Parenting teenagers and tweens can be a very challenging experience and holding family meeting can be a great way to lesson conflict.

I want to share with you something that I have been doing now for months and have been working on with some of my clients; the concept of a Family Meeting.

I believe that a family is a team and when they work together in a collaborative way, they can achieve great things.

The concept is very easy and can be implemented with a child of any age. In my opinion, eight years old is the right age to start and that is what I have found with my clients, however the concept will work with teenagers, they just may be a little resistant at first.

Family meetings started in my house because my daughter requested them. I am, as you can imagine, a very busy parent and as a family, we do not get a lot of time to discuss things as much as we should. My oldest daughter pulled me up one day, telling me that we never get time to talk about the important things and I realised that she was right . . . so the family meeting was born. Every Saturday we sit down for about 30 minutes and have our family meeting.

It is very simple and follows this process.

1. We each take it in turns to speak (Freya created her own talking stick for this).

2. We state something that we have loved over the last week with regards to the familyand something that we want to change and open up for discussion. No one interrupts us and we state our side of the argument.

3. We discuss it as a family and come to an agreement.

4. At the end of the meeting we each commit to one thing we will change about ourselves to make the family run more smoothly next week. My clients and I have found this to be a huge success and it works on many levels.

Firstly, it shows our children that we think what they have to say is important and that they have a say in how the house is run.

Secondly, it gives us a forum to discuss the more important things that cannot be dealt with in five minutes, therefore children stop nagging as they know that their issues will be dealt with. Thus it allows us all to discuss our feelings openly and without judgment. There are only two rules; we do not speak when someone else is talking and we do not blame anyone for anything, we can only say how something makes us feel.

It has worked a treat, so give it a try and see what happens.

Here is what one of my clients recently sent me about his meetings.

"We are using family meetings to share updates on the move with our daughter. She is very involved in it all and knows what is happening.

She stunned us on Sunday, pulling both of us up on our behaviour with a particular event and suggesting how we should have handled it.

Amazing! It is hard to describe the inner smile and the value of it. She also asked how hard it will be to always wait for a meeting (which of course she now knows she doesn't have to)".

 

© Sarah Newton. No content to be reproduced without written approval of the author.

Sarah Newton is Britain’s best-known Teen Coach, and Author of “Help! My Teenager is an Alien”.

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