Guide to Building Family Rhythms

If you want your family to be connected and engaged, you need to build the family habits that act like a cement to your foundation. They might be small but they are what will give you stability and allow you to build your family’s culture.

Let’s talk about the big vision of what healthy family culture is and then we will dive into how to identify the habits your family needs in its current season:

What is Family Culture?

Family culture is an understanding of who we are and how we will live based on our guiding principles. It sets the tone of our day to day lives and interactions all drawn from our mission, vision, and values. Who your family wants to be and what it centers on are at the heart of culture.

Creating Family Habits to Build Family Culture

As part of family culture, the ingrained habits your family lives from are what will help you maintain culture. The way you act daily sets the overall tone for who your family is, so consider the habits you need to build based on your family’s season. These will continue to adapt in new seasons, so think of them as continued layers to the foundation.

1. Daily Family Habits– What can we do on a daily basis that will strengthen our family?

The daily family habits you use create an environment of stability and consistency, so consider the habits that will most reinforce the areas of growth and importance to your family in its current stage. Consider these opportunities:

• Meal-time family rhythms such as prayer, sharing a story, or reciting your mission, vision, and values.
• Check-ins with a specific question you ask to stay up to date and connected.
• Encouragement habits where you share something positive.

2. Weekly or Monthly Family Rhythms- What can we do on a weekly or monthly basis that will strengthen our family?

These habits, while less of the ingrained daily rhythm, are designed to help bring you back together and reconnect. They are space to pause, reset, or clear out time for things you might not have space for during daily routines. Consider tools like these:

• Set up a family meeting to ensure you are discussing what matters. (Find our guide here on creating family meetings.)
• Plan an activity or action to take related to your mission, vision, or values.
• Spend time with family members individually and stay connected to their lives.

3. Family Communication Habits- How will we ensure we talk about what matters and not let things go unresolved?

When it comes to communication, many times families wait until it is a major conflict to be resolved, so setting in place family habits that develop an easier flow of communication and feedback will allow things to be addressed much earlier. Create your own ideas, or consider these opportunities:

• Choose a couple active listening questions everyone can use to help make sure they understood what was said. Commit to memorize and use them.
• Set regular family evaluation or assessment checkpoints where you discuss a specific component of the family where people can bring honest input.
• Define a specific process for how you choose to resolve conflict.

4. Develop a Place of Belonging.- How can we make our family a space where we depend on each other and are safe?

For all the above habits to succeed, it requires that your family environment is a place of safety and belonging. That sense of shared identity and safety is often primarily built through the small but consistent habits that invite people in, let them know they matter, and connect them to one another. Build family rhythms that create interdependence with ideas like these:

• Set a regular practice of how you will encourage each other. (A night to share compliments, a specific day where you all text and share something you appreciate, a fun yearly award, etc.)
• Create high standards of how you will make your family safe and articulate these. (No gossip tolerance policy, set a conflict process, honor boundaries, etc.)
• Build traditions that create shared connection and meaning. (A cause you give to, a place you all return to, a book you read, how you share stories, etc.)

Make Your Family Habits Plan

Now that you understand these core concepts for family habits, use those questions to help refine your ideas process and define the habits you want to instill. The ideas we have listed can help prompt you and consider the underlying principles to help you adapt it to your family’s season. For example, the habit of a family meal time might not fit for your family with adult children, but the core principle of finding a daily way to be connected still can help prompt how you’d adapt the concept.

This is not an exhaustive list of family habits and rhythms either, so add additional categories that may help you. Write down the categories you choose and define what you will implement. Remember, it will take time and it will also evolve over time, so choose specific dates where you will come back and evaluate. You can do this even in increments, so find the pace that works best for your family.

Family Habits Become Family Foundations

Through this practice of family habits and rhythms, you are adding layer after layer to your family’s foundation, strengthening it with each repetition of these actions. Keep an eternal perspective in mind here. What you are doing strengthens your family not only today but it is a path for future generations to follow. That’s the power of family culture!