All relationships and all families experience conflict. With the big personalities in our family and the large amounts of time we spend in each others company, our conflicts have a tendency to get pretty intense.
I recently purchased a conflict resolution guide for teachers (which I plan to review more in depth at a later time) and we’ve begun to implement some of the ideas and strategies I am learning. The guide encouraged each classroom (which in our case is our family home) to have clearly defined rights, responsibilities and rules.
So I got to thinking that our family needs a Bill of Rights and these are the rights we came up with:
1. The right to physical and emotional safety
2. The right to be treated with respect
3. The right to be treated with kindness
4. The right to express our feelings, thoughts and opinions
We may decide to add more “amendments” as time goes on, but for now we felt that these for would be manageable while meeting our needs. I plan to have Thomas and Everett draw pictures of what each right looks/means/feels like to them in order to appeal to their visual learning style. Once we begin to get a handle on understanding and respecting these rights, we will move on to what our responsibilities are.
I even got to throw in a mini history lesson explaining to the boys what the national Bill of Rights is!
kairos family freeschool 