Create a family team locker room in your home.
Think of your family home as the locker room in which you prepare your children for life. Your kids will live most of their life away from you, though it doesn’t always feel that way. Your job is to prepare them for the game of life, no matter how young they are. By creating this sense of teams in a locker room, you inspire connected and eager teammates ready to take on the world. In a locker room teammates get to know one another; they learn the rules and consequences of breaking the rules; they learn the coaches and teams expectations; they enjoy a sense of belonging.
Before a lot of connecting can happen, family teams need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other by asking questions and showing interest in the other teammates lives. True listening needs to happen so trust can be built and so everyone can feel heard.
Clear, overt and fair rules and consequences are also vital to building a team mentality. If kids feel like rules or consequences for breaking rules are constantly changing or are different for different kids or are unjust, they will not respect them! Sometimes parents need to explain why this is a rule for our family and why we think the consequence to breaking the rule is fair. It doesn’t matter what other family teams expect, explain why our family has these high expectations (we have faith in you to be the best person you can be, we want to raise the bar so you will reach for it, our family has strong values and morals, etc.).
We all need to belong to something larger than ourselves. If our family does not provide some sense of belonging, young people often look elsewhere. The risk here is that then they listen to this other group and is that group leading them in the right direction?
You can help develop a sense of pride in belonging to your family team by:
1. Telling and retelling funny family stories and remembering moments when it was great to be in your family.
2. Making it ok to remember the idiosyncrasies by happily saying things like “So many Kilpatrick’s have short attention spans, even our dog is easily distracted!”
3. Creating and sticking to family traditions.
4. Fostering relationships between each family member grouping.
5. Attending each other’s events as much as possible to show support and prove that each individual is important.