Our family philosophy

I’m not sure if this a thing that families do, but it’s something I have thought about off and on for some time now.

I think it has more to do with my behaviour management philosophy being positive behaviour based, which is about teaching your (high) expectations about behaviour. It’s the Pygmalion Effect of having high expectations which leads to high performances.


Schools that use this idea have 3 to 5 expectations that they can actually describe, you could actually demonstrate.


Here are the expectations that I’ve been tossing about:

• Caring
• Creative
• Capable
• Curious
• Clever

I was thinking about Calm as well but do I really want my son to be calm... all the time. I want him to be able to do express anger, sadness, and a host of other feelings in a healthy way. Would telling him to be calm prevent that?


My husband, C, and I had a conversation about the difference between kind and caring, and we decided that despite the obvious first letter difference we would still prefer caring. Just because you do something that is kind, doesn’t mean that you actually care, but if you do care you are more likely to do kind things.


Does this encompass everything there is to know about our family? We love to travel particularly overseas - so that’s curious and also capable if you land somewhere where no one speaks English. We love learning about new things, reading and researching - curious and clever. We love puzzles, designing and making things - clever and creative and capable. We love cooking (and eating) - creative and capable. We love writing - creative and clever. I’m pretty confident (hmm another C word!) that it does.