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After reading Bruce Feiler’s book The Secrets of Happy Families, we were chewing on the idea of creating a Family Manifesto for a very long time. Well, we had a few attempts to pull it together – talked about our family values, discussed the questions from the book, and even tried to engage our boys in the conversation. But we never came up with something we could hang on the wall.

Therefore, Family Manifesto was my number one parenting resolution this year. And we’ve spent the entire January creating one.

What is Family Manifesto?

Ok. Firstly, what is Family Manifesto – or Family Mission Statement- and why do we all need one?

As legendary Stephen Covey writes in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families:

“A family mission statement is a combined, unified expression from all family members of what your family is all about – what it is you really want to do and be – and the principles you choose to govern your family life. It’s based on the idea, that all things are created twice. First comes the idea, or the mental creation; then comes the reality, or the physical creation. It’s drafting the blueprint before constructing the building, writing the script before performing the play, creating the flight plan before taking off the airplane.”

Family Mission Statement helps you to embrace parenting with the end in mind. It outlines the core principles that will guide your parenting decisions and help your children grow in character and develop their own internal compass to guide their choices in the future. And at the same time, it gives them a feeling of belonging to something meaningful. 

In other words, Family Manifesto helps you create an intentional family culture that explicitly prioritizes and promotes the values and virtues you want to instil in your child. 

Very powerful tool.

How did we write our Family Manifesto?

Although we kind of had all the ideas in our heads, translating this tacit wisdom into a Family Manifesto took a lot of effort and mental energy. 

Firstly, I pulled together a comprehensive list of values, from achievement to zest, taken from various leadership, psychology and management books. I also added a list of 24 virtues (or character strengths) associated with flourishing in life. I wrapped everything up with a list of questions to reflect on:

• 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?
• How do we want to treat each other?
• What kind of family do we want to be?

And more questions on our relationship and parenting:

• What sort of relationship do we want to have as a couple?
• How do we want to resolve our differences?
• What kind of parents do we want to be?
• What roles will each of us perform?
• What traditions do we bring with us from the families in which we were raised? 
• What traditions do we want to keep and create?
• What principles do we want to teach our children to help them prepare for adulthood and lead responsible, caring lives?
• What qualities do we want to ingrain in them?
• What sort of people do we want our kids to be in 5, 10, 20 years?
• What is the purpose of our family?
• How can we both support each other in our respective goals?
• How do we want to handle finances?

Then I sent my husband, Dawid, an invitation for a kick-off meeting to discuss these questions and talk about our core values. We had about one week to prepare and reflect on what is really important to us.

At the same time, I assembled a file with different examples of Family Mission Statements, so we could have a rough idea of a format that resonates with us the most. Kind of a vision board.

On the day of the meeting, we sent kids to school, set up an ambience of a jazz cafe in the living room, and grabbed our notes. We both took it seriously. For about an hour, we had a great chat, sipping coffee and talking about our values, relationship, the things we want to teach our kids, and our life vision in general. The type of conversation all parents should have sooner rather than later.

I took notes, and my next step was to refine, distil and pull all the ideas into something visual we could put on the wall. We agreed that we don’t want anything too wordy, like examples from Stephen Covey’s book. We were more after a list of family commandments – principles to live by.

After a while, I sent Dawid a first draft of our Family Manifesto for review. It looked like that:

• Love unconditionally
• Take responsibility 
• Be curious and never stop learning
• Ask questions
• Be proactive
• Love obstacles, failures and mistakes – learn from them!
• Play and have fun
• Count your blessings
• Explore the world
• Dream, create, inspire
• Communicate with love
• Try new things
• Take care of your mind and body
• Focus on progress
• Be a problem-solver and always look for solutions
• Rise by lifting others
• Never ever give up
• Live consciously
• Keep promises
• Have good manners
• Lead by example
• Do your best and forget the rest

Dawid added to the list:

• Carpe diem
• Exegi monumentum

It seems long. And quite complete at the same time. Maybe a bit dramatic and bold, but it definitely reflects our life philosophy.

Now. As my graphic skills are very mediocre, I’ve asked my sister @mityukova_alina to create a poster for us. Here is what we have on the wall now:

I must say – I LOVE IT! It’s a great visual reminder to all of us to be the best possible selves. 

At the same time, we faced a small dilemma. Although two of our boys can read, one is still yet to learn. So we are also thinking about creating another version with pictures. I’m sure our Family Manifesto will go through several revisions during the next few years anyway.

Now it’s all about living by these principles.

I hope you feel inspired to create your very own Family Manifesto.

Loads of love,

Irina

P.S.: Oh yes. One caveat here. Although the general advice is to engage your whole family in the Family Manifesto brainstorming, we decided to take the lead on it, as our boys are still very young. Of course, we’ve tried to ask them a couple of questions from the list, but the answers were mostly like, “we want to be a good family”. So we felt that for now, we need to elaborate on what “a good family “looks like ☺