Tips for productive family meetings

Following are tips for productive family meetings:

• Don't have children. Period. No fam, no family meetings.
• If you inadvertently have children, put them immediately up for adoption. See above.
• Constantly pawn your children off on relatives who live far away. Your time with them will be so scant that your spouse will not want to waste it on family meetings. Go to Disney World instead!
• If you have children and have not the heart or good sense to ditch them, insist on not having any family meetings.
• If your spouse insists on family meetings over your objections, try to always be "unexpectedly called away" at the last minute due to an "emergency" at work.
• Threaten divorce if there are family meetings.
• Join the French Foreign Legion or the Merchant Marine.
• Fake a seizure and escape by ambulance.

If your spouse insists on having a family meeting and you are unsuccessful at escaping from it:

• Try to have a meeting about what sweets to buy or how much allowance to give. This is just about the only agenda in which the children will participate willingly.
• Do not talk.
• Do not allow the children to talk.
• Ignore the children when they do talk.
• Insist that all communications be in Pig Latin. Then the meeting will be fun!
• Agree very enthusiastically with everything your spouse says.
• Videotape the meeting so you can show your spouse what a ridiculous idea it was.
• Videotape the meeting and then have a professional film editor dub in the results your spouse wanted.
• Serve cookies spiked with a mild dose of sedative. When your wife and kids fall asleep, put them to bed. The next day, tell them what they all agreed to.
• Require everyone to communicate in writing only.
• Take everything each child owns and put it all in a pile in the back yard. Tell them that unless the family meeting is productive, you are fully prepared to douse the pile with kerosene and set it on fire.
• Make sure the meeting results in signed, notarized contracts. Enforce the contracts with legal action. With any luck you will be able to divorce your kids and remand them to the custody of the Department of Social Services. Then you will never have to have another family meeting again.

What's that? You say you WANT to have a family meeting?

Never mind.