A Guide to Family Meetings (including uncut audio from mine)

The Lazy Genius Podcast

Host Kendra Adachi provides a practical guide to implementing family meetings using a 'who, what, when, where, why, and how' framework. She

Key takeaways

• Use the improv rule of 'yes and' instead of being a 'no but' person to empower children during discussions.
• Kendra suggests starting with one small, predictable tradition rather than an overwhelming grand agenda.

Main topics

• Family meeting frameworks
• Intentional inefficiency in parenting

Notable quotes

Be a yes and person. Don't be a no but person.

Conclusion

The episode encourages listeners to embrace imperfection and focus on

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to the Lazy Genius Podcast, where we all get to be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Every Monday, you will learn to compassionately manage your time, wisely solve problems, and kindly live in your season. I'm your host, Kendra Adachi, and I am so glad you're here. Today is episode 487, a guide to family meetings, including uncut audio from mine. That's right. I recorded our family meeting from a few weeks ago, and we'll share a snippet of that during this episode. That way you can hear how it actually works for us and also how chaotic my children are. Family meetings are a new addition for us, but they have been wildly successful and helpful to get everyone on the same page. Now, that does not mean that they are efficient or orderly, quite the opposite really. I shared this on Instagram a couple of weeks ago, but I think it's important to sometimes choose inefficiency. If we try and do everything in the most efficient, optimized way possible, we end up like walking robots with no soul. Automation and efficiency are great. I use them every day. Some of our lazy genius principles are attached to those ideas. But in order to keep productivity human, we've got to be intentionally inefficient. Our family meetings are like that. We figure out what we need to figure out, but it also usually takes a while to get there, mostly because my kids are roasters. They love to roast each other. They're rabbit trailers, as you will soon hear when I play the audio of our meeting. But before I do that, let's go over the basics of what a family meeting could entail. It's easy to overcomplicate new things. And if family meetings are new to you, if you've never tried them before, I just want to stop you from feeling like it's an overwhelming thing to try because it's not. It's incredibly simple and you get to choose the basics. You know, we will even use the very, very basic descriptors, who, what, when, where, why, and how. So let's just go through those together. The first basic is the most obvious, who. The who is your family, like whatever that looks like. 99 % of the time, it will be the people you live with, you know, your partner, kids, maybe grandparents, grandkids, whoever, whoever's in your house. For another 1 % of you, A family meeting might be a great thing for extended family, especially if there is like a parent to care for or something where like multiple households are involved in the same set of decisions. That for the most part, we're talking about a nuclear family, whatever yours looks like. All right, so that's who. The next basic is what? Well, a family meeting is pretty simple. Let's get the family together to talk about something specific. For us, we meet once a week to talk about the week ahead. And that is the primary type of family meeting I'm encouraging you to try if you think it would help. But you can have other family meetings that are less frequent, but still focused on something. So a family meeting about where to go on vacation. If it's doable for the family to have one of the kids join a travel soccer league. You know, let's talk about that as a family. Let's talk about how this upcoming season is going to work and what everybody wants to do during the fall holidays. That kind of thing, right? But again, it's still pretty basic. The what is you're gathering together as a family to meet about something specific. Next is when and where. We'll lump those together. Chances are good that a family meeting is going to meet around the same time of the week at home. That's probably where most people are going to have their meeting. We do hours on Sunday nights during dinner. Now, that's actually unique for us in this season because we are taking a break from being in a church community group after leading one for several years. Speaker 1 (4:02) community groups meet on Sunday nights at our church. And so we actually have like free Sunday evenings again, which is pretty wild. Now, when we get back into community group, whenever that is, we will have to adjust when our family meeting happens. But for right now, it is generally on Sunday nights at home when we're having dinner together. However, this is like making a meal plan or any kind of plan, really. When you have something in place. It's easier to shift it when you need to. So we always have our family meeting set for Sunday night at dinner, but it's okay if we have to move it. Now, if you don't ever have a set time to have your family meeting, while that's perfectly fine, it will be harder to add it in week by week because you're having to think about it week by week. But if you always have it during Sunday