Emotional Bank Accounts

Every Monday night we set aside a few hours to have quality family time that we call "Family Home Evening", aka FHE.  In our weekly FHE we will have an agenda that includes: opening song, opening prayer, scripture, lesson, activity, treat, and closing prayer.   Each person takes turn rotating assignments.  Yesterday Nathan taught the lesson on "Emotional Bank Accounts".  We have, as an ENTIRE FAMILY, fallen a little short in helping to fill each others bank accounts, but have instead made severe withdrawals in the way we have interacted.  I'm afraid we may all feel as if our accounts are in the negative, because there has been a little more contention and teasing between family members.  In this lesson we discussed ways to make deposits and things we do that make withdrawals from others emotional bank accounts.  We made a poster with the different behaviors.  Then we each made our own jar with stones inside for us to keep track of how we are doing.  The goal is for our stones to be in everyone else's jars, instead of our own.  Each time we do something to make a deposit for a family member, then we take our color stone and put it in their jar.  Each time we make a withdraw, we take one of our stones from our jar into the negative jar and one of their stones comes out as well.   The goal is to fill each others Positive jars with a variety of eachothers stones and keep the negative jars empty! I love this object lesson, because it will help us see how quickly we can build eachother up or empty out one another's emotional bank accounts.

Family home evening is such a blessing for our family.  It takes effort and sacrifice, but it is quality time where we can discuss, learn, have fun, and work together as a family to help us become better people and a stronger family. Life gets busy and can be very hard, but the efforts will be well worth the eternal blessings.