Parenting Toolbox
A Family Mission Statement
By Susan S., Parent of Generous Jaguar Quinn and Dancing Bird Jade
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about living with purpose and intention. If you were to look at my choices, or those of our family, you could infer some values. But that’s not the same as consciously choosing them and using them to guide decisions and govern relationships. A few years back I read an article about the value of family mission statements and it stuck with me. I think my kids are now old enough to participate and it’s time to give it a try.
What is a family mission statement? It’s a document (could be a sentence, a paragraph, a list, a song) encapsulating and articulating the values of a family, similar to the Village School Mission Statement and its M&M’S (Make Good Choices; Model Respect; Solve Problems). These are examples of simple, succinct concepts that guide the Village community and give us something to refer back to. So many times I’ve asked my son “Are you making good choices?” While he knows exactly what I mean, it’s a Village Value I’m referring to, not our own Family Value, so it feels a little borrowed.
Why should my family have a mission statement? Just like with a company, or a school, every family has a culture. If the culture isn’t intentionally designed and chosen, it will still have a culture, but one arrived at by default. One of the ways to create a family culture of your choosing is to come up with a mission statement. There are many good articles on the Web about family mission statements. Here’s one paragraph I liked from the article “Fathering with Intentionality: The Importance of Creating a Family Culture” from The Art of Manliness website:
“Having a shared vision – a shared sense of values and purpose – bonds parents and children together. It guides your parenting decisions and offers your children clear ideals to strive for and guidance in what choices to make. A mission statement also articulates the standards by which each member of the family can evaluate each other’s behavior, and children and parents will ideally check and encourage one another as they make their way down this agreed upon path.”
How do you create a mission statement, or go about answering the question “What is our family about?” There are many ideas out there, but they seem to have a few things in common. You start with a special family meeting to begin brainstorming, with the understanding that this might take a series of meetings to complete. You ask some basic questions for everyone in the family to answer. Bruce Feiler, author of The Secrets of Happy Families, suggests these:
- What words best describe our family?
- What is most important to our family?
- What are our strengths as a family?
- What sayings best capture our family?
He also has a list of sample words and phrases to inspire ideas, too long to include here (see websites below). From there you hone the list, keeping concepts that feel authentic, essential and lasting to your family, until it’s concise enough to be useable, perhaps even placing it on display in your home.
Now that I’ve done the research, I think it’s time we get started on our mission statement! After all, as Bruce Feiler asks, “How can we ask our children to uphold our family’s values if we never articulate what those values are?”
For more on this topic:
- The Happy Families Toolkit, by Bruce Feiler
- List of Family Values, by Amy Guertin
- Fathering with Intentionalilty: The Importance of Creating a Family Culture
- Creating a Positive Family Culture: How and Why to Create a Family Mission Statement