While visiting Amy and Max the other day I noticed that they had posted a writ on the wall at the request of their 4 year old son that listed rules for eating at the dinner table. I don’t recall the exact rules but they had to do with not playing with your food and other eating related etiquette. I went off on a tangent about it and started thinking about how every family over time creates their own sets of rules and sometimes they are codified into laws like the piece of paper hanging from the dinner table and other times they are simply verbally agreed upon. I poked around and there are sites like Kids Contracts where people have spent time building some legal agreements for kids and parents. What I didn’t see was the idea of a household constitution where a family sets-up a small-scale democracy or other form of government with a base set of law that then guides the construction of additional laws for the family. While it might be nice to have a pre-built system it would lack in the fit for a given cultural style for a single family. Working through the process itself to gain consensus and buy-in from different parties (kids and parents) and likely multiple of each could lead to the formation of a set of family laws that would be respected. I’m interested in setting-up a government of sorts in my own household to sort through the rules as Madeline becomes old enough, probably another year, to appreciate how rules can help to define expectations and ultimately drive success based on incentives in the rules. I also am generally interested in anthropology so it gives me a chance to run a little experiment with my own family unit. If all went well I can imagine that we’d create a great little blue-print family constitution and laws in a wiki that could be copied and modified by other families who might find it interesting as a point of reference to save time. Ultimately we might end-up recreating a lot of what’s already in religions since they rightly took a lead in this type of framework a long time ago. But I’m not interested in the antiquated stuff and don’t subscribe to anyone else’s religion. Plus they involve praying which doesn’t seem to help much for most things I would worry about around the house.