I’ve always wanted to hold weekly family meetings. It sounds like a good plan: meet weekly, have an opportunity to talk about and work on family values, give children input, and celebrate successes together. I first heard about it when I bought a book from Focus on the Family and Heritage Builders called Holidays Family Nights Tool Chest . I tried it, but maybe my kids were too young, maybe my heart wasn’t in it, for whatever reason we never got it off the ground.

Recently, we started doing a chore program called Accountable Kids and part of the program is a weekly family forum. We decide meeting sounded too formal and forum sounded too vague so we are are calling it our family Pow-Wow. For the last three weeks we’ve held Sunday night Pow Wows. Basically, we talk about how the program worked for us, we give kudos to the kiddos, and talk about upcoming events, schedules, a certain target value/behavior, and each child’s individual behavior issues or praises. Oh, and the best part for the kids is they get paid for their paid chores.

Here is the interesting part, my 9 year old LOVES it. He will spend all Sunday reminding me about the Pow Wow. Maybe it’s because he knows he will get paid that night. Maybe it’s because we’ll have a fun dessert afterwards, I don’t know. Whatever the reason he loves it.

Here is why I love it:

• I get to spend time with my whole family and I have their undivided attention
• We give the kids kudos for getting their chores done and behaving appropriately
• The kids have input and share their concerns and thoughts
• We are working on character traits and values
• We are creating responsible children through the Accountable Kids program
• We are celebrating our blessings by getting to Pay our children for certain chores
• We are teaching our children to give and save by using another cool little gadget I found the Moon Jar

There is no perfect way to do a family meeting, forum, pow-wow, whatever you want to call it, but here are some basic guidelines I’ve found useful:

1. Have an agenda: I know it sounds so formal, but it does help with the flow.

2. Let the kids talk, in fact my son often takes over and says “does anyone else have anything to say?”

3. Make it short, kids can’t handle 2 hour meetings like my poor hubby has to endure.

4. Have something fun to do or yummy to eat after wards.

5. Let the kids add to the agenda.

6. For me, I am starting to include a scripture reading, just a small portion of the Bible relevant to our meeting, family, etc.

7. Something I might add this week is sharing a High and a Low. A High being something great that happened that week and a Low being something not so great. I heard a DJ on our Christian music station sharing about doing that daily at home, but I think once a week would be enough for us.

I found a collection of articles about family meetings on the web, here are a few that had some interesting ideas:

Ideas for Planning a Regular Family Meeting

How to Hold a Family Meeting

This link is specifically about Heritage Builders which is part of Focus on the Family. They have three  down-loadable activities to do with your children during Family Nights.Family Nights are a little different from the Family Meetings that I am doing, but family meetings could be part of Family Night as well!

Ligia