Re: your point about being an author, that has always been my approach, too. For this new book, I took in a metric ton of customer feedback (I had over 600 test readers generate more than 10,000 comments) and it really helped the final product. The challenge, of course, is always how to take in external feedback without losing your vision

I've been a bit reluctant to over-generalize from my own theories, and so am not sure I would want to speculate about how to apply them in a family context.