Finding Your Family Identity

The old saying goes that if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. Family life is no different. Building a mission statement for your home is a way to articulate the values you hold most dear, build goals, cast vision and realign when falling off course. Developing a mission statement is relatively simple but requires intentionality and only serves its purpose if it’s derived from the input of the whole crew. Call a family meeting and ask questions like:

• Where are we going as a family?
• What are our priorities?
• What are our individual strengths and weaknesses?
• What are some ways we can serve each other and others?
• What are three words that we aspire to have describe our home environment?

Remember, a family mission statement has everything to do with building goals to implement, not wishes you hope will happen. Purposefully seek to determine what you want your children to remember about home life and what you aspire to impart to them during the years they are in your care. And be willing to listen to your children’s contributions, too. If activities like game nights or family hikes rank high on their list of priorities, but not yours, compromise may be necessary to foster an environment they perceive as loving and nurturing. Develop practical ways for implementation so your final draft can be put into action.

Place your mission statement on display in a place that’s highly trafficked throughout your home, so all family members can refer to it often. "The key is to discuss them constantly (at least once a week) to see how well the family is living up to it (even the parents)," Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, explains. "Everyone governs themselves by the mission statement if they feel genuinely involved."

Build Ties Through Service

Oftentimes, families prioritize recreation as a way to forge deeper, more meaningful relationships together. But working together has a lasting impact that can be far more reaching, as Lenexa mom of seven Carissa Jones can attest. Placing flags on the graves at Leavenworth National Cemetery evolved from being a Boy Scout service project for one of her sons to a beloved annual tradition the whole family upholds. “We, along with hundreds of other Scout and adult volunteers, place flags on the grave markers in the cemetery on the Saturday before Memorial Day,” Carissa says. “It is one of our very favorite service projects each year. We've gone every year since we moved here in 2008 except one. I don't know how you can look at those flags and not be moved!”

Families easily can contribute to worthwhile causes together, such as sponsoring a child internationally through Compassion International, building gift boxes for Operation Christmas Child or serving in a local soup kitchen.

Build a Culture That Aligns with Your Values

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is family culture. The process takes time, dedication and the building of habits. Aspire to order your loves sequentially so that family life is an integrated part of your priorities. For instance, if you seek to foster a love of reading in your children, carve out time in your schedule to make reading together as a family feasible, visit the library regularly or have discussions about what you’ve been reading independently.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

When Friday night rolls around, my kids eagerly jump up and down in excitement even though we have the same thing on the docket every week. It’s family movie night, the only time we ever eat in front of the TV. The same spread is made available—stovetop popcorn, along with an array of fruit and cheese—but the movie, per house rules, has to be new to us. The tradition began three years ago and has become a much-loved part of our family culture. I’m convinced the best traditions are the simplest ones.

Prairie Village mom Jennifer Rodriguez keeps a simple tradition alive that’s been in the family for more than five generations. “We have a birthday tradition that everyone looks forward to,” Jennifer explains. “The birthday person isn't allowed to speak while he/she eats her piece of cake. Meanwhile, everyone else tries everything they can think of to trick him/her into talking. If they succeed, the birthday person has to finish eating his/her cake under the table. The only rules are that it begins with the first bite and ends with the swallowing of the last bite, and we can't touch or speak unkindly to the birthday person. There is so much laughter and we have so many goofy pictures under the table! Most of the time, the children join the birthday person under the table as well.”

936

Nine hundred and thirty-six. That’s the number of weeks your child more than likely will live at home. The number might seem like an abstract figure until you see it laid out visually. Place 936 pennies in a mason jar and take out one for every week your child has been alive. This act isn’t meant to cause grief and despair. Instead, when you count the weeks you have left with your child, be more inclined to make those weeks count. If your time is invested in building a strong family culture, then an empty jar will be a visual representation of a life well spent.

Lauren Greenlee loves maintaining family traditions, especially in KC! Favorites include attending Celebration at the Station in May and Christmas in the Sky in November. Her family’s mission statement is “to live simply in order to engage in life more fully.” She is the mother of three boys and lives in Olathe.