Developing, Nurturing and Maintaining a good Relationship with your Children – Part 1

Before we can ever put our daily choices and patterns into place, we need to know the big picture.  Where are we headed?  What is our long term vision for our family?  Where do we see our family in 5, 10, 50 years?

For Chris and I, our first long term vision for our family is summed up in our family motto…  Every morning and night after our family prayer, we put one hand in together and repeat our motto.   (Sometimes Luke says “B-Y-U” instead and Chris grins while I roll my eyes.  We’ve allowed a compromise though, now he gets to lead a BYU chant after our family motto is over.)  Even little Matthew knows the drill and is excited to stick his hand in and mumble the words with a smile.

The kids know that this means we’re headed for the Celestial Kingdom together and we want everyone there.   Hopefully, by saying it every day, we’re reminding ourselves of the big picture and that all of our other goals and plans need to, in some way, help us get there.

 

Secondly, our family timeline helps both Chris and I, and our children have a vision of our family life.

 

This fabulous idea came from my Dad.  He had our family timeline on a big piece of poster board drawn in pencil and hidden behind the tall file cabinet in his office downstairs.  Once a year we’d pull it out, wipe off the cobwebs, lay it out on the kitchen table and check it out.  {Ours used to be hand-written on graph paper… but recently Chris and I sat down and made it digital… using iNumbers.}

Each child in the family has their own ‘line’ underneath the ‘year line’.  Each child’s line starts on the year that they were born.  On their line we’ve filled in all important milestones and when they will take place… a mark on their line for when they’ll start kindergarten, be baptized, receive the priesthood, go into beehives, Mia Maids, Laurels, Deacons, Teachers, Priests, start to date, go to University, go on a mission… All in pencil. 

It’s our family PLAN.  We want our children to know what the plan is… and that we EXPECT it to happen.  We don’t say IF you decide to go on a mission, they see it actually on their line like it’s part of the plan.  Once it has happened then it goes in pen.  For ours, which is on the computer, it will change from yellow ink, to black.

Another neat thing about this timeline is seeing how the kids lines match up.  How old will Matthew be when Ryan goes on his mission?  How long will Katie, Emily and Megan all be in young women’s together?  What grade will the kids be in when we get out of the army?

When we were deciding if we should move to Germany we pulled out our family timeline and looked at the next three years.  Viewing our family life in the ‘big picture’ made us realize that three years wasn’t really that long.  We also noticed what things would be taking place in the next three years… Ryan receiving the priesthood, Katie going in to Young Women’s, Emily and Megan being baptized. 

Part of developing a good relationship with our children is creating that vision together. 

My Dad still pulls out the family timeline to record events and uses it often for presentations.  Thanks Mom and Dad for your great example… in everything.

Lastly, Chris and I fully plan on and expect that we will have great relationships with our children as they grow older… and we’re working towards that every day.  I spend a lot of time helping my children envision our future relationship as well.  When I’m doing the girls hair or driving in the car with one of them I’ll say, “Emily, I’m so excited for when you go to your first dance and then you’ll come home and sit on my bed and tell us all the details and who you think is cute…”  I want her to envision telling us every detail.  I want her to envision sitting with the both of us to talk about her fears or her problems or her joys.  I want her to envision or EXPECT that having a great relationship and talking to your mom and dad is just what you do.          …We talk about how exciting it is going to be to go to kindergarten and how good they will be in their class,  about how proud we are that they will be choosing to get baptized, about our feelings and actions around dropping our kids off at college, about how they will look over at us in the temple when they get married – to see us crying, about the joy of visiting them and their children when they’re married… you name it, we talk about it, and I think it help our kids envision our relationship throughout their lives as well as build the necessary communication skills for a successful close relationship.