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Family Meetings and the Power of Shared Decisions: Part 3 With Guest Alyson Schafer
34 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to Episode 15 of On the Ground Parenting, and the third part of our special series with international best-selling author and Adlerian psychologist, Alyson Schafer! This week, hosts Sandy and Sam dive deep into one of the core concepts of Adlerian parenting: the Family Meeting.
Alyson stresses that the family meeting is a necessary platform for family democracy. It's a structured way to move away from a traditional hierarchy to a mutually respectful sharing of power. While she is a passionate advocate, Alyson is quick to point out that family meetings are hard and often involve "nasty, gnarly behavior". However, the long-term benefits—teaching kids skills like listening, problem-solving, and taking turns —are immeasurable.
The discussion highlights the huge value of these transferable skills. Alyson and Sandy share personal stories of how family meeting skills translated directly into running board meetings, managing coworkers , and even resolving roommate conflicts in university. They emphasize that issues like chores and rules are best solved through a framework of "we need a better solution" rather than "what's my discipline tactic".
The conversation also expands into a discussion of chores , cautioning that most family chores are janitorial and can make children feel like indentured servants. Alyson advocates for giving children "real jobs" that leverage their talents, such as planning a family holiday or organizing a closet.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's episode of On the Ground Parenting is made possible by the generous donations of our listeners. To learn more, look in the show notes or listen to the end of the episode.
Guest Introduction: Alison Schaefer
00:00:33
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome to On the Ground Parenting. My name is Sandy and tonight with me is Sam. And we are thrilled that Alison Schaefer is with us again.
Family Meetings: Concept and Personal Experiences
00:00:45
Speaker
And welcome, Alison. Oh, thank you so much for having me back.
00:00:49
Speaker
Always great to talk with you ladies. Great to be with you. We were talking, continuously talking and sharing, and we got into family meetings.
00:00:59
Speaker
So let's dive into this topic of family meetings. You mentioned something that your dad commented on, the complexity, how many things are involved when a family meeting occurs.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, when I first started my career, even though I had my master's in counseling and I'm trained in Edlerian psychology, my career was really around parent education. I was just, i was teaching. I was teaching courses, teaching classes multiple nights a week.
00:01:26
Speaker
And I really hadn't gotten into my counseling practice now. But at the time I was just a parent educator. And I just remember just being so gung-ho about this concept of family meetings and I grew up with family meetings.
00:01:38
Speaker
I'm the baby in my family. I have three older brothers. Did I ever love a family meeting? I would have the little talking stick and finally the floor was mine and people were going to listen to what I had to say. And I was so important and I love family meetings. So I taught them in my parenting classes as a core concept. And I really want to make sure that this lands for people.
00:01:58
Speaker
is that if we're trying to organize the family in a way that moves away from the hierarchy of the family structure, and we move to a more democratic, mutually respectful sharing of power, sharing of decision-making in an egalitarian way and in an age-appropriate way, then we need to have a platform for that to actually take place.
00:02:23
Speaker
And so the family meeting to me is a core part of democracy. So it doesn't mean that everybody has an equal say, you you know, you always have a say, but you don't always get your way.
00:02:35
Speaker
I'm not sitting down with my six year old and saying, you're a member of this family, should we go for like open rate or fixed, you know, mortgage? Like that's an inappropriate question. But if you've got a kid who's complaining because they want to have a hot breakfast on a Tuesday and you're only willing to serve toast or cereal, then they want to voice an opinion about how breakfast goes in the home. And I want to hear what they have to say about that so that we can solve the problems of family life together. And when you involve kids in decision-making and have them feel heard, they're much more likely to cooperate with you because you're moving in a more respectful, egalitarian way.
00:03:10
Speaker
So the concept of it to me is beautiful. It's a necessity, but they're hard.
Skills Developed Through Family Meetings
00:03:17
Speaker
They're hard. And it was really my dad who said, do you know how many skills a parent has to have to have an effective family meeting?
00:03:25
Speaker
Like you're making it sound like everybody should just sit down and they're just going to have some parliamentarian experience at the dinner table. And it's true. There's a lot of demands on a parent trying to organize because you're going to get almost worse misbehavior at a family meeting than pretty much anywhere else. And I remember my brothers rolling on the floor 10 feet from the dining table. They didn't want to walk away because in a family meeting,
00:03:50
Speaker
you need to be at the meeting in order to come to consensus about what the agreements are going to be. So if you don't come to the meeting, then the rest of us decide for the rest of the family. So they would like make a very big scene about like, I'm here. i want to, I still want to have my voice heard, but i don't really want to participate in this.
