How to Make Your Family Work Together as a Team

Your family is a team. Just like your workforce is a team or the athletes on a team are a TEAM. And the same strategies that work for other teams outside your home can also be applied to your family.

Work with these steps and I truly believe that you will see your family start to slowly come together as a team, just like in youth sports.

Step 1: Mission Statement/Core Values

Every family has values of some kind even if you’ve never thought about them or clarified them. You are all living by some kind of values. To give your children a compass that will guide them when you are not around, do the work to establish core values in your home.

Step 2: Plan of Action and Milestones

Goal setting is a valuable habit for your kids to learn. It can be applied to many areas of life: sports, money, projects, academics, college–the list can go on and on. Here is a list of goal setting areas for the family. These examples may spark your own ideas:

Step 3: Budget

Although you don’t want your children to worry and stress about money, it’s important that they understand the meaning of good stewardship. Teach them the value of budgeting by talking about your own spending budgets, and by helping them establish their own budget, so they can save for things they want.

Step 4: Routines

Routines are how families get organized when it comes to getting things done and spending time together. The trick to establishing routines in a family is understanding the balance between structure and spontaneity. Routines are good, as long as they don’t become more important than the people they were made for, and as long as you know that there are a time and a place to break the routine.

Step 5: Celebrate Wins

When our kids were growing up, we used to share highs and lows at the dinner table. Sometimes I still make them do it when we manage to reunite! (They are now 33, 30 and 27).

But celebrating wins as a family goes beyond the individual, it expands to actual family wins, like finishing 9 weeks of at-home schooling during Covid-19 or completing a family project, or achieving a family workout goal.