IT’s NEW…
IT’s SPECIAL…
IT’s OURS…
Introducing
Our Family Way
We have talked, talked, talked and
Thought, thought, thought and
Now its time to WALK THE WALK!!
We the people of our Family, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic transquility, provide for the common happiness, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this set of agreements for the Family ...
So begins the opening of our family agreements. I am an American male who has shared custody of three children, J (male) age 13, G (female) age 10 and C (male) age 7. Together, we have to find a way to coexist.
Most families create their culture and agreements over the course of many years and through many many trials, errors and successes. They find an equilibrium that allows them to coexist in a way that meets the needs of all members, or oft times, not :)
Looking at our situation, I decided we needed to somehow jump start this family in a way that allowed the children to participate, remove past dysfunctional influences, and empower all of us to achieve our highest potential. I wanted something that belonged to ALL of us.
The professionals said we needed to establish a framework or set of rules as a family so that we all would be on the same page about goals, values, and conflicts and use these and a strong bias to open communication to build our family. We put together a set of articles that defined what 'we' wanted to be as a family. During our various outings over the course of the first few months of the separation, the kids and I would talk about values we thought existed in people we admired. Sports players, musicians, grandparents all were fodder for these discussions and we kept a list of attributes we admired in each. We explored ways societies govern themselves (dictatorships, facism, democracy, monarchies, etc.) and why some succeed and some fail.
It helped that the eldest son was studying world cultures in a history class at schoool and he took the lead in identifying what culture is comprised of (Art, History, Religion, Law, etc.) and how we could define the ideals we wanted to embrace in our family.
In the end we had ten 10 articles we adopted that identified traits our family members would strive to attain. Everyone agreed to abide by the framework and we included an article defining a set of common values and how conflicts between members of the family would be resolved.
The kids were excited about defining the 'how' our conflicts would be resolved. We talked about the judicial branch of the government (another school topic), trials, historical methods like 'sink or float' and the such. We decided on a simple approach - our youngest son had a system at his pre-school that empowered any child who felt the were not being respected (i.e. someone was taking a toy they were playing with, or someone was messing up their art project, whatever) where the concerned child would ring a bell placed conveniently in the class and state 'Someones not respecting me'.
Of course whenever this occured, the whole class would turn and look to see what was happening and 80% of the conflicts were resolved with that simple shift of peer focus onto the situation. The remaining were resolved by communication between the teachers and the students. We put a bell on the kitchen counter for our purposes and agreed any person in the family could ring the bell (they sometimes just yell out 'RING, RING, RING' when its not convenient) whenever they feel an injustice has been done :)
So - we have a set of general goals, a set of family values, and a conflict resolution plan.
Here we go into the great unknown...
