Photo Credits: Dave Crosby

Every once in a while, someone will ask me how I fit in quality family time while working and traveling. Ultimately, it is all about making the decision to prioritize that part of your life. I have previously talked about my 24 Boxcar theory, where every hour of your day is a boxcar, and you make choices on what to fill those cars with.

Family time must be part of those 24 boxcars, even when I am out of town.

The way I look at it, family time does not always have to be an extensively planned outing. Quality family time is right at our fingertips, yet is often overlooked. I’ve always believed that in order to have quality time, you have to make quantity time. The reality is you can’t make quality time. Rather, you have to have enough quantity of time and then quality time will appear when you least expect it. Take, for example, the daily practice of family dinner. This is a hugely important part of strengthening family and community bonds. It gives families a chance to create engaging conversation between siblings and between children and parents.

It can be easy to get stuck in a rut of daily questions that don’t lead to engagement but instead lead to the same stock answers. Questions such as “What happened today at school?” can often lead to a known dead end answer of “nothing” or “the usual.” While these are important questions to ask your children, they are not the most effective way to bond and grow with them. That’s why, during my family time, I’ve found it invaluable to ask questions that spark the imagination, expand knowledge, and get everyone involved to create cross-generational relationships. These types of questions can range from the personal to the aspirational to the theoretical.

One way to spark true engagement is to make it a game by creating or purchasing a deck of dinner table question cards with a prompt or question that will start conversation about a topic that may never have arisen otherwise. Questions such as: “Where would you choose to live if you had to live in another country?” “Which wild animal would you most like to be?” “Which family or school rule would you most like to change?” “Is it more charitable to spend your money or time?

Through these conversations we learn more about our own hopes, dreams, and aspirations as well as those of our family, all over a single dinner.

One of the most significant benefits of these conversations to our family, which always seem to expand beyond the original scope of the question asked, is we get a chance to learn that we share many of the same hopes and dreams for ourselves as we do for one another, giving us a unique chance to learn from one another and a deeper understanding of how closely we’re all connected through our familial bond.

Another way to engage your children and make them feel special, valued and a part of what you do outside of the home is to bring them into your current environment. Just yesterday morning, as our 11 year old son, Brennan, was having breakfast and getting ready for school I said to him, “Brennan, I’d really like to tell you about all the different business deals I have going on right now so you can understand every time I’m talking about it at home. I’d also like to get your thoughts on some things.” He immediately got a smile on his face and said, “I’d like that.” Yesterday afternoon when he came home from school, one of the first things he asked me was, “Dad, can you tell me about all the deals you’re working on?” It was obvious to me that he’d been waiting all day to talk with me about it. Sometimes all it takes is to simply engage and get the conversation going.

These are just some of the ways I work to build relationships with my sons and my wife. I try to be very purposeful with the sometimes limited time I have with my family whether it is through the Red Plate tradition, helping them learn about finances and investment or simply through talking with them over dinner, and I am very thankful for each of these moments with my family.

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I previously have written about creating meaningful traditions that last, and how in our family, one way to do this is with the special “Red Plate” that symbolizes a special event or achievement from one of us in our home. It can be a birthday, a graduation, special sporting event or accomplishment, or it could even be the day of a doctor’s appointment, but whomever comes to the kitchen table in the morning and sees the Red Plate at where they sit, they know they are going to be celebrated. Every one of us – my four sons, my wife Shawntel, and I – all look forward to seeing the Red Plate.

Our family has another way of creating meaningful traditions.  Another major event happens when our boys reach their 10th birthday, when they have the opportunity to accompany me to a meeting with my stockbroker, and learn what the stock market is and how it works. And on that special day I place $1,000 into their stock account, and my boys have 100% control what happens to it – I let them manage it as they see fit, as long as they keep the money in the stock trading account. They are in charge of choosing the stocks, researching the companies, which I’ve found provides an invaluable lesson in beginning to understand financial management and develop skills that will serve them well throughout their lives.

My son Brennan made his first stock picks when he turned 10 years old this past July: Facebook, Apple and Amazon. Only 7 months after he picked his first stocks for his account, he’s seen a 21% gain in his portfolio.  I’ll never forget taking his older brother Braden (who is now 22 years old) to open up his stock trading account when was 10 years old.  He sat with my broker wearing a blue sport coat and so eager about what he was getting to do.  Braden bought Coca Cola because it was his favorite drink, McDonalds because it was his favorite restaurant, Best Buy because he thought it was the coolest store, AOL because he loved the internet and Gateway because it was his computer. In his first two years Braden had a 38% return in his portfolio! That included a 6.7% return in his first several months, and his brother Brennan is even showing some of the same return results.

What does this show? That in investing, as in so many other areas of life, it’s good to go with what you know and like! I remember my brokers telling the boys not to think of the stock market as charts, graphs or newspaper headlines but rather think of it as way to buy a part of the companies you think are great and that you think will be great for a long time, the Warren Buffet philosophy. The boys were instructed to take two weeks and ask me what companies that they liked were public or private. It was after two weeks that they were to buy companies they like, buy what their friends like, and what they and their friends would like for a long time. None of those things took a computer program to analyze.

This tradition of investing has imparted so much wisdom to my boys, like lessons in money management and sound investment principles. It’s also a good way to impart the values of saving as well has learning how money can be put to work for work, as opposed to spending money on things that don’t provide a valuable return.

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