Get it Together! - The Family Council

If you hope to reach goals as a family, if you want to be more unified, if you need an organized way to approach problems, set rules, and plan for tomorrow, the following suggestion is a good way to begin. I'll call it Family Council, you can call it whatever you'd like. Simply stated, a family council happens anytime two or more members of a family discuss something of importance to them as individuals or to the family as a whole. There are two types -informal and formal- and they have a symbiotic relationship. If you can become more successful in one, the other will follow suit. I'm really here to talk about the latter, but I can't without at least mentioning the first.

Informal family councils take place all the time- when siblings get along, negotiate, or quarrel, when a parent asks a child how things are going, or a child expresses a need or concern to a parent, and when husband and wife talk together. The way we communicate with each other and the frequency of good informal communication will, in a large part, determine how the family comes together to set and accomplish goals using formal family councils. I think that a successful formal council hinges on each member feeling that they and their thoughts are respected and needed. The way to foster feelings of being valued is to participate in (and often instigate) good informal family coucils. In other words: talk to each other as much as you can! Laugh together. Share your troubles and successes. Ask questions. Learn to listen.

Then you can have formal family councils. Formal family councils can include the whole family. They can also involve just a few members when what needs to be addressed doesn't involve the whole family. In our case, half of the members of our family have very limited speech, so for now, Patrick and I meet after the others go to bed. Formal family councils are not spontaneous. They are planned on for a specific purpose. They can be spontaneous when needed, but they should also happen regularly. They can be used to make short term and long term plans, to calendar and correlate everyone's schedules, to discuss family finances, to bring up problems and find solutions, to set goals as a family and determine how to accomplish them. Sometimes the things we talk about are very practical, like: we need to remember that the recycling truck picks up this Saturday instead of Friday or when and where will we go on vacation. Often, we talk about ways we want to improve as a family. This blog is a result of a discussion in family council that involved the desire to do more to help strengthen families and talk of possible ways to do that. With that said, the following are my suggestions on how to make family council happen...

Getting Started with Family Councils

Preparation:

1. Pick a day for regular family councils. We hold our's every Sunday evening, but they don't necessarily have to be weekly. Just hold them frequent enough to meet your family's needs. It helps to be consistent about when you meet, even if it is only monthly. That way, everyone knows what to expect and comes better prepared to contribute.
   
2. This one is especially important if you're about to hold your very first family council (so it isn't regular yet): Let everyone know about it and briefly explain what it is. Maybe this is obvious, but nothing puts a damper on a meeting like having participants who refuse to participate because they weren't notified about it early enough or because they didn't know to come prepared.
   
3. Everyone should start preparing for family council now! Write down things to discuss as you think of them throughout the week. When I forget this step, I often sit down at council Sunday evening with absolutely nothing to say -not because I couldn't think of things earlier in the week, but because I can't seem to remember them when the opportunity for discussion arrives. (This doesn't mean you should wait until next week's council to solve pressing issues when they come up...)
   
4. Elect someone to lead the council -usually a parent. This person plays the part of mediator and is responsible for keeping order and making sure every voice is heard.
   If you plan on reviewing the budget in family council, it helps to have someone account for all expenditures and update the budget generally, prior to coming together.
   

At the Council:

1. We always do 2 things at the beginning of each meeting: Review the budget and correlate our calendars. It really helps to talk about how we're doing with our budget each week. Fewer things are able to take us by surprise, we're able to better plan for upcoming expenses, and we know when we need to cut back on something before it's too late. I also imagine that it will be a useful tool in teaching children responsibility with money to include them in the discussion of family finances. As for calendars, all I feel inclined to say is that plans that are written down (especially in a place where everyone can see them) are a lot more likely to happen than plans that fail to make it to paper.
   
2. Each member of the council (i.e. every person) has a turn to present their ideas, problems, needs, etc. For each concern expressed, there should be opportunity for discussion -like an open forum (or perhaps a debate in some cases). Try not to continue on to the next person or even the next concern of the same person until the issue at hand is resolved in some way, even if the resolution is simply a plan to continue the discussion somewhere else. This may be a good spot for me to say that if something is brought up which doesn't involve most of the family, you should probably plan a different time to discuss it.
   
3. Remember that you have a mediator... In my humble opinion, the key to success in a family council is that every person feels important and knows that their ideas/opinions are valued. The mediator, or leader, is responsible for helping maintain an environment in which each person can feel this way. This may involve asking questions and making sure that everyone has expressed their feelings on a matter (this is especially crucial when individuals are shy or reticent).
   
4. Take Notes. Similar to writing schedules down on the calendar, if you want your meeting to be worth anything, I recommend writing everything down. Patrick and I just take our own notes, but maybe with a bigger family it would help to have one person take and copy the minutes for everyone to have. It is important that everyone remembers what went on at family council and what decisions were made. You will find that things happen as a result of family council, but not if you don't record what is supposed to happen.
   

A Few Additional Ideas:

1. It may help for husband and wife to counsel together before pulling the whole family into a family council -that way they are on the same page going into it.
   
2. Sometimes it is appropriate and extremely helpful to seek the help of extended family. Even if they are far away, there are so many opportunities, thanks to technology, to keep in touch and counsel together. Older generations can offer wisdom and experience that you might not have yet. Sometimes a grandparent, aunt, or uncle can say something to a child that would have been rejected or caused rebellion had it come from the parent.
   
3. It doesn't usually work out when parents show up to family coucil with a list of dos and don'ts. It's okay to come with an idea about desired outcomes, but those outcomes are a lot more likely to actually happen if they were reached through discussion instead of demand.

We didn't always do family council. In the beginning, we would look at our calendars on Monday and review the budget when there was an emergency or other immediate concern. It's not like we didn't talk or were totally disorganized, but when we decided to start this family council thing there were immediate and noticeable improvements. We suddenly had a regular time when we could set a direction for our family and an environment that encouraged it. So, we'd like to invite everyone to give it a try and hopefully find, as we did, that family council helps your family to get it together!