Concretely, deliberate parenting means two things. The first is being clear up front about what is important to each family member and what is important to the family collectively. Some of this is abstract; most parents try to get their family aligned along some core values. But a larger part is answering questions like, What would my ideal Tuesday look like? This may seem mundane, but your life is made of Tuesdays. If your Tuesdays are not what you hope, you may not be as happy as you can be.

In my family, we have decided that having dinner together, at 6 p.m., is among our most important priorities. I could give several reasons for this, but the main reason is simply that for both my husband and me, it’s part of an ideal day. Recognizing this shapes a lot of our other decisions.

Here’s one example: My daughter’s primary athletic activity is running, and at some point a fellow parent mentioned a youth running club at the local high school. When I looked into it, I found out that it meets at 6 p.m. twice a week, conflicting with dinner. This made it a non-starter, and I don’t know that I even raised it with the rest of the family as an option. But if we hadn’t established, up front, that dinner takes priority, I can easily imagine having made a different choice. And after a few more choices like that, our ideal day would be gone.

It would be a mistake, though, to think that in this stage of parenting, personal preferences are all that matter.