We Are FAMILY

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What does family mean to your kids? Have you ever asked them?

The other day, we were having a particularly difficult time with selfishness.  This shows up in our house in phrases like, “But it’s not my mess,” “But I did that last time,” or “Why should I have to do that?”  We address these issues quite frequently, but I wanted to come up with a unique visual on how to deal with the root of selfishness.

To do this, I wrote out the word FAMILY in big, bold letters, and asked my third grader to read each individual letter to us.  Then I asked all the kids how often the letter I appeared in that word, to which they all answered once, of course.

Next, I wrote out IIIIII (the letter “I” six times, which is how many letters are in the word, FAMILY) and asked if the word still looked the same. Did this new “word” still mean the same thing, and did it still function the same?  This is where the older ones started with a slight eye roll.

We then had a discussion, again, on how a family cannot operate when everyone is focused on just the I component.  Each letter in the word represents a specific sound, which gives the letters a specific meaning when arranged together. I went on to expelling that without the letters working together in this way, FAMILY would not exist as a word in the same way.

From there I asked the kids to all agree on an acronym for the word FAMILY that would illustrate the word in the way we wanted to remember it.  This is what they came up with:

F— Family

A — Always There

M — More Than Enough

I — I is Not Part of the Equation

L — Live, Laugh, Love

Y — You Will Go Far Together

I then had a couple of my girls make a picture of our new representation. I have yet to laminate it, but then we will hang it where we can see it as a good reminder.

Operating as a team is an ongoing problem in most families at times, and I find it is most effective to come up with new and different ways to deal with selfish attitudes and repetitive problems.  Kids are usually very visual, so coming up with something that is visual works well for me, maybe it will for you, too.

If you’ve never asked your kids what family manes to them, try it out. Their answer just might surprise you!