Not Traveling? An Opportunity for Making Plans!

With so many families at home due to the pandemic and not traveling over the coming holiday, many are finding time to work on projects, to do lists, personal growth opportunities and all sorts of activities to help them feel more productive and in control of their lives. Here are three possible plans that families might want review to see if they want to develop one or all three. There is definite overlap between the three.

Family Mission Statement – The process of writing a family mission statement offers many learning and communication opportunities for families. The process of designing and writing the mission statement is just as important as creating the final document. Just as businesses, schools and governments have missions and value listings to guide their decision making, families also can benefit as they access their mission statement to make everyday and big decisions. A family mission statement is like a constitution and a compass. 🙂 Here is a step by step process for writing a family mission statement.

Family Technology and Media Use Plan – Students and parents are familiar with the technology agreement documents that come from school asking for student and parent signatures. My take on them is the same as with the mission statement, the process of discussing, sharing ideas and writing one’s own family technology plan is much more important than signing a document that someone else created. So look into writing your own plan based upon the family values that you developed in writing your family mission statement. Here is the link to the workshop. You will find links to the handouts on slide 8. Be warned, I am pretty ambitious in what I hoped to cover in the workshop so please understand that the presentation was meant for face to face sharing where I could walk the parents through the process step by step.

Family Wellness Plan – There could not be a better time than now to come together as a family to design and create your family wellness plan. The internet is filled with helpful articles, blog posts and videos guiding us to be active in taking care of our collective well-being. We are so fortunate to have so much science-based information on how to support our mental, physical and spiritual needs. With Positive Psychology we have the PERMAH construct and Character Strengths to provide the structure to set goals, list action steps and follow them. I put together a simple planning document that your family can adapt and use. Here is a template if you want to do a personal wellness plan.