We talk a lot about wellness topics like diet, exercise, sleep, stress, hormones, supplements and more on this blog, however we do not often touch on healthy family strategies. The question we often fail to ask ourselves is, “what do we want our family to be like?”
I love this dialogue between Katie of the WellnessMama fame and her good friend Heather from Mommypotamus.
Katie talks about how they created a Family Manifesto and why is it an important teaching tool. I hope you find this useful and if anyone has any good tips on how to display your manifesto please share that with us.
How to create a Family Manifesto that Inspires Action
Here is Katie’s transcript from her podcast.
We kind of named it our “family manifesto.” I am going to write about it soon and share ours. But we thought about doing a family mission statement and I know a lot of people recommend that, and it just didn’t feel actionable enough, if that makes sense. I felt like the word that fit for us was a “manifesto.”
And so we sat down with the kids, and we brainstormed, and had them throw out… It was really interesting to see the words that they threw out for what described our family. The ones that came to mind first for them were things like “adventurers,” and “explorers,” and “climbers.” Like the four year old, it was “hand-standers.” And I’m like, “Well, I’m not very good at that one yet.” But it was really cool to see the things that were important to them.
And so, we took all those words and drafted it into a paragraph that is more like a manifesto/creed, like it is an action-oriented thing, versus not just like how a mission statement might be. Like, “This family is…” It is very much like, “We are… This is what defines us.” And so, there’s lines like, “We are adventurers, explorers, and challenge-seekers, who are willing to take risks, and fail, and fall down, and apologize, because that is when you grow.” Just things like that and I am working on trying to figure out how to artistically put that on a wall, so that it is in a prominent place to remind us, because it has become kind of a teaching tool in that sense.
When siblings fight, we can be like, “No, this is great, because when we apologize we grow and we learn from that,” and just tying it back into that. And my hope is that that sticks with them when they eventually move on, which is hard to believe that is going to be in seven years for the first one. But hopefully that is something they will take with them and that will kind of guide their life. And hopefully, maybe with their own families, they will have their own version of it.
just feel like it helps us to be more intentional. I think in life, especially as parents, you can just get swept up in the day-to-day and not really have the time and focus to be intentional in what you are trying to accomplish with your kids. Not that we do it well every day. We certainly don’t, but we just try to keep the realization that, of all the work that we do and all the business that we build, and all this, that really our most important project in life is how we raise our children.
So the manifesto just felt like a very tangible way to bring them into the family culture and have us kind of like, “This is us. This is what we do. This is what we believe. And this is how that actually looks in our life.”
Have a healthy week
Dr Pia
