As we think about trying to build our families into teams, one of the things that people almost immediately say is, “Oh, does that mean my kids can’t be in music, can’t be in sports?” And it does certainly bring up all those conversations.

But one creative thing to consider is that there are ways that the entire family can really engage in an activity that’s traditionally thought of as an individual activity. So an example in our case is, my son Jackson is super into martial arts. He’s the one son, he’s got four sisters.

So we just sat down as a family and said, “Hey, let’s all go with Jackson into this sport. And so we all went! We spent two years, April and I got to red belt, all the girls made it to black belt with Jackson. So yeah it was awesome! Be creative! If it’s important enough to that individual, then maybe it’s worth the family trying to figure out how to do it as a team.

 We’ve always tried to figure out how to do this with work. We’ve owned some of our own companies and my wife just started a sewing studio. So there’s a conversation that goes on, with each of the kids, what are you going to do to be a part of this team effort?

Let’s not make this feel like just mom’s project, let’s make it feel like a family team endeavor. So Kelsey especially has been super involved with with her mom and other kids who’ve had different activities. When our kids were really little, we had an ecommerce company and so all of our kids liked put stickers on all the inventory. We always made that their task.

Right now in my company, there’s not a lot of obvious places for kids to intersect, but I’m always looking for them. So one of the areas that I found was that, we do a once a month breakfast where the leaders of the company serve all the employees. And so I bring a couple of my girls in, typically to that breakfast to help serve all the employees to help clean up afterwards.