You may have been in a school where there is a list displayed of school values, these are the things that they find to be most important on either a spiritual, emotional or mental or maybe even a physical level for their environment.

Very often businesses have these, they have some idea of what their key values are and what it is that they’re striving to achieve via the work that they do and the purpose of these is to really give a sense of direction and meaning and purpose and to help everyone stay on the same page and on the right track. Having values and knowing what your values are can be a really useful exercise especially if you’d like everybody to subscribe to them. However, I don’t often see or hear about families who are setting out what their family values should be. We hear about family values a lot and what family values might be culturally but what about for your actual home? What are the things that are most important to you about how your family looks after each other? You can find more help around parenting here.

Your purpose is what the key things are that you wish to achieve as a unit and this can be a really useful exercise for either adults to do and this can be a really useful thing to include your children in the formulation of these particular values for all of you as well. Of course, as adults, we tend to have a greater repertoire of words and language so it’s much easier for us to take a label and use that to describe what it is that we essentially want for children. They’re maybe going to find that a little bit more challenging simply because they perhaps have not got that vocabulary there yet or they don’t understand what some of the other terminologies might actually mean in which case we’ve got a wonderful platform that we’ve just created for discussion and learning and that might also be useful and important.

I just want to give you some ideas today about what things you might want your family to be striving for and as a family you need to have goals if you want to be a close tight unit. You need to be working together towards achieving something and that can be the creation of another goal.  

In creating values, I want to ask if it’s a big decision to make that together and not independently of each other especially if it’s something that’s going to affect each other? It should be a joint decision.

When we bring these sorts of ideas together as a team and even get them down on paper and talk about which ones are the most important for us to agree to and subscribe to then we’ve got a much better chance of being able to make those things a reality but also from a discipline perspective it means that if something starts to go a little bit off we can come back together and say listen we’re not sticking to our values here and this is something we all agreed to in the beginning we all agreed that this is the way it should be. 

Values are like your pillars that hold up the structure of your family and from these, you can then start to really dissect them and get down into the nitty-gritty of what that means you actually need to do, you know, maybe that means that you need to take responsibility for clearing up your room, maybe that, means that you need to be nice to your sister. It could be any one of those practical fundamental things that happen on a day to day basis in the household but if we jump straight in with those things without first talking about the values then sometimes we can get stuck in a situation where it’s just I’m telling you what to do and you just have to do it because it’s the right thing.

When we talk about values first and putting those key principles in place then it becomes much more likely that people are going to understand the ‘why’ behind the rules that we might then lay down for everyone to follow. I want you to have a think over the course of the next month about what your family values might be but don’t just think about it by yourself it’s something for you to share and discuss with your entire family. Remember, if you need help, an NLP4Kids practitioner can lead you through the exercise.

By Gemma Bailey 

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org