00:04:08
Speaker
So you get a lot of really nasty, gnarly behavior in family meetings. And yet they're kind of like a, there's still a necessity in the democratic family system. And They teach your kids so many of their own micro skills, taking turns, listening, problem solving instead of fighting, keeping focused on the future instead of dreading up the past.
00:04:31
Speaker
There's a lot of skills that will apply to the rest of their lives. But to just think that parents are just going to go out and have family meetings and love them and that their kids are going to love them, like that's false advertising. So I believe in them so deeply having lived with them and having raised my kids with them.
00:04:48
Speaker
for all the pains in the butts that they are, that I videotaped our family meetings and I have them edited and they're on my YouTube channel because I want people to see how horrible they can be. I don't want them to look clean and tidy. I want people to see that there's either trash or trash.
00:05:04
Speaker
there's There's a lot effort that has to be put into this one part of your parenting. But I would say it's one of the most important uses of my parenting energies. So I got to kind of sell parents on it, but I got to kind of tell them it's a lot of skills and it ain't going to look pretty and you're not going to like it in the beginning.
00:05:22
Speaker
But if you stick with it long enough, parents will come back to me time and time again and say, best thing you ever taught me. Best thing you ever taught me. But yeah, you again, you got to kind of look at the long game before you get some of the benefits
Family Meetings' Broader Applications
00:05:36
Speaker
from that. And and I'm sorry, and I know I'm just monologuing here. But i so i know I took my kids came with me to present at conferences to talk about family meetings when they were older, you know, when they were in their twenty s And they would stand in front of an audience of counselors and say like, no, I never, I didn't like family meetings, but they went like, but how would you live without them?
00:05:58
Speaker
They honestly didn't know how a family would, it dumbfounded them. How, I mean, how would you even have a family without a family? They couldn't comprehend that. And they went, well, you know, they went off to university and they started sharing houses with roommates and things. And they're like Well, we have to decide on who's going to buy the groceries and who's going to take out the recycling bins. And what happens if the boyfriends come over, but I have to study for an exam and you guys are up partying and I need you to quiet. Like, how would you not solve that if you didn't have like a house meeting?
00:06:27
Speaker
So they they were just like, this is the way the world works. How can people not do this? I'm so glad that you brought that part in about them moving out of your home into another home.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it's still working there because I have to tell you, I ah started a job as an executive director at an agency and suddenly i had to run a board meeting. And you know what I had never done before?
00:06:50
Speaker
I'd never run a board meeting, but you know what we did every Sunday night at my house? We had a family meeting. And I transferred those skills. And do you know, it's interesting. I have a friend that works in Europe and she talks about the European model for job sharing, which is very different than the way that we do job sharing here in North America.
00:07:10
Speaker
But she has looked deeply into the research on why women in the workplace have parenting skills that translate into workplace skills, because we actually do an incredible amount of human interaction, ah like learning to calm fights that could accelerate or learning how to be interactive, that problem solving.
00:07:36
Speaker
ah These are things that you learn working with your children, but my gosh, it's very similar to working with coworkers or managing people. And so there's all these transferable skills that we somehow degrade by saying, well, it's just children. Like they're just in baby blue and little pink. So, you know, how important could you be just being a you know parent?
00:07:58
Speaker
It's like, there's a tremendous amount of skills in being a parent that apply to all the other places of life. Yeah. I think that we undersell ourselves. We need to really have a strategic approach to list everything.
00:08:12
Speaker
I wanted to comment that I have had some acquaintances in the past who have mentioned family meetings not being necessary or why do you think that's an important part? And I just took a look at the evolution that long before we had business, we had family.
00:08:29
Speaker
And in order for that whole tribe or gathering community to survive, they had to communicate and they had to have that means by which they would problem solve or identify, you know, who wasn't pulling their weight and everything.
00:08:46
Speaker
It was there before a business practice of a meeting. And the business world adopted that from, you know, the family unit. And i even talked about how there may be different construction sites and maybe the the newest laborer on that construction site might not know what's going on until a supervisor, a boss who has been at a meeting.
00:09:13
Speaker
And so then there's that downloading, but there is that organizational structure of a meeting. that helps it all flow better. So it's present in all the systems.
00:09:25
Speaker
Some places it's it's more effective than others, but the family meeting is present. when And one of the things I like about it too, is that it it does a reframing for the parent's mind, because we are kind of told that we need to be
Practical Problem Solving in Family Meetings
00:09:39
Speaker
disciplinarians. And so we always are trying to think about like, what's my discipline tactic to change this behavior.
