Let’s face it, life is fast, busy, and crazy! The days fly by and every time you blink it seems like it’s a new season. When you have children, it gets even busier. And we have found that if we don’t get together as a family, we will miss our chance to connect and to keep our focus on what is important. So today we discuss two types of family meetings that are essential for us to stay on track on what matters. This is something we do at home that helps us face the spiritual, mental, and physical challenges that come as we are trying to raise a healthy family. We do these two meetings every single week (almost – we are not perfect). They help us to stay connected to each other, communicate well and encourage each person in our family. They continually move our family forward so we can be successful and thriving.
This might look different for you. Maybe your children are at a different age, or your family is too big for this set up. Maybe your weeks or your daily schedule looks very different than ours. Please take this as an outline and mold this to fit your family. We always want to share what works for us, and what is helping us and this is a huge part of our family. Our children look forward to it and we are always excited to sit down with them with no distractions and get to spend this quality time as a family on a weekly basis.
Two Types of Family Meetings:
- Family Meetings – Why? We do this to continually cast our vision and mission. We want to make sure we are on the same page and we want to know what is going on in each other’s lives. We have family core values and we want to keep those in front of us weekly to keep our minds set on what is important.
What do we do? Everyone has a “family meeting journal”, where we share different wins, goals, and dreams. We also use these to document our meeting so we can review and pray through-out the week.
First – We talk about “wins”. What happened that was awesome over the past week. What is something that we are excited about? Once a person shares we cheer, celebrate and clap (this may sound chee-zee, but we love seeing our kids cheer each other on).
Second – We often have a time of teaching. If there something that keeps coming up that needs to be instilled we chat about it. For example, this past week we have had trouble speaking kindly to each other, so we talk about that (other recent teachings – financial stewardship, gratefulness, chores, etc..). We share a scripture which is associated with our teaching.
Third – We share goals. We have specific goals for each child. Goals as simple as our 3- year old remembering to brush his teeth. Our 5-year old working on her handwriting. These goals can be big or small depending on your child but we talk to them about how they are doing and we celebrate when they are reaching their goals!
Fourth – We go through our “Serrano Core Beliefs” and then we close out in prayer this is the most important thing we do. It is our chance to share what or who is on our hearts and we take time to come to the Lord and pray together as a family. It is powerful!
(The order is not critical to us, we rather focus on just enjoying our time together)
2. Parent Meeting – Why? Every Sunday night the two of us meet and we walk through our week. This allows us to be on the same page and writing down our game plan for the week, this supports our communication, and this helps us stay connected in our marriage. (takes 10-15min.)
What do we do? We both get our calendars out and look at what is happening this week, we compare schedules and ask each other questions like, “How can I best support you this week?” and “Are there any critical meetings I need to attend?”. Sometimes we take the kids for an hour so that our spouse can have some much-needed alone time. Other times if one of us has an important meeting, we know who is in charge of dinner and bed time with the kids. We must be on the same page to be able to make allow our family and our relationship to continue to flourish.
We believe that if you begin to create a space for your family and for you and your spouse to come together you will see many positive changes happening. You will function better, be more connected as a whole, and you will communicate more clearly. Everything starts and ends with family. And we want to see your family thrive!
Dr. Raul and Jess