Setting Goals and Your Stepfamily

I love a new year. It's a great time to consider changes we want to make, successes we've had and challenges we've dealt with.

Goal setting plays an important role in making changes or setting new priorities for our family relationships. If we want positive action to take place, we need to be intentional in setting goals toward changes we desire.

Goal setting can start small and develop further when change begins to occur. It's helpful to start with areas that need the most attention in your family and form goals surrounding the most urgent needs. Some goals may need everyday attention while other goals require sporadic but concentrated involvement.

Goals change as stepfamilies grow and mature. When our children were younger our goals focused more on forming strong relationships with each other and creating unity in our family. We also focused on keeping the lines of communication open between all parties involved in the parenting process. As our children have grown older, our goals now center more individually, focusing on specific needs of each child. There is less communication with others in the parenting process and we are comfortable with and thankful for the unity achieved in our family.

The two girls pictured above are my stepdaughter, Adrianne(24), and daughter, Jamie (19). Ten years ago the two girls could hardly stay in the same room together for over an hour without an argument. Today they easily enjoy each other's company while shopping together, playing games together, and exchanging constant conversation about boyfriends, school, work, or life in general. Years ago it would have been easy to quit trying for a friendly relationship to ever form between the two of them. But we never gave up on our goal of unity within our family relationships.

Goal setting allows us to identify our strengths and weaknesses in our family and work toward desired changes. It also allows us to affirm ourselves for setting goals and reaching them.

It's a brand new year with 365 days, 8760 hours, 525,600 minutes.
Our goals this year will be reached only if we take time to set them first.