Family Meetings
Meeting... I think most of us cringe at that word. In the Dave Ramsey community, many of us have budget meetings with our spouse. Here, we call them budget dates because that feels nicer.
What about family meetings, does that sound terrible? Maybe family date sounds better too? I don’t know, but I love the idea of them! Connected Family has great Family Night questions and some general information.
Our lives are BUSY, probably too busy to not have tackled this before. It’s going to take real work to make this a priority every week but it needs to happen. I’m hoping that starting in the summer when things are *slightly* less busy we can have a routine down for them for the fall, which is pure CHAOS, in the best ways possible.
How I hope they will go (after convincing teens it’s fun 🙄) I want to make sure we start and end with positives.
-Scheduling for the week (usually FUN stuff)
Activities/appointments already planned
Things they WANT to do (go swimming with friends)
Things they NEED to do (get deodorant at Target)
-Delegate Family Contributions (aka chores) for the week
-Planning bigger events like vacation or a birthday party
-Hash out grievances and resolve issues
-Dinner ideas (Please let them all have great ideas each week, I am TAPPED out on meal prep🤞🏻)
-Financials. Just keeping them in the loop, on their level
-Goals, theirs and ours. Thinking sports, school, reading, skills goals for the kids likely.
-Family question. Connected Family has a big list and I love them. Things like “How could you help make our house run as smoothly as possible?”
-And end with ALLOWANCE from the previous week. This is new ish to us. I feel like kids need a chance to manage money but they also need to do their part and contribute at home. So they get a set amount per week and broken down by days they met their contributions (those are nothing huge or hard to do. Dishes, keeping their room tidy, laundry, BASIC LIFE SKILLS
Do you have family meetings? What do you go over?
