The Family Culture Blog
Practical ideas for building your family’s values, rituals, and rhythms. Written by two lifelong educators.
Featured
Family Core Values
How to choose the three to seven that actually describe your family, and what to do once you have them. Ask most families to name their values and you’ll get a list of nice words. Honesty, kindness, respect, love. Everyone nods, someone writes it on a chalkboard sign for the
How to Write a Family Mission Statement
Plus 12 real examples: short, long, funny, and serious. We’ll admit it: “mission statement” is not a phrase that makes anyone’s heart race. It sounds like something a bank writes and hangs in its lobby, and honestly, if you search the term right now, a lot of what comes up really is banks. We understand the eye roll. But a family mission statement isn’t a corporate exercise, and it doesn’t have to sound like one. Think of it as writing down the thing you’d want your kid to be able to say about your family when they’re thirty, sitting across
What Is the Fundamentals System? The Weekly Method Behind Our Family Culture
Most parents we’ve interviewed build family culture in one of two ways. They sit down once, agree on what they value, and never really revisit it. Honesty gets said out loud one time, over dinner or a long weekend, and then life happens and nobody mentions it again until something goes wrong. They leave it to chance, addressing issues as they occur and having kids kind of know what’s important to their family but kind of not. Typically, they parent one of two ways…either exactly the way they were parented or definitely NOT the way they were parented! And…that’s different
40 Family Values Activities
Between the two of us, we spent close to seventy years in schools. Nancy worked closely with middle schoolers and their parents for three decades as a school counselor while Steven spent his time in classrooms, engaging students in experiential learning. If there’s one thing we noticed over and over again in that time, it’s this: a family that plays a board game together on a Tuesday night is not the same thing as a family teaching a value on a Tuesday night, even if it’s the exact same game. We say that because most lists like this one,
You only get one chance
to raise amazing kids
