Family Meetings and Organized Living
Parenting Tips for Teaching Personal Organization Skills

Family meetings are an excellent way to establish structure and communication in an organized home. You can achieve organized living and teach your children personal organization skills with these parenting tips.

Regular family communication helps to achieve an organized home.

Creating a structure for the family to come together and talk provides many benefits to your family life.

Your family communication will improve and you establish a venue for the family to review specific structures that are already in place and might not be working well.

In order to help your family achieve organized living the family meetings should be regular and systematic.

Your children will learn how to:

• take turns
• function in a group
• function within the democratic process works - not everybody gets what they want all the time.
• plan
• set up rules and guidelines
• express dissatisfactions and frustrations non-violently
• problem solve
• listen to others concerns (empathy)

All of these are important for personal organization, but most importantly your children will be heard and know that they have a safe place to talk about family life.

Parenting Tips for Structuring Family Meetings

• have regular meetings at the same date and time that has been agreed to - this encourages a high level of commitment from everyone. Not attending means that your views and ideas will not be heard.


• Start and end on time - you are trying to teach your children the personal organization skill of punctuality. If you are not on time there is a good chance they won't be either.


• Make sure that the agreed upon rules have been written down and are brought to every meeting.


• Have an agenda and stick to it - leave the agenda in a highly visible, accessible spot where family members can write down items for the upcoming meeting.


• Always start with a gratitude or thank you "go round" - "I would like to thank_____________for ....." or "I am grateful for....."


• Keep minutes - this is essential. It is so easy for people to misinterpret what was agreed to at the meeting but writing it down gives the family a record to go back to.


Go from the article on family meetings to the list of age appropriate chores for children

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Parenting Advice for Raising the Responsible Citizens of Tomorrow.
• Change the rules as needed - children will grow and acquire different skills over time so the rules may need to be adjusted as long as everyone agrees to them.


• Don't tackle too many problems at one meeting - if your family meetings just become a place to make complaints you will be defeated before there can be any benefit to the family. If there are a number of items on the agenda that cannot be dealt with at a single meeting ask the family to decide which ones are most important. This helps to teach your children how to set priorities.


• Make decisions by consensus if possible - if you think you are all going to agree on something you are not being realistic. The democratic process means that the majority of people in the family get their way. Consensus, however, means that a everyone can at least live with the solution, even those who do not get what they want. They don't have to like it just agree to live with it!


• Make sure everyone is heard - even very small children can have an idea or opinion.

Remember if your meetings aren't organized your family won't be either! If you want to improve family communication and teach your children about personal organization you have to be a good role model.

You will be amazed at the power of family meetings in achieving a more organized home.