are almost done working on our actions and consequences board. Also, we reviewed upcoming weekly responsibilities for school and work—so that everyone knows “what’s going on”, and we added a new part to our discussion of individual achievements and family achievements—we each had to say something we liked about one another. This worked really very well. I think it’s a “keeper”!
We finished our discussion of positive and negative verbal and non-verbal messages and our review of how they worked this week, Joey said that “other people were really nice and Jay was really positive with me this week”, Dad said that “This worked well for us”, Jay and Kenny said they saw no difference this week, and Liza said “I like that Joey and I were better to each other”. It seemed to me that the focus made us all more aware of positive and negative messages and how they can affect others in our family. So for that awareness, J. Denis Mercier’s book Building Family Communication, worked well.
As far as family meetings in general, the kids seem to like that it helps us to sort out problems and my daughter said that she feels that it brings us closer together. Two of the other kids only like it for being able to pick out a family activity from a hat! J So we’re off running…I can’t wait to see where this brings us!
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