The Anatomy of a Family Meeting

the practice of numbering our days

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My oldest son turned nine this past year, and in the quiet moments he’s sitting with us on the couch—before the movie starts or at halftime of the football game playing on TV—I look over at my husband and whisper, “I can’t believe we’re halfway through.”

He’s learned the Lord’s Prayer and how to do his laundry, but—

Does he know how to shake a new coach’s hand and introduce himself?
Does he know to pick up trash when he sees it on the ground, even when it isn’t his?
Does he know to stick up for the kid getting pushed around on the playground?

I feel the optimism and hope that we’ll still have another nine years to teach him, but I can’t help picturing the time as if it’s sand in an hourglass, marking down the years—and months, weeks, days—that we have left with him under our roof. Instead of the tick, tick, tick of love bombs, I hear the draining drip of time.

The Why Behind Family Meeting

With our children ranging from ages 1 to 9, we have one foot in the thick of the sleep-deprived, butt-wiping, not-enough-childcare years and another in the burgeoning big kid years, with our kids’ increasing independence and our diminishing influence.

Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, says, “What if we treated home as the most important work organization?” If we treated our households like the most important organization, the CEO (ahem, Mom), would receive the highest compensation 😉 but also we would, to an extent, formalize regular communication and reflect on shared goals. In other words, we would have a weekly family meeting.

Like with any habit or practice, motivation gives us momentum. When I think about the why of our family meeting, I think about opening channels of communication, offering a safe space to connect, air grievances and share celebratory moments.

Our goal is to craft an enduring family culture, practice shared responsibility, make sure we are intentional about teachable moments, and set an example for how to incorporate healthy rhythms into regular life.

Our Family Meeting Agenda

When I received the email from Cultivate What Matters that a new product was dropping called The Family Workbook, I was intrigued. This is not an ad, and I am not an affiliate, but I had just purchased PowerSheets for 2024.

We took the workbook on our family summit this past November (a post for another time), worked through several of the introductory pages and have been using it as a resource since then. I couldn’t recommend it more.

I take notes in my workbook—the pages for family meetings look like this—but you could also just grab a notebook.

This is what’s currently working for us in this season, but I’m sure we’ll adapt as the kids grow older. As with anything, there are endless resources, and you don’t know what works for you until you’ve tried it. I’m sharing this not because I’m trying to be prescriptive, but because it’s sometimes helpful to get a peek behind the curtain and see what’s working for other families. (Know that our execution in real time is far from perfect.)

Our current family meeting stack: We take notes in the Cultivate What Matters Family Workbook. We use Levi Lusko’s Roar Like a Lion devotional (highly recommend for middle grade readers), this CSB Kids Bible, these Character Matters cards, and 365 Connecting Questions for Families.

1. Devotion/Bible reading. 

We start the meeting with our oldest son reading out loud either a devotion (we love the one linked above, gifted by my son’s godparents) or if our church is doing a reading plan, a Bible story.

2. Highs/lows from the week. 

This is a chance for us to remember the good times of the past week, and it’s fun to hear what each kid calls out as their highlight. I love not just making the memories, but also collectively reflecting on them. 

The lows give us space to talk about what we need and to air grievances that might otherwise get swept under the rug. For example, a recent low from my five-year-old was that he lost video games for the weekend, and we were able to talk about the consequences of disobedience. The most convicting lows, though, are the ones about our parenting, when our kids remind us of a time one of us yelled or that we need to put money in the swear jar 🙊. Then this becomes a time for us as parents to practice repentance and apologizing the right way.

3. Calendar review. 

We’ll talk about what’s on the docket for the upcoming week—baseball games, appointments, deadlines, possible times for a date night, and child care coverage needs.

4. Chores/allowance payout. 

We’ve been pretty casual about chores in the past, with a chore list and each kid earning a point for a completed chore that could then be traded in for money or a treasure box. Recently, though, we’ve been experimenting with paying out an allowance based on assigned chores completed (using Greenlight). The objective of this part of the meeting is to come together as a family on a regular basis to figure out how to share the load.

5. Fun.

This is the part where we take a minute to brainstorm a fun thing to do as a family in the week/s ahead. Sometimes this is something small like a family field trip to Handel’s or something bigger like playing hooky from school to go to Disneyland. We’ll brainstorm seasonal things to do (in December this was the candy cane tree walk, picking out a Christmas tree, etc) and vacation plans in the works.

6. Character card.

I’m a huge fan of these character cards. Each card has a character trait with definition, examples of this character trait in action, and a Bible verse. We focus on just one trait per meeting. We try to call out ways we’ve seen our kids practice each trait and/or they’ll give us examples of how they can practice this trait.

7. Connecting question.

We got this book at a marriage retreat we went to a few years ago and never used it until we started doing family meetings. There’s a question for each day, so this would be fun to do around the dinner table, too. It’s a fun, casual ending to the meeting, and I try to write down the kids’ answers to look back on.

8. Ice cream!

Since family meeting is usually the last thing we do on Sunday night before bedtime, it feels special to close out the night/Sabbath/weekend with a treat.

What Works for Us

• Sunday afternoons/evenings. This is our most relaxed time of the week and most naturally conducive to thinking ahead for the week. Lately, we’ve been playing family pickleball between 5:30 and 7 p.m. and then coming back home for ice cream and our family meeting.

• Set the stage with snacks and drinks. All the fun beverages and treats come out for family meeting. Currently this looks like lychee sparkling water, small cans of fruit punch Olipops, and Handel’s ice cream that we buy by the pint.

• Keep it short and sweet. We’re working with very short attention spans over here, so we do our best to keep things moving. Our goal is 15 to 20 minutes, but realistically with all the pausing to wrangle or redirect, we usually close out around the 30-minute mark.

That’s it! It might read like a lot, but we’re pretty casual and flexible about it all. We skipped family meeting last weekend because it was Easter, and just this Sunday, we did our highs/lows in the car at the In ‘N Out drive-through while waiting for dinner (then went back and did the rest of the agenda when we got home). Take what serves you, and forget the rest. 🙂

💌 Related Posts

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The Anatomy of Our Annual Family Meeting //

Emily Ley

📖 Related Reading

The Family Firm by Emily Oster
Take Back Your Family by Jefferson Bethke
The Life-Giving Parent by Clay and Sally Clarkson
Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley
Foundations by Ruth Chou Simons and Troy Simons
Family Discipleship by Matt Chandler & Adam Griffin*

*currently reading this, although I have all of these books on my bookshelf

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