Tovim ha-shnayim min-ha'echod, two are better than one.  (Koheles 4:9)

What about more than two?

According to the Vilna Gaon’s understanding of a Mishna in Avos, the more, the better.  This includes children together with adults.

The Mishna says: Marbeh Yeshiva, Marbeh Chachma (Avos 2:7),

The Gra on this Mishna says it alludes to this statement in the Gemara:

Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says: Much Torah have I learned from my teachers, and I have learned more from my colleagues than from them, and I have learned more from my students than from all of them.  (Makkos 10a)

This is true not only for teachers and children but also for parents and children.

Parents need to have the first word and the last word.  They will make their lives easier when they listen to their children’s words in between.

At a moment when many families around the world are confined to home, climbing the walls, and are searching desperately for fresh techniques for managing their household chaos, one proven solution that my family, along with many others, uses comes from an unlikely source: agile development.

It’s no secret that working parents face enormous pressures. Ellen Galinsky, of the Families and Work Institute, asked a thousand children, “If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?”

When she asked parents to predict what their children would say, the parents said: “Spending more time with us.” They were wrong. 

The kids’ number 1 wish: that their parents were less tired and less stressed.

So how can we reduce that stress and help families to become happier?

I spent the last 15 years trying to answer that question.

The single best solution I found may be the simplest of all: hold regular family meetings to discuss how you’re managing your family.

A few years ago, my research brought me to the Starr family home.  David is a software developer, Eleanor is a stay-at-home mom.  At the time, their four children ranged in age from 10 to 15.

Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped in that endless tension between the sunny, smooth-running household they aspired to be living in and the exhausting, ear-splitting one they were actually living in.  Eleanor said, “I can’t take this anymore.”

What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to their parents, their peers, or even a professional, they looked to David’s workplace. Specifically, to a philosophy of business problem solving that David had studied and taught: agile development. The techniques worked so well for their family that David wrote a white paper about it, and the idea spread from there.

When my wife, Linda, and I adopted this blueprint into our home, weekly family meetings quickly became the single most impactful idea we introduced into our lives since the birth of our children.

The idea of agile was invented in the 1980s in large measure through the leadership of Jeff Sutherland. A former fighter pilot in Vietnam, Sutherland was chief technologist at a financial firm in New England when he began noticing how dysfunctional software development was. Companies followed the “waterfall model,” in which executives issued ambitious orders from above that then flowed down to harried programmers below. “Eighty-three percent of projects came in late, over budget, or failed entirely,” Sutherland told me.

Sutherland designed a new system, in which ideas flowed not just down from the top but up from the bottom and groups were designed to react to changes in real time. The centerpiece is the weekly meeting that’s built around shared decision making, open communication, and constant adaptability.

Such meetings are easy to replicate in families. In my home, we started when our twin daughters were five, and chose Sunday afternoons. Everyone gathers around the breakfast table; we open with a short, ritualistic drum tapping on the table; then, following the agile model, we ask three questions.

What worked well in our family this week?

What didn’t work well in our family this week?

What will we agree to work on this week?

From the very beginning, the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters’ mouths. What worked well in our family this week? “Getting over our fears of riding a bike,” “We’ve been doing much better making our beds.” What went wrong? “Doing our math sheets,” “Greeting visitors at the door.”

Like most parents, we found our children to be something of a Bermuda Triangle: words and thoughts would go in, but few ever came out. Their emotional lives were invisible to us. The family meeting provided that rare window into their innermost thoughts.

The most satisfying moments came when we turned to the topic of what we would work on during the coming week. The girls loved this part of the process, particularly selecting their own rewards and punishments. Say hello to five people this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose dessert for a month.

Naturally, there was a gap between the girls’ off-the-charts maturity during these 20-minute sessions and their behavior the rest of the week, but that didn’t seem to matter. It felt to us as if we were laying massive underground cables that wouldn’t fully light up their world for many years to come. Ten years later, we are still holding these family meetings every Sunday. Linda counts them as among her most-treasured moments as a mom.

So what did we learn?

Listen to the children. Our instinct as parents is to issue orders to our children. We think we know best; it’s easier; who has time to argue? And besides, we’re usually right! There’s a reason few systems have been more “waterfall” than the family. But as all parents quickly discover, telling your kids the same thing over and over is not necessarily the best tactic. The single biggest lesson we learned from our experience with agile practices is to reverse the waterfall as often as possible. Listen to your children whenever possible.

(Adapted from: The Agile Family Meeting, Bruce Feiler, Harvard Business Review, June 26, 2020)

You speak first and you have the last word, the decision.  In between, listen to your children.  You might be surprised at how much you learn, and how much it means to them that you listened.

Rabbi Ackerman is the author of Confident Parents, Competent Children, in Four Seconds at a Time

Available at bookstores and on Amazon.

He can be reached at 718-344-6575