Our Monthly Family Values (Our List of Family Values)

In our home, we teach monthly family values to help our kids learn important life values and morals. I’m sharing a little bit about how that looks and a list of family values we teach – check it out!

Last year we started implementing a monthly family value into our home. As my boys are getting older, I’m really trying to be a purposeful parent, and make sure that I’m teaching them important values and morals, and not just hoping they pick them up along the way.

I’ve shared a little bit about these on my instagram stories, and have received a bunch of requests to do a blog post so here we go!

List of Family Values

How do you choose which values to teach?

I got this idea from Ralphie of Simply on Purpose. She’s the source of most of my good parenting ideas! I attended one of her workshops last year and she mentioned monthly values and gave a list of a few, and I took the idea and ran with it. We’ve done it ever since, with great success.

Some of the ones she mentioned:

• self reliance
• love
• loyalty
• courage
• respect
• honesty
• positivity
• self discipline
• friendliness
• unselfishness
• dependability

There’s also a really good list of family values RIGHT HERE that breaks them down into social values, civic values, work values, and more.

Do you go in a particular order through the list of family values?

We choose which value to teach each month either randomly, or based on what we feel like our family needs to focus on that particular month.

We did Friendliness in September when my kids were going back to school and talked a lot about being kind to other kids, including everyone at school, being a good friend, etc.

How do you introduce them each month?

Our family has a weekly family night on Sunday nights after dinner where we have a lesson, an activity, and spend time together. We introduce the value of the month at this family meeting by writing it on a large piece of paper and hanging it on our wall. Philip and I brainstormed a list of family values to pull from each month.

We talk about the value, what it means, and then we give a short (like 4-5 minute) lesson with examples of the value and how to implement it. We get most of our lesson material from THIS MAGAZINE that has issues every month dating back to 1971, so there’s no shortage of material! They have short fictional or non-fictional stories in each issue that discuss different values and are written for (and sometimes by) kids!

What else do you do throughout the month to teach?

We do a weekly memorized scripture verse to go along with the value of the month. I’m in charge of this each week, and admittedly I’m not the best at doing it every single week, so sometimes we have the same scripture for a few weeks in a row.

But the goal is to memorize one scripture verse every week that relates to the value.

I put the verse to a song so it’s really easy to learn, and my boys have all picked up on it really quickly. I keep them all in a Google Drive folder, and you can see them all HERE if you’re interested.

Also, each Sunday during that month, we focus our family night lessons on that value, so they get at least 4 lessons during the month about the value for that month.

We also work hard to praise them when we see them demonstrating that value, and those words of praise from a parent are huge for them in feeling confident about learning the values.

Will you ever go back and repeat values?

Absolutely. We had one month where we didn’t feel like our family needed an extra month to focus on that value, so we extended it.

And as they get older, they’ll forget everything we taught them now, so we’ll go through these many, many times and teach lessons that are age-appropriate as they grow.

I’d also like to start doing daily mantras for each value this year. I think that saying, “I am honest!” or “I am respectful” each morning or evening would be really powerful for them and help instill the value even more.

Leave a comment if you have any other questions about how this works, or if you have done something like this and can offer some additional insight or wisdom!

Happy Friday!