Keeping the Peace

Keeping the Peace: Family Meetings for Conflict Resolution
By Althea Solter
Issue 118 - May/June 2003

"If you don't stop that, I'm going to put it on the agenda!'

When I overheard my ten-year-old daughter yell this to her teenage brother one day, I realized how important our weekly family meetings had become. I highly recommend family meetings for parents who want to become less authoritarian with their children without becoming too permissive. Weekly meetings provide a forum in which family members can resolve conflicts in a truly democratic way. Anyone can bring up a problem, and everyone participates in finding solutions and making rules. Family meetings can work well with children as young as four years.

Getting Started
A good way to start having family meetings is to propose a regular, weekly meeting time. Our family held its meeting on a specific evening each week during dinner. If we could not all be together on that day, we tried to set another time that week for the meeting. You can use your first meeting to discuss the structure of future meetings, as well as the decision-making process.

It is important to have a written agenda. In our family, we taped a blank sheet of paper to our refrigerator door, where family members wrote down the items they wanted to discuss, along with their names. This became the official agenda for the next meeting. (Children too young to write can dictate their agenda items, or draw a simple picture.) Meetings work best if no one adds any items to the agenda once the meeting has started. In order for meetings to run smoothly, there needs to be a chairperson and a secretary. These responsibilities should change each week so that each member of the family has a chance to participate in the leadership; as soon as children are old enough to do these jobs, they should have their turn. The chairperson's job is to see that each agenda item is addressed in order, to ensure that no one interrupts the person speaking, and to keep the discussion on the topic at hand. The secretary writes down the decisions reached.

Giving appreciations is a wonderful way to begin meetings. The chairperson can begin by asking if anyone has an appreciation for another family member regarding something specific the person has done during the week. In our family, we sometimes had many appreciations, at other times very few. For example, I once appreciated my children for helping out by doing extra chores when I was sick. On several occasions they thanked my husband and me for helping them with homework.

After appreciations, it is useful to have an announcement time when family members let each other know, for example, if they are planning to be absent for a meal or out in the evening during the following week. This becomes increasingly important as children grow older and participate in numerous activities.

After announcements, the chairperson can then follow the written agenda, addressing each item in order. Some families may wish to decide on a time limit for the meeting, while others may think it is more important to finish discussing every item on the agenda. In any case, meetings should have a definite end; it's fun to end with a special dessert or a short game, if time permits.

Agenda Items: The Nitty-Gritty Content of Meetings
Here are some examples of conflicts that we discussed in our family: use of the bathroom, chores, reading at the table, disappearance of pencils from the kitchen drawer, leaving lights on, going into people's rooms without knocking, messes in the living room, and use of the living-room couch. We solved all of these problems during family meetings, to everyone's satisfaction.

Sometimes parents who consult with me report that their children are at first resistant to the idea of family meetings, thinking that this is merely a new trick to get the children to do what the parents want. When this occurs, I advise the parents to restrict the agenda items of the first few meetings to pleasant topics that are not emotionally charged, such as planning a family trip or discussing how to celebrate an upcoming birthday. Even after meetings are a well-accepted routine, I recommend using them not only for conflicts, but also for neutral topics.

It is also important to encourage the children to use the meeting format for problems they have with their parents, or to address situations in which they feel that their needs are not being met. My son once brought up a problem he had with us playing music in the living room while he was trying to do his homework, so my husband and I agreed not to play music while he was studying. (His room was right next to the living room, and the walls are thin.) A year later, when he acquired a drum set, he was quite willing to work out a solution at a family meeting when we told him that the noise bothered us. The solution we reached was that he would play his drums only when he was alone at home.

In most families, discussions of chores usually take up a good deal of meeting time, at least at the beginning. To get started with this, it is helpful to use a meeting to make a list of all the jobs that need to be done daily, weekly, and monthly. Be sure to include in this list all the jobs the adults do that might otherwise be taken for granted, such as earning money, paying the bills, and shopping for groceries. One way to divide up the chores is to ask for volunteers to take responsibility for each one. After you reach agreement on this, someone can write up an individual job list for each family member.

Another way to assign chores is to rotate them systematically among family members each week or month, or distribute them randomly at each meeting. There are many creative solutions, and whatever system your family agrees to is the one that will work the best. Whatever system you use, you can expect some aspect of chores to keep reappearing on the family meeting agenda. This ongoing negotiation, although time-consuming, is important to the success of the democratic process. The idea is to encourage a feeling in children of cooperation and a willingness to do their share because they are part of the family. The use of an external reward system would undermine this goal. There is no need to pay children to do chores. Once your children learn that you will take their problems seriously, listen respectfully, and use mediation fairly, they will start using the agenda sheet to write down problems they have with their siblings. If one child is bothered by something that a sibling has done, he or she will learn to write it on the agenda sheet, knowing that the problem will be dealt with equitably at the next meeting. This can prevent conflicts from erupting into major fights.

It is important to take all of your children's agenda items seriously, no matter how trivial they may seem. My daughter once wrote the word "burping" on the agenda. At the next meeting, she explained that her brother's loud burping bothered her. He replied that everyone had a right to burp, and that she did lots of things that bothered him, such as chewing gum loudly with her mouth open. (Meetings can become quite animated at times!) They finally reached the following agreement: He promised to stop burping loudly if she agreed to chew gum with her mouth closed. They never had a problem with this issue again.