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Child Development
Meet Your Family's Future at a Family Meeting
A method for creating meaningful conversations that promote family growth.
Posted January 16, 2018
Many families, during the childhood and early adolescent years, schedule some version of a “family meeting,” a time that is designated for the parents and children to gather together to discuss important matters. Whether or not you have done so in the past, there are good reasons to cobble together family meetings even during the final stages of child development.
I like to refer to this as “making the time to think about time.” In other words, making the time for the family with one or more late adolescent or young adult children living at home to consider and evaluate not only their present level of functioning and interaction but also the kind of relationships that they imagine having with each other when they no longer co-reside.
It is, of course, always advantageous to use family meetings to take care of the typical components of family life: solidifying communication, clarifying reciprocal expectations, clearing the air after conflicts, and simply remaining in respectful contact with each other. But as older children are on the runway preparing for take-off, such meetings become even more valuable if they create the opportunity to begin reflecting upon the significant changes in family life that await, and how everyone can best adapt to those changes.
When parents at any stage of development complain to me that their efforts to schedule family meetings are complained about, or outright stymied, by their children, it is usually because these meetings are characterized by insufficient recognition of the need for an evolving relationship between the generations.
So when it comes to families with adolescents and young adults living at home, discussion confined to chronic friction around issues such as, “How come you always bring the car home with an empty tank of gas?” or “I’ve told you repeatedly: no drinking or smoking in the house!” or “So how’re those college applications coming along?” will understandably be of limited appeal, for they keep old and somewhat outmoded, parent-child dynamics in place: parent as police officer and child as scofflaw, parent as taskmaster and child as slave, parent as prosecutor and child as defendant.
Of more relevance, and usually of more interest, is a family meeting that explores the possibility that the family unit itself is in the midst of a significant transformation, and the ways in which its members can best collaborate on this transformation so that everyone survives and thrives.
One exercise that I often suggest to families that provides them with a framework for this kind of conversation is a sequence of questions that provide a snapshot of the family’s functioning, past, present, and future, on three different dimensions: responsibility, power, and relatedness.
When it comes to the issue of Responsibility, here are some questions for the family to begin exploring:
- What aspects of life is the young adult solely responsible for right now?
- What aspects of life are the parents solely responsible for right now?
- Where is the overlap between the two? Where does responsibility still get shared between the two generations?
- How did this balance look a year ago?
- How would all of you like this balance to look a year from now?
When it comes to the issue of power, here are some questions for the family to begin exploring:
- What is the young adult completely in charge of right now?
- What are the parents completely in charge of right now?
- Where is the overlap between the two? Where does power still get shared between the generations?
- How did this balance look a year ago?
- How would all of you like this balance to look a year from now?
And when it comes to the issue of Relatedness, here are some questions for the family to begin exploring:
- What is the young adult allowed to do entirely on his/her own right now?
- What are the parents allowed to do entirely on their own right now?
- Where is the overlap between the two? When is or should there be time that is spent together?
- How did this balance look a year ago?
- How would all of you like this balance to look a year from now?
Parents are important to children at any stage of development when they provide a mirror that reflects back to them an image of who they are and how they come across. But parents can also be important to children at any stage of development by functioning as a beacon, a light that illuminates the many pathways that can carry each family member, and the family as a whole, forward, enabling them to remain engaged with each other in healthy ways even as they begin to differentiate from each other.
Nobody has a crystal ball when it comes to predicting the future, but children—even young adult children—who see that their parents are willing to contemplate and envision the evolution of family life are, themselves, more likely to evolve. It is when the agenda for a family meeting expands beyond addressing the nitty-gritty details of family life and enables its members to reflect upon the past, take stock of the present, and gradually create and become acquainted with their future that such a meeting truly takes on significance, and promotes growth, for both generations.
