Introducing & Integrating Values with Your Family

You’ve done the hard work of starting the drafts of your family’s values, but now what? Actually presenting these and achieving buy-in can take time and ongoing conversations.

In this guide, we will walk you through different ways you can introduce values to your family depending on the stage of life you are currently in. And we’d encourage you to read through all the stages– many of these insights can be applicable in different ways to your own current season.

Introducing Values with Young Children

At this stage, you hold a position of authority and influence by default with your children so the initial sharing of values is simpler. The important things to focus on here are how to make sure it is integrated so they will remember it into the seasons ahead.

Introducing Values

• Use the tool of a family meeting to introduce values to your kids for the first time. Depending on ages, keep the time to a minimum, and even break it out into multiple meetings if needed. The key here is to simply share why these matter and what your little ones can do.
• Treat this stage like you are continuing to reintroduce values. With kids going through rapid growth stages, ongoing conversations and new explanations will help connect to where their brains currently are.

Integrating Values with Young Children

• While young kids may not fully grasp these concepts yet, repetition is your most powerful tool. Point out and affirm the behaviors that align with values.
• Create a memorization tool to help your children begin to repeat and remember these concepts.
• Have a regular story time with your children where you can share stories that align with values and that help make the concept tangible.

Pay Attention To:

• The best way to introduce values is with your own behaviors. How you act is the starting point your children will have to remember what values look like in your family.

Introducing Values with Pre-Teens & Teenagers 

During this stage, your children are moving beyond the care-giving stage and exploring independence. Here is a time where it will be important not to force this concept on your family but to open up conversations and create agreement around shared practices. Allow opportunities for your children to participate in the process and still use the opportunity for guidance as well.

Introducing Values

• Before introducing values drafts, make sure you gather your family to talk about the bigger vision first. Make it collaborative where everyone can talk about ways they hope to grow and what success would look like. Finding your common themes can be a helpful starting point.
• Lead your family through the exercise of identifying values. Have a list and ask people to circle their own ideas. Even if you have your own drafts already, it’s important to hear everyone’s perspectives and you can use that to adapt as needed.
• Once you have an agreed on list, set up a family meeting where you can begin to discuss plans on how your family wants to live these out. It’s helpful to come with tentative ideas for children to react to, as opposed to a completely blank slate, but stay open to hearing ideas.

Integrating Values with Teenagers

• Make it a game to identify and celebrate when family members are living out values. Consider having a token you pass out when you catch someone living out the values, and then at your next family meeting, share the stories about these.
• Make an assessment tool for your family to help measure how you are doing with integrating values. This becomes an easier way to develop accountability and generate conversations when you have a set tool, rather than attacking individual’s actions.
• Encourage your children to create their own ways they want to practice values on their own, beyond family activities. Consider helping them set their own personal goals.

Pay Attention To:

• This season is especially important to be multi-generational in your thinking. While you might want to still be the key authority in the home, this age can be such a crucial stage for your children, the next generation, to be bought into the values they want to pass on. The more you nurture their investment in these ideas, the earlier you are helping values sink in. They get the chance to be a full participant in who the family wants to be for generations. So hold things open-handed and invite them in!

Introducing Values with Young Adults

As your children step into adulthood and begin to leave the home, they are in a transitional moment of learning to live from the foundation that has been instilled but also beginning to make it their own. If you are just now beginning the process of articulating values for your family, it can become a valuable way to help your children navigate their own stages of forming identity.

Introducing Values

• Don’t rush into immediately sharing values. This stage of life is especially important to start with building connection first so you can approach conversations with empathy and inclusion. Start first by making time to catch up to hear where your children are at in life, their challenges, and look for common themes that might help prime you for the discussion about values.
• Introduce the general topic of values first. Talk about something you have been learning and explain the concept of values and why they matter. Gain your family’s perspective and use this to help prepare for how you need to approach the next conversation to introduce the values drafts you’ve created.
• Consider walking through the values creation process to allow your children to participate in the decisions. Treat the drafts you’ve created already with openness so that you can finalize them together as a family. (Read our post here for more information on values examples and how to organize this process.)

Integrating Values with Young Adults

• Build intentional processes for how your family will stay connected. Maybe it’s a weekly group text check-in where people can share highlights, including how they saw values being lived out. The more you communicate about what matters, the more it naturally becomes entwined in your family’s way of life.
• Choose a specific project or activity tied to your values that your family wants to take on together. For example, it could be identifying a specific cause you all want to save money for and donate together. The idea here is to help cast a clear vision of what your values look like in action and get people excited to join in this.
• Model the values for your family, and lead the way in calling out and celebrating where you see values in action. While your children might be busy in the new seasons of life, you can continue to help reinforce these concepts through kind encouragement.

Pay Attention To:

• Creating buy-in is important at this stage so that your children don’t feel like it is another rule to impede on them as they are growing into new seasons of independence. Work to create agreed-on, shared vision about how adding values will positively impact your family’s dynamic. Values should create fun, joy, and new opportunities, more than just rules, and they should translate on both the family and individual level.

Introducing Values with Adult Children 

With your adult children who may be busy with their own families, in-laws, or careers, integrating values as a family can become a helpful way to reconnect. You get to be a coach in this season of life, available for advice and living out your values as a model.

Introducing Values

• Much like the previous stage, it still is important not to rush into sharing values. It could even be most beneficial to have individual conversations first to introduce what you have been learning about this concept and gain insight from how your children react to the conversation to determine the next best step.
• To introduce values, consider including it in a family meeting where you can introduce drafts, share why they are meaningful, and discuss how you personally are implementing them for you and your spouse. Encourage your children to share their perspective or ideas on how to implement.
• If there are challenging relationships or your children may not be receptive to a conversation yet, the best step to introduce values may simply be in how you change your own behaviors. Model what you say you believe, and look for ways to articulate how actions were tied to values in the conversations or stories you share to help make the connection. For example, “I was visiting with our neighbor this weekend, as I’ve been trying to work on our value of service…”

Integrating Values with Adult Children

• Use generosity as a way to bring people to the table and to illustrate the concepts. What would be a project you all could agree on that you want to support that ties back to your values? Use it as a conversation starting point to dig deeper into why that cause matters and the impact your family wants to make.
• Pass on the family stories. In this season of life, the stories you share actually can be an impactful tool to share the lessons that have been meaningful to your family, and it may be the stories your children will want to pass on to their own children. Get intentional about identify the stories that align with your core values, and you’ll have a helpful foundation to share. (Want more information on finding your key stories? Visit our guide here. )

Pay Attention To:

If you are introducing values for the first time with grown children, it’s important to reframe your perspective here on the opportunity. You might not have the early formative years, but teaching values now can help give your children their own roadmap they can use within their families. Or depending on where your family is at relationally, values may be the way for you to pave a path to restoration first. Be willing to step back and acknowledge where the current journey is at and how you can grow together.