Guide
The Once-a-Year Family Review
An hour, once a year, that quietly resets how a household treats each other.
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- Time in real life
- One hour, once a year
- Ages
- 6–18
- Reading
- 7 min
Reviewed by Sian Trombley, CCCFounder, Thrive Family Company
7 min read
Organisations review the year. Schools review the year. Families almost never do — which is strange, because a household makes more decisions per week than most small businesses and almost none of them are ever revisited.
The annual review is not a performance appraisal, and it is emphatically not a session for telling children how they should improve. It is an hour in which a family looks at the year it actually had, keeps what worked, and retires what nobody ever really wanted to do.
Run it in the same week each year — the end of August, the first week of January, a birthday. The date matters less than the fact that it repeats.
Set it up properly
- One hour, in the diary, with proper food on the table. This is a slightly special occasion and should look like one.
- One large sheet of paper and a pen for every person, including the youngest.
- Phones in another room, adults included. Especially adults.
- One adult chairs, and it is not the same adult every year. From about twelve, a child can chair it, and it is worth letting them.
The five questions
- 01
1. What was the best thing about this year?
Go round twice. The second answers are always more honest and more interesting than the first. Write every one down, in the words the person used.
- 02
2. What was the hardest thing?
Adults answer this too, truthfully but age-appropriately. A parent who names a hard year gives children permission to name theirs. Do not fix anything at this stage — just record it.
- 03
3. What do we do as a family that we should keep?
The traditions that survive this question become real traditions. The ones nobody mentions are usually being maintained out of obligation by one exhausted adult.
- 04
4. What should we stop doing?
The most valuable question of the five. Families accumulate commitments the way lofts accumulate boxes. Everyone gets to nominate one thing, and one thing genuinely goes.
- 05
5. What is one thing we want next year to have in it?
One per person, written down and kept. Not goals — a want. A trip, a Sunday habit, a room repainted, a person seen more often.
The part adults find hardest
Ask, once, near the end: what is one thing you would change about how I parent? Then say thank you, write it down, and do not defend yourself. Not one sentence of explanation.
This is uncomfortable, and it is the single highest-value ninety seconds of the hour. Children who learn that a parent can hear criticism without collapsing or retaliating grow into adolescents who bring you the difficult things, because they have direct evidence that difficult things are survivable in this house.
Close it properly
- Read the page back out loud. Hearing a year summarised in your family's own words is the emotional pay-off of the whole exercise.
- Photograph the page and keep it. Reading last year's sheet at the start of the next review is genuinely moving, and children ask for it.
- Choose exactly one thing to change, not five. Households do not change five things.
- Put next year's date in the diary before anyone leaves the table.
A family that reviews itself once a year is unusually hard to drift apart, because drift is the only thing the review is designed to catch.
Try this week
- 01Pick the date and put it in the shared calendar with the whole household copied in.
- 02Buy or find one notebook that will only ever be used for this.
- 03Run question four — what should we stop doing? — even if you do nothing else.
- 04Ask the hard question about your own parenting, and only say thank you.
- 05Photograph the page and set a reminder for the same week next year.
The therapist's perspective
I have recommended this to families in crisis and families in perfectly good shape, and it lands differently but usefully in both. In difficulty it produces a rare hour in which the conflict is not the subject. In calm it catches the small resentments before they become the reason a family ends up in my room.
If you have teenagers who declare it embarrassing, run it anyway and keep it to forty minutes. In my experience they complain the whole way in, answer the questions honestly, and ask when the next one is.
Sian
Founder, Thrive Family Company
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