00:09:45
Speaker
And so right away, we go to the toolbox of, you know, discipline. In a family meeting, we're saying there's something in the family that's not working and we need a better solution. And that's a very different framework to think about.
00:09:57
Speaker
So, you know, I think about this one family that I worked with where the kid was never, it was his job to set the table and they were always having to nag him and remind him and he didn't set the table. And it was an ongoing thing that he wasn't taking responsibility for this chore.
00:10:12
Speaker
Well, when they actually talked about it at the family meeting, the child said, that's because the only time that you let us have TV time is in the half hour before dinner.
00:10:23
Speaker
And so everybody gets to watch TV but me. I have to go set the table. And so I don't like that. and And they were like, well, how about if you set the table at lunch? like You don't have to set the table in the half hour that you have TV time, you or or we could move dinner back by half an hour. or we could And suddenly all these solutions came. then And this wasn't a kid trying to be a bad kid. This was just like our formula isn't working.
00:10:46
Speaker
And when we took a different approach to it, the problem went away. It was just, oh, okay. I remember with my kids, we would fight leaving the schoolyard because they'd want to play on the playground with their friends.
00:10:58
Speaker
And so we had a conversation that I, you know, i really don't want to be fighting on the playground about, you know, are we staying? Are we going? Again, I always like to get the kids to give their ideas first. I'll brainstorm with them and I'll throw some ideas. I like to throw some crazy ones out just to show them that there's no bad idea. And I throw some wildies out there.
00:11:15
Speaker
But my kids ended up coming up with the idea that we would have like a little calendar and we would have like the long days that we would stay at school and the short days and they could look on the calendar with like a little picture so that they could look in the morning and say, oh, okay, today we're going right home for lunch. But tomorrow we get to stay and I would pack a snack and bring my coffee and, and they could see it and they would know and they would predict and.
00:11:36
Speaker
They could be involved in picking which days of the week they would stay and play. And it just solved this fight that we were having every single day. it was such a simple thing to solve. And I think about all the parents who are on the playground with their kids holding onto their pant leg, trying, I don't want to go home. I don't want to go home for lunch.
00:11:53
Speaker
I'm like, oh man, we had that one solved. We just kept knocking back problems after problems. And and there was a lot of things that we could repeat the solutions. You know, like a lot of people fight every time their kids get in the car because they'll go like shotgun, shotgun. I want to sit.
00:12:07
Speaker
I'm just like, are we going to fight every time we get in the car for the rest of your your whole longevity of life? Like I'm not having a fight every time you get in the car We need solution for how we pick turns.
00:12:18
Speaker
Yeah. And that picking turns for seats, picking turns for who sits next to mum at the dinner table, who picks turns for who goes first in Monopoly. They got a system for how to pick who goes first and how to share that. And that applied to so many situations. That was such a great thing to solve kind of once and for all.
00:12:36
Speaker
And just so much harmony, just so much harmony comes from when you have this opportunity to problem solve with your children. And then the other point about that is once a week, we have a family meeting about once a week, you know, people get busy, we always try to schedule the next meeting at the end of the meeting we just had.
00:12:52
Speaker
But kids typically will tolerate living within an arrangement that they agreed to, even if they don't like it on day one, they'll tolerate it if they know that they have a chance to tweak it within within a week. within a re you know It's not like chiseling the tablets like forever and for always, this is going to be the new rule you know that we we look, we see, we try, we adapt.
00:13:14
Speaker
And so it meant that all the kind of parenting stuff happened in one block
Decision-Making and Cooperation in Families
00:13:20
Speaker
at time. So if my kids came up to me and said like, I want to, can I have Susie over for a sleepover? And I'd go put that on the agenda for the family meeting.
00:13:28
Speaker
um You know, oh, I want a Barbie doll. Put that on the agenda for the family meeting. and I didn't have to do all this live time, you know, stuff, but my kids knew that I took them seriously. I kept a little book in my purse. I would write it down And they're like, I know that my mother is listening and I will be heard, but I'm not going to like use my dramatic flailings of ah of a temper tantrum on the playground because I want to go to the dollar store and and get a Barbie after school today. Like I showed them there was a way to get your needs met constructively. And Alison, you've also talked about ah when you're starting a family meeting about advisable topics on the agenda because you don't want to get too
00:14:11
Speaker
onerous or overwhelming. And I'll say that my family, we'd been having family meetings for a while. And so we were at the stage where actually family chores were part of our family meeting, but certainly were they were not there at the beginning.
00:14:26
Speaker
And the funny thing was we were talking about the different chores and the kids noticed their names were on the chores list more than their parents' names were. And that gave them like, so they had an equal voice and they could challenge appropriately.
