Create Your Family Vision

Something that we’ve been doing since way before kids and continue to do so since our little treasure came along 4½ years ago is to create a Family Vision, or a Family Mission for the year.

The beauty of this is, it works whether you’re part of a family unit, a single parent, in a partnership with no kids and even just for yourself!

Most parents want their family to be kind, patient, selfless, thoughtful, fun, grateful, share, play nice, respectful, honest, balanced, community oriented, disciplined....and that’s just the start of the list. I’m sure you can add a few more!

However, in order to spend less time getting frustrated and snippy with your kids/partner, increase your family unity and therefore decrease your stress, everyone in your family needs to be on the same page as far as values and "rules" are concerned. A fun and effective way of doing this is for you all to create your Family/Team vision for the up and coming year. Here’s how you can do it.

Gather together old magazine, comics, leaflets - anything with really bright pictures and words on. You’ll also need a large piece of paper - I always use a flipchart sheet - some glue and scissors

Gather everyone together and ask this question: What do we want this year to look like for us as a family/team?

You might want to change some of the wording, depending on how old your children are. But essentially, you’re looking for everyone’s input into a few rules and values which would make everyone’s lives easier and happier over the coming months

Once people have started thinking bout what they’d like to see, they each cut and tear out pictures, or words from the magazines which represent a value, or a rule, or a principle, or something to live up to. Last year the pictures my little girl chose were all Disney pictures, or ice creams, but that’s fine. She joined in and we could still use some of what she’d chosen!

Once you’ve got all the pictures and words, everyone starts to stick them on the large sheet and discuss why they’ve specifically chosen them. Its great to have some music on in the background and it really gets you into the heads and hearts of your family members

Then, from everything you’ve got, try and pick out between 5 and 10 values/rules/principles you all want to live by over the coming year

Once you’ve decided, ask this question: How would we know we were all walking our talk with this value/principle/rule? What would we be doing? This helps bring each one to life for everyone, especially the younger members

Make a commitment together that as a family/partnership, you’re going to stick to these values as a way of loving and living together. You could even ask one of the children to make a poster with the values written up, and put it up in the kitchen. Spending time together and working out what a successful happy family looks like to you is fun and it cuts right down on the niggles and stresses you may have had previously, because everyone has contributed to it and everyone has agreed to it.

Then simply enjoy how it knits you all together even more tightly over this next year!