The goal is not to achieve the best possible family logistics performance. Personal and family management tools are often ill-suited for families seeking cohesion, as they don't accommodate adults, children, and those with reduced autonomy in the household. These tools lack flexibility and often perpetuate the notion that family management is a race for performance and mere task execution, equating to personal success.
Family life is anything but a performance. It's about nurturing a family spirit that creates and maintains a loving, safe, and supportive environment for every family member. The Family Time of Merlinstruction serves as the cornerstone of your household's family spirit.
We often think of organizing our professional lives and projects, but we overlook or underestimate the importance of support and guidance tools for family life and living together: logistics, planning, education, and participation. 'Family Time' is a complete set of simple, beautiful, and flexible tools to support your family across different time and personal scales. The box includes a Routine Planner for each person, a Weekly Planner, Habit Tracker, an annual wall Calendar, and the Life Line.
Addressing Couple Issues in Family Life Management
Daily family management often sources tension between partners. Questions like who does the shopping, meal preparation, takes kids to extracurricular activities, and helps with homework can quickly become overwhelming. This sometimes creates friction within the couple, with each feeling overwhelmed or believing the task balance is unfair.
In the whirlwind of daily life, couple communication can take a back seat. Yet, smooth communication is crucial to coordinate all family activities and obligations. With different schedules for each family member, it's often hard to track who's doing what and when. This disorganization can lead to forgetfulness or overburdening one partner, exacerbating tensions and fatigue. Misunderstandings or frustrations from insufficient or ineffective communication can add stress to an already heavy situation.
Finding time for family activities and annual celebrations is essential to maintain a strong connection among all members and create cherished memories. However, aligning everyone's schedules is often a challenge, leading to anxiety and guilt, especially when parents struggle to balance personal and family commitments.
Additionally, vacations, meant to be relaxing and joyful, can become a major stress source when all routines are disrupted.
Finally, families may find it hard to maintain and value their principles and values. The pressure of busy schedules, social obligations, and professional demands can overshadow the importance of transmitting and living by essential values that united the couple and fueled the dream of a certain family spirit. Often, the urgency of the moment overshadows the essential, leaving little room for reflection and living out cherished principles. Family meals, enriching discussions, and time spent together can take a backseat. This gap between family values and daily reality can create stress and frustration, making it imperative to find ways to recenter family life around core values.
Addressing Couple Issues in Child Rearing
As children grow, they need to learn to structure their time and lives gradually. This helps them develop a clear understanding of different time scales, which is reassuring for them. It also helps them anticipate, project, formulate ideas and desires, and communicate, thus developing language. However, this structuring requires parental guidance, which can be time-consuming and frustrating when parents' schedules are already full and they lack the necessary tools for this guidance.
Educating and establishing routines requires considerable parental investment. This can represent an additional mental load, often unevenly distributed between the two parents. Lack of support, or insufficient means to manage this burden, can lead some parents to give up or neglect this crucial aspect of child-rearing, which can, in the long run, harm the child's development and family harmony. Establishing routines is critical for children's autonomy and parental assurance, creating a rhythm in which children and parents can project themselves together in a shared coherent framework. Children can then develop self-discipline, actively participate in family tasks, and feel responsible.
Finally, addressing the essential need of the family: creating a strong and lasting family spirit.
Creating a strong and lasting family spirit involves creating and maintaining a loving, safe, and supportive environment for every family member. The lack of concrete tools to support family life represents a real challenge in knowing how to move forward. How many of us have asked ourselves, "Why didn't I also give birth to a manual?" With Family Time, we didn't want to impose a way to manage family life, as each family is different. We aim to provide each family with customizable supports that lay the foundations of their own family life, materializing the values and principles unique to them. Setting the basis of their family spirit, to better nurture it afterward. Once this is in place, the rest becomes much easier!
It's crucial to have resources that are inclusive, easily accessible, and tangible, and usable by all family members, regardless of age or technical level. An ideal tool should serve everyone, facilitating coordination, communication, and planning, while respecting the individual values and needs of each member and reminding of the imperatives of living together. This lack of suitable tools can lead to a lack of connection among family members, creating great frustrations, misunderstandings, and barriers to a harmonious and balanced family life.
Realizing a loving and supportive family environment can often be hindered by daily logistics, communication, and coordination among family members. Family Time is offered as a pillar for parents and children, providing tangible tools that support communication and ease tensions related to the multitude of tasks and responsibilities we have towards each other. With tangible support at hand, each family member can now contribute meaningfully to family life. Dive deeper into the benefits of the 5 supports included in the 'Family Time' box through our following articles, and rediscover serenity, harmony, and joy in your family life.