We’ve all been there. The bus (or car) leaves for school in five minutes, but your kids are nowhere near ready. One is rolling around on the floor in his pajamas, one is refusing to eat her cereal, and the third needs help finding a lost backpack. You’ve patiently waited, you’ve coaxed, you’ve pleaded, but now, you’re getting desperate. You start to yell—again. And when you do all make it school (late) none of you are feeling good about the day so far.

Most American parents approach meals together with a sense of fear, dread, or both. They may have lovely images in their head of children cheerfully chatting while eating home-cooked quinoa with spinach. Kids respectfully answer questions about their day, while parents enjoy their meal and even chat about work. Everyone finishes what’s on their plate without grumbling. The whole family pitches in with clean-up, without being asked. Reality is so different.

Families have to lay the groundwork of healthy relationships before they can achieve their maximum potential; they have to address the five dysfunctions. So what are those dysfunctions? Lencioni identifies them as: 1) absence of trust; 2) fear of conflict; 3) lack of commitment; 4) avoidance of accountability; and 5) inattention to results. Let’s take them one by one.

Managing conflict is one of the keys to healthy relationships, and yet, your very brain often works against handling it well. When you become emotional, your cerebral cortex, the upper part of the brain responsible for self-control, rational thought, and moral reasoning, shuts down, and the midbrain, which controls your fight or flight response, kicks into action. You say and do things that you later regret, because your brain and body literally can’t handle the kind of intricate emotional and mental complexity that comes with solving an interpersonal problem.

Human beings crave connection—love and being loved, understanding and being understood—and the way that we connect with one another is called “communication.” But so often we don’t communicate in ways that lead to connection. We communicate thoughtlessly, haphazardly, selfishly, or in other ways that cause hurt instead of healing.

Establishing a regular family meeting is perhaps the single, most important thing you can do for your family. The benefits are numerous and often immediate: clarity of family identity, better communication and teamwork, greater likelihood of achieving family goals, etc.

Your family is the first place to begin exploring art together. The books you read, pictures you color, movies you watch, and music you enjoy can all be a part of your artistic journey, especially if done intentionally. Since the days of the cave paintings of Lasaux, humankind has come together as a community over the creation of art. Make your family the first community where this happens, and then explore how your family’s community can begin to engage in the larger community around you.   

Families are the first place where we learn about the importance of civic engagement, and also things like mutual respect, informed participation, and civil debate. Participating together as a family in the civic process, having healthy but vigorous discussions about key issues, and promoting civic education is a key work of the family.

For families facing a crisis, it is natural and good to turn to faith and spiritual practices to help make sense of the madness. (Notably, the Pew Research Center says that roughly a quarter of Americans report that their faith has deepened during the present pandemic.) And while it’s not impossible to establish healthy habits in crisis, it’s far easier to have such habits in place, so you can dig into them when you feel the world crashing around you.

A 50-year research review from the American Psychological Association found that “family routines and rituals are powerful organizers of family life that offer stability during times of stress and transition.” The review defined “routine” as more like communication, something taking little time, and helping us convey “what needs to be done.” “Rituals, on the other hand,” writes lead author Dr. Barbara H. Fiese, “involve symbolic communication and convey ‘this is who we are’ as a group and provide continuity in meaning across generations.” The most common rituals of importance to families were birthdays, holidays, Passover, funerals, and the “Sunday dinner.”

How you as a family approach your spiritual life is of course a deeply personal issue, but all the research points to its importance. Whether you attend religious services of some kind, pray together (also associated with greater marital and family relationship satisfaction and trust), read faith texts, practice spiritual meditation, or some other practice, your family benefits from a disciplined, mindful approach to faith. Whatever it is, do it together, and probably even with other families. The research generally points to the fact that it is communal faith vs. a more individualistic, personal faith that confers a myriad of benefits. And be intentional about explaining to your children why you as a family do what you do.

