The Power of Words

For quite some time now, we've had a serious attitude problem at our house. There's a whole lot of name calling, finger pointing, lack of patience, and lack of responsibility going on. As such, Teag and I have been working on a few different things to try and change our kids perspectives towards each other, and their attitudes in general. One of those ideas has been a daily gratitude chart, where each person in our family has to come up with a different thing they're grateful for every day. We liked to see what the kids wrote, and they liked to see what we would write for ourselves, and for Finn, but we didn't see any overall changes taking place. So last night, we attempted another tact.

I gave each kid a different color of post it note, and we had an FHE about looking for the good in each other. Not just the obvious, surface things, but really looking at people, and trying to find their positive attributes. Many of you may have seen the video of the youth in one ward doing something similar to this for their Young Women. I made each person in our family a poster, and then we took turns sticking our "words" on them.

Not only have the kids seemed very excited to get new messages, they've been actively plastering them to other members of the family all day. Less than 24 hours later, their posters look like this:

It makes me very happy to see some of them words that they've come up with to describe each other, heartfelt things that give me real hope of a positive change. As a writer, I definitely believe there is a significant power in words, and I hope to teach my family how to use them wisely, to build up those around them, and to make an impact for good.