Greater Good

Every year I rethink our family meetings at the beginning of the summer, when all of our routines are changing anyway, and this June has been no different—except that I recently read Bruce Feiler’s The Secrets of Happy Families, which puts a big emphasis on family meetings.

Fieler, a columnist for the New York Times, took the concept of “Agile teams” from the high-tech business world and applied them to his family. He explains:

Agile is a system of group dynamics in which teams do things in small chunks of time, adjust constantly, and review their progress frequently. Ideas don’t just flow down from the top but percolate up from the bottom. The best ideas win, no matter where they come from.

When applied to family meetings, the concept of an “agile system” really empowers kids, giving them a very tangible role in their family (as you’ll see from the video above, I think giving kids’ a voice in their upbringing is the #1 reason to have family meetings).

Fieler advocates asking three “agile” questions at each family meeting:

1. What went well in our family this week?
2. What didn’t go well?
3. What will we agree to work on in the week ahead?

I love these questions so much I’ve just revised our family meeting agenda to reflect them. The idea, according to Fieler, is that in answering those three questions, kids start to evaluate their own progress. He also recommends that kids suggest their own rewards and punishments for the things they’ll be working on in the week ahead. Although I’m not a huge fan of motivating kids with external rewards, I can see how this might work really well in terms of letting kids regulate their own privileges (like their screen time) based on whether or not they’ve met their own goals.

To include those three questions, I needed to shorten up our existing agenda a lot (there was too much on it, anyway). I moved our calendar review to Sunday night, and added the “plan family fun” part of the meeting to the end of the calendar review, which will give me time to plan for the weekend (and increase the odds that we’ll actually do what the kids suggest). I am also going to start making the “appreciations” opener optional—a time to recognize things we appreciate in others briefly. The way we are doing it now can take up the entire meeting time, because every family member says something they appreciate about every other family member.

If you are new to family meetings, get started by watching the video above. This written post is also a good resource, as is this podcast.

Have fun and let me know how it goes!

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

Like this post? We hope you’ll become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook, or sign up for the Raising Happiness monthly newsletter.

My friends and family know what’s coming when we’re out to dinner and they see a little packet of white squares come out of my purse, held together with a rubber band. It’s a pile of carefully selected Table Topics—little cards printed with questions—usually from the “Family Gatherings” collection. (Though on date night, I like the “Couples” collection.)

I’ve been structuring our family’s conversations for nearly a decade. For a while, I tended to focus the discussion on what everyone is grateful for. But in the last year or so I’ve been partial to those Table Topics, which are sold as “questions to start great conversations.” The questions can be much harder to answer, but in my experience, after all the groaning and eye-rolling dissipates, everyone starts to grab for the cards and we end up laughing and having a good time.

I instigate these conversations for fun, of course, but also because I know that they help my family bond and help my kids experience themselves as a part of something larger than themselves—which, in turn, could make them more resilient, better adjusted, and more successful in school (as I wrote about last week).

Below are 20 questions that would be good to have your children ask their dad or grandpa on Sunday (even if you are phoning or Skyping someone far away). One tip: See if you can get the dads to weave their answers into a narrative demonstrating that your family members have been through both good and bad times together, but through it all, you’ve stuck together. This is a way of modeling your family’s grit and growth mindset.

The exact content of Dad’s answers isn’t crucial. Research suggests that the most important thing is to make time for conversations like these—and Father’s Day seems like as good a day as any to start!

1. What do you remember about the houses you lived in as a kid? Which one did you like the best?

20. What did your grandparents do with you that you loved? What did they do that you didn’t enjoy so much?

Happy Father’s Day to all those great Dads and Grampa’s out there (especially our own “Dadu”)!

Many of these questions were adapted from the “Family Gathering” edition of Table Topics.

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

Like this post? We hope you’ll become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook, or sign up for the Raising Happiness monthly newsletter.

This fall, my main squeeze and I are getting married. We’ve been dating for almost four years, and we’ve been engaged for so long people think we are dragging our (probably cold) feet. “What’s the hold up?” our friends ask. “Are you or aren’t you getting married?”

Our hesitation is about the children, of course. My guy lives with his two children in a different county from me and my two children. All four kids are happy in their schools and their communities—not to mention living near their other parents.

My children and I are not planning on moving to Marin; he and his children are not planning on moving to Berkeley. It’s a logistical puzzle with some unique pieces, but I believe at its center is a question nagging many of us today: How do we build a happy family?

That’s the question Bruce Feiler poses in his recent book, The Secrets of Happy Families, and in his wildly popular New York Times article, published earlier this spring.

It turns out that a large part of constructing a happy family is about creating a particular type of narrative about our family history, one that demonstrates that members of our family have been through both good and bad times together, but through it all we’ve stuck together. This is a way of modeling your family’s grit and growth mindset.

Researcher Marshall Duke calls this the “oscillating family narrative,” and he and his colleagues have found that that when kids internalize it, they emerge more confident, with an “intergenerational [sense of] self.” That is a jargony way of saying that kids who know a lot about their family history—the parts that they didn’t experience themselves, but that were passed down to them through stories—feel that they are a part of something much larger than themselves.

When we give kids this sense of being part of something bigger than just themselves, they reap enormous emotional benefits, according to Duke and fellow researchers Amber Lazarus and Robyn Fivush, in a study made famous by Feiler. These benefits include:

-a greater sense of control over their lives;

• higher self-esteem;
• better family functioning;
• greater family cohesiveness;
• lower levels of anxiety;
• fewer behavior problems.

In fact, in Duke, Lazarus, and Fivush’s research, knowledge of family narrative was more strongly associated with children’s emotional well-being than any other factor.

It’s not that knowledge of your family history provides all those benefits in and of itself; the way to build a happy family is not necessarily to start giving kids family history lessons.  The researchers explain:

“If simply knowing family history could make for better states of well-being, some might propose (confusing correlation with causation) that we simply teach children various facts about their families and they will become stronger. Clearly, this approach would not work!”

Duke, Lazarus, and Fivush go on to explain that most kids come to know their family history at times like dinner, or on vacation, or through holiday traditions—and that other research shows that these same situations and experiences occur more frequently in cohesive families. 

All of these things together—family dinners and vacations and all the talking and playing that occurs because of them—help kids develop an intergenerational sense of self. Kids experience themselves as a part of something larger, and that sense gives them “the personal strength and moral guidance…associated with increased resilience, better adjustment, and improved chances of good clinical and educational outcomes.”

So the way to build a happy family is to help kids develop that intergenerational sense of self, and the way to do that is, in part, to build family time and rituals where you can construct narratives about your family.

Next week we’ll get started with 20 discussion questions that will help you start creating your own “oscillating family narrative.” It’s going to be fun!

References:
Duke, M P, A Lazarus, and R Fivush. “Knowledge of Family History as a Clinically Useful Index of Psychological Well-being and Prognosis: A Brief Report.” Psychotherapy (Chic) 45, no. 2 (2008): 268–272.

Bohanek, Jennifer G., Kelly A. Marin, Robyn Fivush, and Marshall P. Duke. “Family narrative interaction and children’s sense of self.” Family Process 45, no. 1 (2006): 39-54.

© 2013 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

Like this post? We hope you’ll become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook, or sign up for the Raising Happiness monthly newsletter.