00:14:42
Speaker
And so how many years later is that? And it's still the funniest thing we ever talk about. And yes, we were able to revisit that and ask them, so what do you think should be happening here?
00:14:53
Speaker
So conversation was flowing instead of it being ah someone made a decision on someone else's behalf. I think that's really when we're going to the the roots of Adlerian psychology, it's really designed to win children's cooperation rather than force their obedience.
00:15:10
Speaker
And in that model, if you want to cooperate with your fellow person, regardless of how old they are, you really have to have mutual respect, you in the relationship. And like I said, even though parents have more power, more say, more prefrontal cortex, like there's a lot of things we have to do in a leadership role, you can still lead respectfully rather than being a dictator.
Family Roles and Responsibilities
00:15:32
Speaker
And so when we try to win children's cooperation, part of the groundwork for that is that they do have to feel that they are not an indentured servant.
00:15:43
Speaker
And so bringing them into the conversation, and think about that, even with chores, I mean, gosh, have me back, we could do a whole other, we could do a whole thing on chores. Let me tell you, we're just, we're doing spinoff conversations, man.
00:15:54
Speaker
Could we please do a whole thing on chores? Even with adult children in my house, it is an ongoing issue. A hundred percent. But a lot of what happens in families is that, you know, we we hear, we hear that the children should do chores. And then when you look at what chores they do, like it's pretty much all janitorial. I am sorry. Yes, it is.
00:16:14
Speaker
It's cleaning the kitty litter box. It's loading the dishwasher. We give them the most terrible job. Of course they feel like indentured servants because we don't give them very respectful jobs that that speak to their talents, that speak to their creativity.
00:16:30
Speaker
I would much rather say like, you know, so you know what? You're like a great organizer. You know, could you look after the front hall closet? It's a mess of, of winter mittens and snow pants, man. Some of that stuff has to go to Goodwill. Would you just take over the front hall closet and get that settled for us?
00:16:44
Speaker
Oh, you know, somebody who loves organization is going to love that job, you know, and you probably have some like little manic kid. I watched a kid here on my street. he He clearly was told to go walk the dogs, but that kid had so much energy. He was so happy walking those dogs. He was twisting them around the street pole and pulling on them. And I thought he is burning off his energy because he's going to have to go home and sit still for dinner. He's having a great time burning off his energy.
00:17:09
Speaker
And so, you know, if we could get like a little bit more creative and and stop just thinking that everything is about the darn recycle bins, like get off this people. Like there's, I have a whole list on my website of like creative jobs. Like I had a nine-year-old without a word of a lie.
00:17:25
Speaker
Nine-year-old who did all the family planning for their European holiday. He had all the hotel reservations. He had all the airlines booked. He had all the outings. He got it all approved by his parents. But this guy, he loved being on the computer and he loved planning travel.
00:17:39
Speaker
I'm like, what a great gift to give the family. He showed up in a really big, important way. Mm-hmm. And I've had other people where it's like, don't just walk the dog. like I had somebody with a clipboard interviewing new veterinarians. like what ah Tell me exactly what your credentials are for our cat.
00:17:56
Speaker
Tell me exactly. like We have to give our kids real jobs. like you know And yeah, sure, everyone's got to take their plate off the table or whatever. But I think we get in these narrow little ideas of kids helping that kind of miss the point of that you contribute to a family, the give and take of social living, right? Like you help.
00:18:16
Speaker
And then when you need help, you get help, right? Like the Mennonites, your barn burns down. We help you rebuild it. We all pitch in You got a bad day. We help you out. It's a feeling. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's worthwhile.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah. Reciprocity and value. Yeah. Wow, what a conversation we had. And it just seems as if this is the appropriate spot for us to pause.
Conclusion and Future Insights
00:18:38
Speaker
And we're going to offer the rest of this conversation in a subsequent session.
00:18:43
Speaker
But what a superb intro to family meetings, talking about the transferable skills of parenting to effective relationship skills and other relationships that we have and a side sharing of even tasks, chores, jobs.
00:19:00
Speaker
We'll see you the next time. Are you looking for resources? Are you looking for connections? Check out Linktree below and it will give you all the information that you need. See you next time.
00:19:20
Speaker
On the Ground Parenting is a production of Muskoka Family Focus's parent education program. It is made possible by the generous donations of listeners like you. If you'd like to make a donation, sponsor an episode, or just ask a question of one of our hosts, go to linktr.ee forward slash on the ground parenting.
00:19:38
Speaker
On the Ground Parenting is produced and published by Red Juice Studios. To learn more, go to redjuicestudio.com. Thanks for listening.