The Family Journal by Byron’s Games – Review

Disclosure: I received this product free through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I’m a Type A planner person. I like things to be organized and structured. I like color coding (hello, elementary teacher!) and alphabetizing and systems. Which is not to say that I’m not messy or cluttered, but that’s a story for another post.

That’s why the idea of The Family Journal by Byron’s Games intrigued me. Weekly family meetings? Family goals? A family motto? Hmmm ….

Honestly, I’ve tried to institute some of this loosely before. I’m all for writing down goals and knowing where you want to go. I like the idea of a family mission statement and knowing why that’s a choice destination.

But not everyone in my family thinks that way, and my attempts to start a conversation around these things hasn’t always been well received in the past. With this fancy bound book in hand, though, I thought things might be different.

As soon as My Big Helper opened the journal, it was. She immediately jumped on board and became the scribe for the project. As the writer of the family, putting everything that’s important to us into words and down on paper properly was important to her.

Which may be both the pro and the con of our results.

My Big Helper led our meetings. She read the info from the book, asked everyone for their ideas, and was generally all into it. She listened to what everyone said and then wrote it down. Often the book asks for multiple drafts of important statements, so she read them when she finished and wrote another draft if the directions called for that.

That means that all of our work is beautiful and lovely – but it sometimes took a little while. We’re all old enough to handle that, and we talked while she was writing, but with younger kids, I think some of these meetings might need to be broken up into multiple sessions – or maybe you could ask the questions in one meeting and then put it together on your own, then discuss it at the next one. We already play games and talk during dinner, so it was a natural extension of this process for us to stay around the table just a little longer to do this. I could see this working with littles if you discussed it one night at supper and then followed up with finished products the next night. If you did that, each session might take only a few minutes. For us, it was sometimes about an hour while we talked and then waited for all of the writing to happen.

Writing our yearly goals was a smoother process than our family mission statement, because while we don’t have any major disagreements or anything, it was difficult to fit it all in there clearly. Writing yearly goals was still a tricky process because our likes and talents lie in different areas, but by keeping them broad and encompassing, it worked out well. It was really interesting to see what kind of goals everyone wanted to set for our family for the coming year, as well.

While we haven’t worked through many of the formal family meetings located further back in the book, I like the structure. There’s room to review the previous week’s family and individual goals and set new ones. There’s an inspirational quote and space to record things for which you’re all thankful. Setting goals and intentionally being grateful are good habits to have.

The next section of these weekly meetings is a connection activity – basically, an activity designed to help your family bond and make memories. Some of them are simple, short things that you can easily do at home, like play Tic-Tac-Toe or Charades, while others are much more involved, like visiting a historic site or volunteering as a family. Others would help teach skills, like cooking dinner together, while some would instill family values and history, like creating a family tree or scrapbook. I like all of these ideas, though with teens and high school workloads, it would be difficult to go with a preset schedule of activities like this.

I don’t see why you would necessarily need to go in order, though, so I think anyone could make it work with just a little tweaking. What I realized, though, is that we already do many of these activities as a family – and I love that. I hope that when my kids are grown and gone and parenting on their own, that they’ll have fond memories of cooking with me or taking field trips or volunteering. I hope that spending time together creatively will be priorities for them with their families, too.

Maybe our kids are just on the upper end of the age curve for this book, but there’s great value in it. We’re talking more about goals and how and why to do things than we ever have. If that hadn’t already been a priority with our teens – if they were younger, if that wasn’t a parenting goal of our own, or if we were overcoming some kind of trauma or becoming a blended family – I think The Family Journal would be just the thing to help us solidify our goals and make memories together.

If you want to make memories intentionally and show your children how to set goals and form good mental habits, consider adding The Family Journal to your parenting arsenal – but don’t take my word for it. Click here to read other reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew.