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YOUR FAMILY LIFE PLAN
Excerpted from ENTREPRENEURIAL COUPLES: Making It Work at Work and at Home.
Answer the following questions as honestly as you can. There are no right or wrong answers. The purpose of this exercise is to help you identify your parenting and family values and goals, so that you can plan for yourself, your partner’ and our children a life that is consistent with those values.
- Make a list of the people who were most significant to you as a child and indicate what you learned from them or how they influenced you.
- Make two lists for each of your parents. In the first column, list those parenting qualities you most admire about that parent. In the second column, indicate those parenting qualities you least admire. Which parent are you most like and least like? Which of their parenting qualities do you possess? What would you like to change?
- Repeat step 2 with grandparents, teachers, and other significant adults from your childhood.
- What are your fondest memories from childhood? Why?
- What do you think your children would recount as their fondest memories? Ask them.
- How would your children describe you if asked about you as a parent and as a person?
- What do you really know about your children? What do they like? What makes them laugh? Do they have opinions about anything? Who are their heroes?
- Sit down and have a meaningful conversation with each child and let her or him take the lead.
- Have a family meeting with all family members and discuss how the family might reorganize itself and raise everyone’s consciousness about healthy family relations.
- What are the qualities you believe are responsible for your successes in life? Are you teaching those qualities to your children?
- Do you and your partner share the same parenting philosophy? If not, what is your plan to get on the same track?
- Pick up a good book on parenting and begin educating yourself. With your partner, read and discuss one chapter each week. Then apply what you are learning.
Evaluating Your Responses
By now you are probably getting pretty good at sifting through your responses and those of your partner. You have been evaluating and reevaluating other aspects of you life plan. Now it is time to reorganize your parenting priorities too. Look for the patterns in your answers. Really listen to what your children and your partner are telling you. Notice where the discrepancies are between your good intentions and your actual behaviors. How can you bring them together? If you are continuing in an unhealthy pattern, now is the time to change it. Notice, too, what you are doing right, and build on those successes.
Taking into account all that you have learned from this exercise and from each other, including the children, what will it take for you to become an authoritative parent who takes time to get to know your children, who takes seriously the responsibility to foster resilience and independence in your children, who understands that children need time to make changes, and who wants your children to remember their childhood fondly?
Summarizing Remark
Write one sentence or a brief paragraph summarizing what you learned from this exercise and what you want to change.
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