Family Meeting #3--(Day 16)

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”!

Family Meeting Two (Day 8)

The kids actually asked to have our team meeting this Sunday. I’m taking that as a good sign! I came armed with “star charts” and information from the little book, Building Family Communication by the William Gladden Foundation, just published this year. (A review of this booklet can be found in my blog’s Family Resource Reviews section). Before we even sat down at the table, someone had found the “talking spoon” and my daughter had tacked up a huge sheet of paper for our discussions. We discussed upcoming weekly events, positive achievements that each person had this week, reviewed our use of the word “BACON” to halt arguments during our meeting time, and then discussed positive and negative verbal and non-verbal messages based on the Gladden book. Then, we got down to the nitty-gritty. It went a little bit like this, more or less:
MOM: Okay, let’s start with our next item: Positive Family Achievements. Five minutes.
LIZA: Well, we behaved at the football game last night.