The Purpose of Creating Family Laws
Because financial education is deeply intertwined with family values, some of our Spend Then posts aren’t directly related to teaching your kids about finance. They’re more foundational, about ways to articulate what’s important to you as a family.
We do this because we believe that when the foundation is strong and your family has a shared understanding of basic principles, you can more effectively raise financially literate children.
On the Spend Then blog, we started by talking about my family of origin’s “family sayings,” and then about how you can create your own family quotes or sayings. In this post, we’ll be talking about the Family Laws we had when I was growing up.
Family Laws?! Does that sound intimidating? It really wasn’t. Our family laws simply helped all of us understand how our family worked and how we were expected to interact, not just with our family but with the world at large.
We had 5 Family Laws:
Peace
Asking
Order
Respect
Obedience
I think my mom and dad originally read about this idea in a Montessori article (I attended a Montessori school when I was young). Regardless of where they got the idea, it stuck. Here’s what each word of our Family Laws meant to us.
Peace. Peace meant maintaining peace within yourself, your space, and the family. For example, if I wanted something from my sister who was in another room, I didn’t yell, “Brooke, come here!” Instead, I was expected to go and speak directly to her. Doing so obviously creates a more peaceful home atmosphere than all 6 of us yelling to one another at any given time. But, more than that, I learned early that, for me, being peaceful with others starts by having peace within yourself. I found that when I had internal peace, I was more settled and better able to extend it to others. That’s true even today.
Asking. In our home, we were allowed to ask once for something we wanted. One request. That’s it. From a parenting perspective, this also made our home more peaceful, because we weren’t nagging our mom and dad with the same question 500 times. It also made me a better negotiator, because I knew that if I only had once chance to ask, I’d better really think it through. I often did something nice for my mom or dad before asking, understanding early that it wasn’t all about me. In retrospect, I think having this as one of our family laws helped my siblings and me understand that our parents had authority, taught us the importance of boundaries, and helped us develop self-discipline.
Order. Order means exactly what it sounds like: my parents wanted an orderly home and that included the kids. We were expected to clean our rooms and, as a part of the family, everyone was assigned a “zone” of the house to clean. Getting us involved in cleaning our home helped us learn that when your space is in order, your mind is in order. We also learned not to waste precious time searching for our things (you know, the “a place for everything and everything in its place” idea). My parents didn’t expect perfections, but they did expect our rooms and “zones” to be presentable. My dad inspected our space and gave us a rating every Saturday morning. A less than great rating meant we had to re-do it. We quickly learned that our time was valuable and that it was better to do it well the first time.
Respect. You might think that “respect” would mean respecting our parents or other adults. And while it did mean that, it also went beyond adults—we were expected to respect our sibling. Yikes! When we didn’t, we had the “repenting bench.” For example, let’s say that, on an off day, I hit Brooke. When she told our parents, or they heard her crying, we both had to sit on the uncomfortably hard repenting beach. What happened next? We had to sit there until we worked it out. Then, one of my parents would be the “judge,” who listened while we explained both sides of the story and who was at fault. We had to apologize, promise not to do it again, and hug each other. My parents remained neutral and we learned to how to manage conflict. Ingenious!
Obedience. The kids in my family were expected to obey our parents. We didn’t plead or sass. Obedience went hand-in-hand with our family law of “respect.” My parents weren’t dictatorial and didn’t abuse their power; they modeled respect in the way they treated us, others, and each other. But we learned early that we should obey them. One way to do so was by being respectful of our elders, conversing with and listening to them. As we grew, we benefited from this family law when we had to obey teachers, coaches, and, eventually, bosses.
If you created family quotes or sayings, you likely included values, things you want your kids to internalize as they grow, like, “I can do it” or “Do your best.”
Family laws are more about the non-negotiables.
As you create them for your family, think about the bigger picture. What are the things you want your children to inherently understand about the world? What are your expectations of how they’ll interact both with family members and others? Thinking through these questions will give you a good idea of what you might include in your own Family Laws. Good luck!
If you have questions for us about the process, please leave them in the comments.