A Family Mission Statement

What, a family mission statement?!! Companies have mission statements and they understand the power of having a mission statement. Families can have mission statements too! A mission statement will create a powerful bonding between parents and children, between husbands and wives that simply does not exist when there’s no sense of shared vision and values. A clear sense of a shared vision and values enables you to hold each other accountable without conflict. It also enables both you and your children to self-regulate. But most importantly through a family mission statement you can let your children and or spouse know that you are totally committed to them, that you have been from the moment they came into your life and that the bond has never been broken and never will be broken and that nothing can happen that will ever break it. Below are three steps to help you develop your own family mission statement.

Step 1: Explore What Your Family is All About.

What is the purpose of our family?
What kind of family do we want to be?
What kinds of things do we want to do?
What kind of feelings do we want to have in our home?
What kind of relationships do we want to have with one another?
How do we want to treat one another and speak to one another?
What things are truly important to us as a family?
What are our family’s highest priority goals?
What are the unique talents, gifts, abilities of family members?
What are our responsibilities as family members?
What are the principles and guidelines we want our family to follow?
Which families inspire us and why do we admire them?
How can we contribute to society as a family and become more service-oriented?

Ground Rules
• Listen with respect
• Restate accurately to show you understand
• Write down all the ideas

Step 2: Write Your Family Mission Statement
I have listed examples below, however, I think it’s best to try to come up with you own! One suggestion is to:
• Give everyone ten 3x5 cards
• Everyone write ten words on each card, share the cards.
• Now, give everyone ten votes. The ten cards with the most votes win.
• Write a sentence using each word or write a paragraph using all ten words.


Step 3: Use It to Stay on Track
A family mission statement serves as a huge magnet that keeps attracting family members to the route that leads to your destination.

EXAMPLES:
The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for each individual to become responsibly independent, and effectively interdependent, in order to serve worthy purposes in society.

If your children are really small, you might want to go with something really simple like:
We do not hurt others.
We do not hurt things.
We do not hurt ourselves.

Our family mission is to:
Value honesty with ourselves and others.
Create an environment where each of us can find support and encouragement in achieving our life’s goals.
Respect and accept each person’s unique personality and talents.
Promote a loving, kind, and happy atmosphere.
Support family endeavors that better society.
Maintain patience through understanding.
Always resolve conflicts with each other rather than harboring anger.
Promote the realization of life’s treasures.

Our family mission:
To love each other…
To help each other…
To believe in each other…
To wisely use our time, talents, and resources to bless other…
To worship together…
Forever.

Our home will be a place where our family, friends, and guests find joy, comfort, peace and happiness. We will seek to create a clean and orderly environment that is livable and comfortable. We will exercise wisdom in what we choose to eat, read, see, and do at home. We want to teach our children to love, learn, laugh, and to work and develop their unique talents.

Our family is happy and has fun together.
We all feel secure and feel a sense of belonging. We support each other fully in our seen and unseen potential. We show unconditional love in our family and inspiration for each other. We are a family where we can continually grow in mental, physical, social/emotional and spiritual ways.
We discuss and discover all aspects of life.
We nurture all life forms and protect the environment.
We are a family that serves each other and the community.
We are a family of cleanliness and order.
We believe that diversity of race and culture is a gift.
We appreciate the grace of God.
We hope to leave a legacy of the strength and importance of families.

Our family mission:
To always be kind, respectful, and supportive of each other,
To be honest and open with each other,
To keep a spiritual feeling in the home,
To love each other unconditionally,
To be responsible to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life,
To make this house a place we want to come home to.

Or....you could write a phrase that starts with each letter of your last name, write a poem, or make a piece of art...it could be anything! It's your very own mission statement for your very own family.


Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families by Stephen R. Covey.

Your Family Tree

My son Andrew's homework tonight was to put together a family tree. It was interesting to me that he is now very motivated to fill in all the blanks. He wants to know who's who. I should explain that my mother comes from a family of 12 which means I have a lot of cousins, who now all have kids, as do I, who are practically grown. My point in sharing this is that I came across a great website that makes it very easy to create a family tree. You can fill in names, add pictures, include emails so other family members can fill in more blanks, etc., etc., etc. Check it out and have fun! http://www.myheritage.com/page/family-tree-template

Girls are like Apples on Trees....

Girls are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. The boys don't want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples from the ground that aren't as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they're amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who's brave enough to climb all the way
to the top of the tree.
borrowed from megan

The Good Thing Bad Thing…..

A friend and I were talking the other day about how grateful we are for our education and how we don’t take things for granted, but that it is a challenge to make sure our children don’t take things for granted. We shared a couple of memories related to how poor we had grown up. I told her I had recently read something in an old diary of mine I wrote my first night in the college dorm. I wrote, “I only have one dress, but I’m here!” She shared she was one of ten and that her parents basically put her in foster care as a way of feeding her. I told her in college I had met several very wealthy friends and that I noticed some were nice and some were not and that I came to the conclusion that the difference was the nice ones were grateful for what they had.
I have taken this lesson with me and to this day, I believe being grateful is the key to happiness. Her question to me was, “How do you teach gratefulness?” I don’t know if there is a curriculum for teaching gratefulness, but I can tell you what I have done with my boys.
First of all, I have to say that teaching them to be grateful is something I have consciously done from day one. From the time they could almost talk, whenever I gave them something I would follow it with “what do we say?” and they would say “thank you”. We as parents also need to say “thank you”. Sometimes we don’t say thank you to our children for bringing us something we asked them to bring, for example. My question to you is, “if it was a friend who brought you that same item, would you feel the need to say thank you?” I know, sometimes, it feels like overkill, but I would rather err on the side of saying more thank yous, than not enough.
Secondly, I also taught my boys to be grateful for things like having five fingers on each hand, for the ability to feed themselves, for the ability to walk or run, or for the ability to see! These are things we don’t always think about, but boy would your life be different if you were not able to do any one of those things.
Finally, the other thing I taught them to play was “the good thing, bad thing” game. Yes, I made this up! I explained there is a good side and a bad side to everything. If we were stuck in traffic, I would say, “the bad thing is we’re stuck in traffic, what’s the good thing?” I was always amazed with all the different responses we would come up with ranging from: the good thing is we’re all together, to the good thing is we have a car, the good thing is we have air conditioning, and on, and on! If while driving home, I reminded them we needed to get the cleaning done, I would say “the bad thing is we have to clean, what’s the good thing?” Again, we would come up with all kinds of things like, the good thing is we can relax and watch a movie afterwards to we don’t have to scramble if someone comes over to it feels great when everything is clean! One time I remember picking them up from school and saying how tired I was. They then said, “the good thing is you have a job and because you have a job you can buy us what we need and want”. We got so involved in thinking about the good things, I forgot I was tired!
Another time, I remember we went camping and my nephew’s bike was left behind. When we got there, everyone but my nephew had their bike. He was not a happy camper (no pun intended) and he was making sure we all knew how unhappy he was. While walking to the pond, I overheard Andrew, my youngest son, saying “Jacob, you gotta think about the good things. The good thing is we are here! Look at this place! And we get to hang out the whole weekend…it’s easier to think about the bad things, but you can’t forget to think about the good things.” I was sooo…. proud of Andrew.