Happy August! With the school year ramping up and lazy summer days flowing into more structured school rhythms, now is the perfect time to take a step back and see how we’re spending our time and focus. Since moving to the United States and my husband taking a job where he didn’t have to travel, we are taking advantage of the amazing local educational and community opportunities available around us and this time of the year has us eager for new adventures.
The last six months since we moved have required us to find a new balance in life, as things have been in flux. So far it’s working! Our kids just left the house for biking club and my husband noted that it took very little prodding or support from him. They got the bikes, water bottles, snacks, biking clothes, and gear ready with directions to this week’s route and left on time. A huge win for our family!
When we add educational and community events into our family routine, it is essential that we look at things from a Balanced Family Framework. This framework is a measurement I developed that looks at all of the facets of whole family life that support balanced, resilient, and joyful families. When any element is seeking to expand, we need to bulk up or restructure the other elements to support it in a holistic way.
For a quick overview, here they are:
Balanced Family Framework: A Gauge For Joyful Home Life
1. Physical & Economic Stability
Food, shelter, health access, predictable income — foundational.
2. Safety & Predictability in Daily Life
Stable family routines, secure relationships, low environmental stress.
3. Emotional Connection & Family Functioning
Warm relationships, clear communication, cohesion — strong predictors of well-being.
4. Social Support & Belonging
Extended family, friends, community ties — buffer stress and support growth.
5. Developmental Growth & Agency
Opportunities for learning, competence, self-regulation, and future planning.
6. Meaning & Purpose Across Family Members
Shared identity, goals, traditions, values that guide long-term flourishing.
Adding extra-curriculars puts the focus on the element of social support and belonging along with developmental growth and agency. Less inherent, but intentionally cultivated are the emotional connection and family functioning elements which coordinating this activity involves. We need to reinforce the rest of the elements of the family’s foundation so growth can be maintained. This means elements 1, 2, and 6. This has coincided with three things our family has focused on lately that have helped our family stay balanced.
Nothing says I love you like clean underwear in your drawer
Physical stability for us means job time! Extra biking clothes and trips to the pool means more laundry! Who is going to do that extra washing, sorting, folding, and putting away? Activities in the evening means family dinner time must be adjusted. Extra calories need to be consumed to keep those growing bodies strong. Who puts away the biking gear so the home is still a refuge of peace? To keep the burden from falling on any one particular person, we ought to coordinate these and the other tasks of family work. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this in the weeks ahead.
Family Learning Time
I used to be great about insisting on an entire hour to teach the kids as a whole every morning. As they grew older, some of them had more pressing academic demands with their college courses, so we scaled back. It’s important to be flexible and adjust according to the family’s needs. Now the college kids tell me this family learning time is what they learned the most from in their education.
Currently, we’re bulking it up again and I couldn’t be more thrilled about that. With the college kids back at school, it’s just easier when there is no competing element in the house to draw focus, but we still give our high schoolers the choice to join in or study on their own. Right now, they usually stay! Taking time to learn and share together is huge for building safety and predictability in daily life and emotional connection and family functioning. I mentioned our family learning time briefly in my last newsletter, but it deserves a more detailed study on the website, so we’ll be covering as well.
The Twenty-Year Plan
Fifteen years ago, our family created a vision of how we want our family to be in twenty years. Just five years away from that, we’re seeing things come together. But fifteen years ago, two of the kids currently at home were two-years old and a newborn. The other two weren’t even born. We decided it was time to create a new family twenty-year vision. This is one of my favorite things we’ve done as a family and really is key to creating meaning and purpose across family members. We’d love to share the process, so stay tuned!
For now, I hope this inside peek into our family processes has you thinking about what’s helping you stay afloat when things are fluctuating. Send me an email or share with someone you trust the ways these elements are helping your family navigate life’s moving parts.
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