Family Thriving Assessment

The Family Thriving Self-Assessment is an exercise to help families understand identify their strengths and areas of growth. The Self-Assessment comes from the Scandrette family book, Belonging & Becoming: Creating a Thriving Family Culture, located in our IF Library.

The assessment is based on seven dimensions of a thriving family—purposeful, rooted, receptive, connected, responsive, resourceful, and productive. Families should take this at the very beginning of their intentional family journey as a way to identify areas where they can grow. Then once a year, the family should take the assessment again to see if they are growing into a thriving family.

Below are seven dimensions of family thriving. Read and respond to each statement, and circle the number that best reflects your current family experience—from 1, strongly disagree, to 5, strongly agree.

Purposeful

A thriving family lives from a deep sense of purpose and a positive vision of the future that it can articulate and use as a guide for decision making.

• We have decided what to keep and what to leave behind from our families of origin.
• We’ve thought critically about inherited and adopted family scripts.
• We are able to talk about what matters most to us.
• We share a positive vision of our future together as a family.
• Our family has a shared purpose that we can articulate.

Rooted

A thriving family enacts household rhythms and policies that are life giving and that support the family’s shared purpose.

• Our rhythm of life is sustainable and has space for work, rest, play and meaningful celebrations.
• We have an effective venue and process for planning and decision making.
• We have agreements about how tasks will be accomplished.
• We’re making conscious tradeoffs with our time and money to pursue what matters most.
• We’re intentional about the amount of time we spend in front of screens and engaged with entertainment and social media.

Receptive

A thriving family cultivates awakening to God’s care and the larger story we are all part of by embracing life-giving spiritual practices and making conscious ethical choices.

• We explore and articulate our understanding of the larger story in open dialogue.
• We have shared life-giving spiritual practices that help ground and sustain us.
• We have a venue to sharpen our thinking and discuss values, ethics, beliefs and the important needs and opportunities in our world today.
• We make shared choices about how to deepen the practice of our ethics and values.
• To our best ability, we’re living out our deepest values with consistency, and we’re honest when we aren’t.

Connected

A thriving family relates with love and respect and pursues healthy ways to connect, communicate, navigate conflicts and have fun.

• We spend time together doing activities we enjoy that help us feel connected.
• We celebrate one another, express appreciation and say “I love you,” and family members feel seen, heard and cared for.
• We have shared rules of love and respect that govern how we treat one another.
• We have effective tools for navigating conflict, making repairs, offering forgiveness and negotiating boundaries.
• Our family can welcome and invite others into our lives, including relatives, friends and new family members.

Responsive

A thriving family embraces each other’s belovedness, holds their brokenness and supports their growth.

• We’re growing in awareness of our personal growth challenges, can share honestly with one another and support one another’s steps of growth.
• We identify and celebrate the gifts and limits of each family member’s personality.
• We understand what may be age and developmentally appropriate expectations for each member of our family.
• We focus more on internal character development than external behaviors or just following the rules.
• We’re able to talk critically and compassionately about the aches and struggles of the human condition.

Resourceful

A thriving family lives abundantly, using resources wisely and practicing gratitude, trust, contentment and generosity.

• We live with a sense of abundance, rather than worry or fear, and we trust that hat we need will always be provided.
• We’re grateful and content; we have just the right amount of possessions; and we are learning to distinguish between wants and needs.
• We have clear financial goals that reflect our values as well as a yearly budget to guide our spending choices.
• We actively teach younger family members how to handle money, and we model the wise use of financial resources.
• We’re making conscious efforts to be ethical and sustainable in our consumption and generous with our resources.

Productive

A thriving family celebrates each person’s uniqueness and supports the development of skills and capacities to serve others and pursue the greater good.

• We help identify, nurture and celebrate the gifts of each family member and help each other imagine how our gifts and kills can best serve others.
• We resource the development of skills and capacities to help family members make a meaningful contribution to society.
• We model and teach the dignity and value of work, diligence and a job well done.
• We are helping each other discover how to compassionately engage the great aches and opportunities in our world.
• We take steps to practice compassion and serve together as a family.

Calculate your score for each of the domains. Identify which two areas are a strength for your family and which two areas you want to work in strengthening.