Looking at Family Relationships

Strong people skills is one of those things that I have always said is a priority in educating my children. It is also a priority I feel I am falling short of all too often.

Today we started a project to evaluate our family relationships. The idea came from Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining, and Bad Attitudes... in you and your kids by Turansky and Miller. 

Each family has more relationships than we may realize at first glance. 5 family members is not 5 or even 10 relationships.

We began by putting each family member's name on the white board. To make it a little more fun everyone got their own color. We included God, so we have 6 people in our relationship map.

Next each person is connected to every other person. We drew their relationships in their color.

We are also in relationship with ourselves. That is 6 relationships per 6 people for 36 relationships! Give yourself some grace, that's a lot to manage!

We talked briefly about only being able to directly control your relationship with someone, not their relationship to you. We can influence another to improve their relationship with us, but not control their response.

The writing assignment was:
List everything good about one relationship. 

What needs improving in that same relationship?
What could I do to work toward making this relationship what I would like it to be?

We'll do one a day until we've gone through them all, including our relationship with ourselves.

 

My hope is we will each see insights into individual relationships by examining them one at a time. 

We'll have more discussion and hopefully set some goals of things to improve on while realizing there is good in every relationship, even if they sometimes hurt us or frustrate us.  With younger children simply talk through the concept. It's easy to see how we relate differently to each member of our family if we pause to look at it.

How do you help your children work on relationships?