Mistake #8 - Do Not Clearly Outline Ownership

Reference: Leadership Education by Oliver and Rachel DeMille pages 212-224

When I first read about this "mistake" I have to admit I was a little confused by it. I had never thought of who "owns" Christmas or dinner or the yard. To me these things seemed self-evident. However, after studying this subject in more depth, I realized that we really do seem to"own" certain things in our home and they are often unspoken.

For example, it is obvious to me that parents "own" the family rules, yet in some families everything is decided by the entire family. Another example would be that a child "owns" the cleanliness of their room, but for children who share rooms sometimes certain aspects of the room cleanliness belong to different roommates. It was really interesting to me to sit down and make a list of what we have as unspoken ownerships in our home.

Here is a little list:

• Garage - Dad - We are not allowed to change where things go in the garage. This is Mike's domain!
• Home Education - Each Child - We understand that "teachers teach and students educate". Each child has to choose to be educated, choose to do the work, and choose to pay the price for a quality education. Mom and Dad provide the learning environment, but each person has to do the work to educate themselves.
• Dog - Children - Mom and Dad have given ownership of Maggie the Dog to the kids. If she lives or dies, it is up to them.
• Filing Paperwork - Mom - Mike does not want to touch it and I like to know where everything is.
• Paying Bills - Mom - I like to know where every penny goes. The original bill paying/budgeting system was chosen as a couple and I implement the majority of the plan.
• Yard - Dad - Mike loves making sure the yard looks pretty and I love that he will take care of it.

These are just a few, but I'm sure you get the general idea. We have determined that this works for our family, but families are so different with different personalities that really ANY ownership will work as long as it is defined. The problem comes in when ownership is not clearly defined. When Mike and I were first married we each wanted to implement traditions from our upbringing. Some things were easy to decide to which tradition we would keep, but others were not so easy. It took time to really decide what worked best and whose tradition fit our needs. In some cases it took us 3 years to come to a happy solution.

As for this as a mistake in Scholar Phase, I thought that we needed to sit down and just generally discuss ownership of education. When we did however, the kids blew me away with their depth of understanding they already had about this. They KNEW they owned their education and that only they can educate themselves. I guess it was nice to just reaffirm that this is how it works.