dinner like we do or something that's like standing. Even if there's something happening at the time that you plan it, you just make a simple shift to, you know, breakfast that day or the night before or the night after or something like no problem. And the next week you're set still because the time and place has not changed. Right. So it's really nice to choose and you can adjust within that choice. Now, you also don't have to meet at home, even though that's like probably typical for most people. It might be nice to do your family meeting at like an ice cream parlor or like at a park or going for a walk or something. Depending on what you're going to be talking about and what you need to like maybe write down or remember, you can absolutely have a family meeting out of the house. So consider if that's actually a better fit for your own family meeting because it totally could be. Okay, then the final two basics are like a little less tangible, but no less important. Why and how? All right, first, let's talk about why. Why do you want to try family meeting at all? Maybe you feel like you personally carry too much of the mental load at home and you want to make things feel more even and collaborative. Maybe your kids are getting older and they're going all the places and it's good to make sure everyone is thinking through like the just the logistics of the day together. Maybe your family members are like just a bunch of ships passing in the night. So having a set time to connect and just hear what's going on with everybody. That's the main goal. Why do you want to do this at all? Having a set reason, it will help you feel better about how the meeting goes. That way you can be relaxed around aspects that don't matter as much. Okay. So for example, for me, the why, the reason we do this is really just like family. togetherness and participation. The Adachis are mostly introverted, contented homebodies. We all have things going on. We leave the house. We enjoy those things. But it really is easy for us to just like kind of go about our days without saying much beyond the basics. Like, you know, it's dinner time. And when people get home, like, how was your day? And, you know, just like all the usual things. I mean, we totally like we really like being together. We definitely talk. We have a good time. But everyone is like pretty independent and independently entertained. Plus on certain days of the week when the boys don't get home until like 730 and Kaz usually stays late at work on those days because we know we can't eat till the boys get home anyway. We get maybe an hour or two together before like homework and showers and all the things, you know? But so the why is like, let's just like be together as a family and work together as a unit. Speaker 1 (7:50) accomplish something together. Now, here's the thing though. I did not realize that that was going to be my why when we first started family meetings. Technically, our family meetings, they started out of a practical need. Over the summer, Sam started driving. He got his license. And all three kids had more activities at random times. So we actually needed a checkpoint logistically. nobody got blindsided because like somebody needed a ride to something that nobody knew about, you know? It was also just a really great touch point for reminders about summer chores, where are we going to have our family game night? Like each kid was sort of working on something during the summer. So it was a check-in for that. Because there wasn't a daily rhythm given by school, we needed something kind of steady in the summer. And it was great. It was so great. But once the school year started, the logistics of our family meeting became secondary. It's still what we talk about. Everybody still has stuff going on. We still plan chores and meals and game night and all that. But now my primary purpose that is like kind of secret to the kids, they don't know that that's really my purpose, is that we're all just like participating and being a family together. Now that includes logistics. But it also includes like knowing what's going on in the lives of the rest of the family and just like having a conversation together, just the five of us. We are participating in what's happening with each other, both physically and emotionally, which means if we all leave a family meeting connected to each other, if I'm like, yeah, that was a good, we've laughed. Like, I feel like we're a family. We've connected as a family. If we leave a family meeting with that, it matters far less to me that all the logistics got put in place or not. Like it doesn't matter as much because that's not the primary purpose. Now, some days that release is easier than others, depending on, you know, like my own emotional health that day. And some weeks I actually do need logistics to be wrapped up a bit more because there's just like a lot going on. But overall, I'm like. more or less patient with the chaos of how long it takes to get to the logistics of it all because of the meandering and the laughing and all of that. Because the meandering and the laughing, it means we're connecting. And that matters more than getting all the info quickly. Again, you will hear that in a bit. So why do you personally want to have a regular family meeting? Think of a quick list of possible reasons and then imagine what would happen if you