I started doing board meetings three years ago when the kids were super young—they are four and five now. I read the book on a Saturday morning, and the next day I scheduled the first board meeting. I said to my wife, “For the rest of my life, I want to do this with our boys.”
I was trying to add a higher level of quality one-on- one time. Because there are two of them, and they're so close in age, they play together a lot. I wanted more individual time.
That was something I never had with my dad. I love my dad, and feel lucky to have him. He’s my hero. But to this day, I can't remember a time when my dad and I hung out one-on-one, overnight. Ever. I can't imagine how our relationship would be different if we had.
I started with Max initially, because Noah really couldn’t even talk to tell me what he wanted to do. They're old enough now that they're starting to talk about the next meeting. They say things like, “Hey! Next board meeting, we're going to go surfing.” Or, “The next meeting we're going bowling.”
The boys love it. They tease each other about it, saying things like, “Oh we did something. I can't tell you. It's a secret.” They get very excited about it.
I'm playing the long game with these board meetings. What I'm most excited about is that one moment—it could be in one year, it could be ten—where we’ve created a space for them to share something that might otherwise have gone unsaid. I know that in my life those moments just never came up because there was no place to do it.
Out of all the stuff I do, if I had to pick one thing, one ritual, one rhythm that I do with all my kids, this is the one. This is the most important thing I do with them.
DAVID BACH’S STORY
When I first tried a Board Meeting, I was already super-close with my son, Jack, who was 13 at the time.