Family Values What you value is what you’ll have.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES• In This House We Will Giggle: Making Virtues, Love & Laughter a Daily Part of Your

Family Lifeby Courtney DeFeo

• Character Matters! Raising Kids with ValuesThat Last by John and Susan Yates

• For Parents Only by Shaunti Feldhahn andLisa A. Rice

APPLICATION EXERCISEFAMILY CORE VALUES PROJECTRaising a family is an endeavor filled with many questions—each week brings hundreds of them. Did you brush your teeth? What time do you need to be there? What’s for dinner? Amid the myriad of small questions that make our lives happen, it’s easy to forget to ask the big questions that truly shape our family cultures. Questions like:

• What really matters to our family?

• What values do we want to govern how our family functions?

• What values do we want to pass on to our children?

• Who else will help instill our family values?

Families operate on a set of “core values,” whether we like it or not. The goal is to be clear and intentional about what those values are and strategic in how we pass them on to our kids.

This project is designed to help you identify your family’s core values and then build a plan to nurture them.

PART ONE: WHAT ARE YOUR CORE VALUES?Couples: Answer all questions in Part One separately. You will compare notes with your spouse in Part Two.

A. List twenty distinct values you desire to pass on to your children.

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From the previous list on, designate your top five core values in order of priority. (Note: Excluding values does not mean you don’t want your child to embody them. The goal is to simply elevate the highest values for your family.)

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PART TWO: DEVELOPING A TOP TEN LISTA. Form a Top Ten Core Values list.

• For Couples:Share your answers from Part One and discuss the following questions:

• Which values appear on both of our lists? (Circle them.) • Which values that you feel passionately about are unique to one list? (Underline them.)

Combine both of your Top Five lists to develop a unified Top Ten Core Values list, and rank the values in order of priority. If any values repeat, choose another one from either list that you both consider important.

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• For Single Parents:Add five more core values to your previous Top Five list to make it a Top Ten Core Values list, and rank the values in order of priority.

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Additional Core Values

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B. Consider your Top Ten Core Values list and consider yourselves/yourself.

• Which core values come easily for you?

• Which core values don’t come easily?

PART THREE: DEVELOPING A PLAN FOR INSTILLING CORE VALUESThink through the following questions. Jot down notes and then discuss your responses.

A. Consider your children. • Which of the Top Ten Core Values seem to not be strengths for our children?

• Which core values seem to come more easily to them?

B. How well is our family nurturing these values?

C. What am I/are we actively and deliberately doing to model and teach these values to our children?

D. What influences outside our home are most helping or hindering our family’s grasp of these core values?What can I/we do to maximize or minimize the impact of each?

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E. What changes must we make in our family’s pace or schedule in order to better foster these core values?