Creating a Family Mission Statement

What do we believe as a family? What are our rules for being happy together? A great way to become more aligned is to create a family mission statement that represents what your family is all about.

Include such things as: what kind of standards each family member will be held to; what kind of principles everyone wants to live by (e.g honestly, loyalty, trust); and what kind of rules should govern the household. By giving your children a solid foundation and standards to live by, they will have more structure and guidance as they get older. According to Psychology Today, after creating the mission statement, your family should decide on a place in the home where it should be displayed. This way, anytime they are facing an obstacle, challenge or disagreement, they can look at the mission statement and be reminded of how to handle the situation appropriately and within the family’s guidelines. 

One reason a family mission statement is so essential, is that it helps parents and children be proactive rather than reactive about stressful or emotional situations. If there are already some guidelines about how certain situations will be handled, then children can not be upset when they get their punishment because they already agreed upon it, and parents will be less likely to punish their kids too severely due to their initial emotional response. The Child Development Institute shares some helpful tips on how to effectively create a family mission statement and one of the most important points is to effectively communicate to your children what you expect from them. Of course it is best to implement this family mission statement as early as possible, however it can be difficult for small children to understand these concepts. For that, the Child Development Institute recommends using lots of concrete examples to describe abstract ideas and to explain to the children what you want from them, not what you don’t want.