Motherhood and Kids

4 Essentials Steps to Set your Family Goals

Creating goals has always been important to me.  I will say that I have always been a goal getter. Everyone has strengths and weakness, trust I have plenty of things I am working on.  BUT goal setting and making a plan is not one of them. I personally have long term and short term goals that I made for 2020 and I have accountability partners to ensure I meet them. While that is great that I actively want to succeed, I am not a family of 1.  So what if I am meeting all of individual goals, if my family is remaining stagnate. Let me also say that some of the goals I had I’ve needed to modify as COVID-19 really threw us a curve ball.

*Quick Tip:  If you have family goals set and don’t reach them for a particular circumstance, that doesn’t me ditch them.  Modify them based on where you are now, and alter the timeline.  This is better than completely negating the goal. 

It is just as important for me to create family goals and visions. Rick and sat down to do a check in on how we are doing with meeting our family goals, and I thought I would chat about it on my blog. With us coming to the end of the year and getting close on closing on our home it is important that we regularly check in our goals.

I think it is important to have individual goals, but if you are family, or a couple with kids.  You have to be goal setting as a family. It helps us to push ahead and never be stagnate.

Let me start with sharing a few over our family goals.

• Strengthen our relationship with God as a family – For us we want a relationship over religion.  And I want our children to feel and understand that relationship early on.  Action: We regularly attend church and now that COVID-19 hit we are maintaining watching online.  However, we want to consistently have our family bible study nights at home where we study the bible together.  Another thing we want to do is be consistent with praying together as a family. Lastly, we are having bible verse each week that we want to reflect and integrate in our everyday life.   This is a major goal for our family to remain consistent.
• Become debt-free – I will be doing a praise dance when  this happens! We are expected to be pseudo debt-free early next year.  I say pseudo because we will still have home debt. We have paid off our credit card debt, but we still have our student loans we are hoping to pay off.  This will be a huge accomplishment as we had over $120k in student loan debt.  Action: Maintain our family budget.  Our family budget is established and target to help us keep our budget in check and allow us to save along with pay off debt. If we follow this budget we should be able to get rid of all petty debt this year.
• Eat 5/7 meals at the dinner table – I know for some this may be easy and is already done, but for our family we don’t always consistently do this. Especially now that activities have resumed.   We want to do better with creating a dinner routine. It’s important that we do this because the dinner table is a great place to have dialogue with your children. Action:Prepare more crock pot meals, so when I get done with work the meal is already done and we can sit down together at the dinner table.
• Close on our home – This is a huge one for us.  Especially after the devastation of losing our last home.  You can read about that HERE. We have a close date set, and now just need to get to the finish line.  Action: We are preparing all our finances for our down payment since ours will be about 25% (by choice). And we have been going by the house daily to ensure all is going well on the build process.

I think first you have to create and outline and vision of where do you want your family to be at in 10-15 years.  While God, will of course change that plan in second I think it is important to get an overall general goal.

4 Steps to creating your own family goals: 

Establish what is you would like to see happen

This is where you identify, what are some things you want to happen in your family that isn’t currently.  What are some areas of improvement?  At this time with your spouse assess what are the changes you would like to see done.  Allow both of you to make a list.  When we make a list it helps us easily frame it into our family goals.

Your goals here should relate to the entire family.  Some of the questions I ask is, how are my kids doing? What can be improved with my children’s character? For us, where are we struggling? How can we experience new things?

When we make a list it helps us easily frame it into our family goals.

Create your family goals

After you have made a list of opportunities for improvement you then build these into goals. Example.  Let’s say children are struggling in school, my goal would be consistently have them attend tutoring and us a parents increasing or study time with them.

We typically have 5 major goals for the school year.  Of course we will have smaller goals that we would like to achieve but we typically keep it to 5 core goals to help push our family ahead.  When you are building yours do what works best for your family.  I know for my boys if I do too many they will probably forget. HAHA.

Family Business Meeting

Once my husband and I have established our goals we sit down as a family and share what our yearly and monthly goals are to the boys.  To keep the boys attention I normally put them on  board to make it fun for them.

I share with them how the steps that we will do to get to our goals, along with sharing why we thought it was important to make these goals. We then check in on our goals every couple weeks to make sure we are working to our goals.  The check-ins are also a time to assess if the goals are realistic or if another action plan needs to be made to reach the goal.  There has been many times that we have to adjust our plan because we are progressing towards achieving our goal.

As Cameron is getting older we have been stressing to him the important of creating his own individual goals as well. He will be a teenager in a couple months and its important that he start working towards his own goals.

Get the kids involved

Allow your kids to set their goals.  Let them think of goals they would like to meet.  Ask them the purpose behind it, to aid in them critically thinking about the goal. Ask questions like: What is the biggest benefit of this goal? How will this goal help others?

We will break the goal up in sections to not make the goal see so hefty.  We also will brainstorm what are possible obstacles we could face attempting to hit the goal. If you have the space, I recommend even making a board to track your family goals.

It sounds pretty simple but the tough part is holding each other accountable.  Keep pushing one other, give the kiddos tasks they can perform. Example: Since  one of our goals is to eat at the dinner table more we give the kids a task to set the table and prepare for us to eat together.  I know this may seem like a small task but I want the kids to feel like they are help us reach our goals.

Your family goals can be whatever is best for your family.  They can be big or small goals! The mission here is keep pushing your family to be the best version of themselves.

*This post on how to set family goals was sponsored by Walmart, of course all thoughts and opinions are my own.