In her groundbreaking book Stress-Proof: The Scientific Solution to Protect Your Brain and Body—and Be More Resilient Every Day, Dr. Mithu Storoni argues that the brain, just like the rest of the body, requires intentional care to thrive. Stress, as decades of research have now shown, is a significant contributor to illness. To maintain your family’s physical health and optimal functioning, you need to face the problem of stress head-on. Your family needs to care for the mind just as it cares for the body. Below are a few tips for ways to downshift and better stress-proof your family.

Americans like to identify health with “how I look.” Imagine the covers of most fitness or health magazines in the supermarket check-out lane. In these, “health” looks the same: low body weight, toned musculature, bright white teeth, all-over good looks. Health is attractive. But there is much, much more to health than eating right and exercising. In fact, in his research into the longest-lived groups of people around the world, longevity expert Dan Buettner identified 9 common attributes that these groups shared—and only one of them had to do with fitness, and three with food or drink. The rest of the “Power 9,” as Buettner calls them, have to do with having a sense of purpose, deliberate stress management, social connectedness and belonging, and rootedness in family.

Budgeting—the word alone brings shivers to the spine. When we think about budgeting, we usually imagine piles of excel sheets and bank statements, calculators, stress, and lots of cutting of things we actually enjoy doing. No wonder only 41% of American households follow a budget. But budgeting is crucial for a lot of reasons, some of which have more to do with your relationship quality than with money.

Research has shown that increasing income does grant most Americans some level of increasing life satisfaction and emotional well-being—but only up to a point. After that point, satisfaction and well-being actually start to decrease. The authors of the study speculate that although money is useful in paying for daily needs, repaying debt, and providing some basic “extras,” after this point, “people may be driven by desires such as pursuing more material gains and engaging in social comparisons, which could, ironically, lower well-being.”

Chances are, your family can already count many, many other families as “friends” or at least “acquaintances.” You’ve got a group of friends you’ve known since high school, who now have kids of their own, and maybe you get together once or twice a year; a group of fellow soccer or football or hockey parent friends; the families of your kids’ school classmates; maybe some in your church, or that you met while volunteering together, or at work, or who live next door. Many of these people may very well share your values—that’s why you’re friends in the first place. Like-minded people tend to find each other. You feel comfortable with them, and you know you can open up to them. These people have been there for you, and they’re crucial. But if you’re serious about achieving your family’s goals, you may want to consider actively seeking out families that share similar goals with which to share your journey.

Decades of research into parenting have demonstrated that authoritative parents—versus authoritarian or permissive—end up raising the most successful children. Authoritative parents are those who set limits, but use lots of love, kindness, respect, warmth, and communication in upholding those limits. Children raised in authoritative homes tend to become more autonomous, self-reliant, self-disciplined, and academically and socially successful. They are taught to be in touch with their emotions, to have a healthy respect for natural boundaries, and to take charge of their own behavior. Perhaps the most well respected source on authoritative parenting is Positive Discipline, by Dr. Jane Nelsen.

You may focus on serving needs outside your home, you may focus on meeting needs inside your home, or you may also combine seeming disparate careers and gifts into an income-generating family “side hustle.” All reports indicate that the side hustle is on the rise, with over 40% of full-time working adults saying they have an income-generating job outside of their main career. A side hustle could be a great way to unite a family that may seem to be pretty different.

The work of children, Montessori believed, was their education—but education toward life, not education in a narrow, academic-based sense. And as it turns out, the family is the first place that such work begins. This should bring comfort to millions of parents this fall, who remain slightly panic-stricken at the thought of supervising their own children’s education in a more involved way due to continued school closures and remote learning. But the truth is that the first and foremost indicator of student success is how involved the parents are.

One benefit of COVID-19 has been the opportunity that increasing numbers of parents have to work from home. For many, the new arrangement could be permanent. Entrepreneur recently published a story on 17 big companies now allowing extended or even permanent flexible work arrangements, including Google, Twitter, Uber, Square, Zillow, and REI. Certainly, working from home has its challenges, especially for those with very young children. But according to a recent Gallup poll, 59% of Americans still want to continue to work remotely “as much as possible” after the pandemic is over. This is an incredible opportunity for parents to invite their children into their work world. And why would you want to do that?