The Things I Love Most

Tips To Enjoying Life With Your Family

M & D meetings {Also known as Mom and Dad Meetings with Cookies}

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I think communication in a family is so important.  Children need an environment where they can feel safe to talk to their parents and even siblings about life! Our kids are pretty verbal, and don’t have a hard time telling us how they feel.  Sometimes a little too much 🙂  About a year ago my husband and I decided to start having monthly meetings with each of our children individually.  We felt really strongly that each of them needed to have a time to talk to just us.  A time where they can tell us their concerns, frustrations, work on goals, and for us to praise them.
We started out by calling them M&D meetings and eating Milk Duds while sitting around talking.  We realized that Milk Duds totally made us sick and that my daughter with braces couldn’t eat them, so we went with M&D Cookie Meetings.  M&D meaning Mom and Dad meetings and Milk Dunk, because who doesn’t love to have yummy milk to dunk cookies in!  I have heard of having monthly PPI’s, but both of us felt like it would be good to have both parents there and the kids LOVED the idea!  They love the attention.  Not that our children don’t get one on one time to talk to us during the month.  This is just a special time designated for just them, and they love it.
We have our meetings on Fast Sundays (the first Sunday of the month) after dinner. We have the other kids go play with toys in the play room and call each child one by one to the kitchen where we sit around the table and eat cookies and talk!  The first time we did this we didn’t think our meetings would be very long, but it ended up taking over an hour to talk with 3 kids.  They talked a ton!  Even our 5 year old enjoyed just sitting and talking to us, telling us his concerns of his little brothers stealing his toys, making goals to learn to play a sport, and us telling him how proud we are of him. We would ask him if he was done and he would just keep talking.  It was so sweet.
I decided last month that we needed a meeting layout so I made this up…..

We bought each child a notebook and will glue this on the cover.  In the notebook they write down their goals for each month and are able to look back and see what we talked about the month before.

We start each meeting with a prayer. Then we start right into the meeting and eating!  First Goals! As far as goals, we first go over their yearly goals with them and then let them pick a goal to work on for the month.  They can be anything!  From being more kind to their sibling, to learning to play Tetherball.  Yes, that was my 8 year olds goal and he did it!    We then move on to any concerns that they might have or that we might need to talk to them about.  Stuff such as them being more kind to so and so, or getting up in the morning without whining.  We don’t want to make them grumpy, just simple little things that are of concern.  They can even tell us concern they are having. Then it is time to let them just ask questions.  Our 6 year old likes to ask silly questions, but our 10 year old is starting to ask deeper questions.  We just chat and let them talk to us about whatever they want.  Last is praise time.  It is a good thing to end on to tell how awesome they are and how much we love being their parents.  We close the meeting with one of us saying a prayer for the child we have been talking with.  This has been a great time to teach them to pray and ask God for things.

Starting these meetings while our kids are young is a good idea. We want our children to always feel comfortable to talk to us.  I know that as they get older the harder it would be for them to feel like they could talk to us if we hadn’t already been talking.  It doesn’t matter how old your kids are, what religion you are, or if you have kids that don’t like to talk.  Try this out!  Make or buy cookies, and just sit and chat.  You will be surprised and excited about the stuff they say! My only advice…Don’t Yell and Don’t Get Mad!  Just let them talk, and enjoy this time with them!  If you stay consistent with it they will look forward to these meetings!  Let them know they are loved no matter what!  Teach them that you as a family are united, and that you love and support each other.  I love this quote by President McKay.

I know that God will work miracles in our home if we are united and show love one to another!

Comments

  1. This is awesome, Kendra! I wish we had done more of this through the years. We have done it off and on, off and on. It is SO worth the effort! One of my kids opens up to me when we go driving together. I always volunteer to take him places for that purpose; I just noticed we had our best talks in the car. Eventually, he started asking me to go places with him, and then he would talk… (He has to ask me to come with him now because he usually drives himself places. He is 19). I love our talks together while we drive down the road! I may have to start doing this again (or planning drives) now that the kids drive themselves! 🙂
    Thanks for the great post!
    Corine 😀

  2. Wow, this is so awesome. I love the whole thing and I will need to share this one.
    Blessings for all your good ideas.