The Secrets of Happy Families

Creating a family identity is the collective equivalent of imagining your best possible self. I

Alan Kazdin, a psychologist who heads the Yale University Parenting Center, has pioneered what he calls “parent management.” His core idea is that parents should spend more time identifying and rewarding good behavior instead of endlessly punishing bad behavior.

favorite expressions, including Linda’s classic “We don’t like dilemmas; we like solutions,” and my recent addition, “We push through. We believe!” Then Eden cried out, “May your first word be adventure and your last word love!”

What words best describe our family?
What is most important to our family?
What are our strengths as a family?
What sayings best capture our family?

list of qualities they evaluated for. And I took the entire list of 24 Character Strengths identified by Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology

from In Search of Excellence and some from Good to Great. A

Sean Covey. Sean is the fourth of Stephen Covey’s nine children (the one who said his family’s mission statement should be “We kick butt”). He’s also the author of The 7 Habits of Happy Kids and is a leadership coach in the company started by his father.

Collins is a lifelong student of business management. He is the coauthor of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, which was a best seller for six years, and he also wrote Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t, which has sold more than five million copies.

One of Covey’s real innovations was applying a similar process to families. He suggested that families create a family mission statement. “The goal,” he wrote, “is to create a clear, compelling vision of what you and your family are all about.” He said the family mission statement was like the flight plan of an airplane. “Good families—even great families—are off track 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. What makes them good is they have a clear destination in mind, and they have a flight plan to get there. As a result, when they face the inevitable turbulence and human error, they keep coming back to their plan.
Covey said creating his own family’s statement was the most transforming event in his family’s history. He and his wife first looked over their marital covenant, in which they had included ten abilities they wanted their children to have. They then asked their kids a series of questions, including “What makes you want to come home?” and “What embarrasses you about our family?” Next the kids wrote their own statements. Their teenage son Sean, a high school football star, wrote, “We’re one heck of a family, and we kick butt!” Finally they ended up with their single sentence.
The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness, and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for each individual to become responsibly independent, and effectively interdependent, in order to serve worthy purposes in society.
Covey lists a dozen examples of other families’ mission statements. They range from the homiletic: Our family mission: To love each other . . . To help each other . . . To believe in each other . . . To wisely use our time, talents, and resources to bless others . . . To worship together . . . Forever.

Family Mission Statemen