The Family Lab – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Time to tackle larger events, like weddings, funerals, family reunions, and community events! In this third installment, we talk about the structure of events, from the invitations to the send off. This week Whitney is joined by Angela Halliday and Debbie Siebert. The book we've been discussing is The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker.

To listen to the other two episodes about this book, click the links below: 

Art of Gathering Part 1

Art of Gathering Part 2

Weekly Open Lab: Wednesdays at 10 am MT (through April 30 2025, then resuming in September) 

Join Whitney in her virtual studio to share ideas, solve problems, craft experiments, chat about past and future episodes, discuss this quarter's book, or just drop in to say hi! 

https://riverside.fm/studio/listener-ideas?t=880793c622433a15fcce

On March 6, 2025, Elise Caffee was in a terrible car accident in Cancun. The car she was in was hit by an asphalt truck, and she was rescued, but severely burned. Since this was published, Elise passed away from her injuries. You can find more of her story at instagram.com/elisecaffeeupdates

I decided to change my planned schedule to bring you a conversation I had with Elise about friendship in 2022. I used clips from it in two different episodes, but never released the entirety of it. Elise had so many beautiful things to say about friendship and kindness. Please enjoy her wisdom today and say a prayer for Elise and her family. 

Donate to the driver's family here: Go Fund Me

3kidstravel.com

Weekly Open Lab: Wednesdays at 10 am MT (through April 30 2025, then resuming in September) 

Join Whitney in her virtual studio to share ideas, solve problems, craft experiments, chat about past and future episodes, discuss this quarter's book, or just drop in to say hi! 

https://riverside.fm/studio/listener-ideas?t=880793c622433a15fcce

Connecting with your kids takes effort, creativity, patience--and a lot of experimentation! Whitney Archibald, Angelynn Singley, and Paola Jellings, who have (gasp) 18 children between them, talk about experiments they've tested to connect with their kids, and come up with a few for you to try. Then four contributors share their ideas as well.

Here are the books mentioned in this episode:

The Five Minute Time In by Brittney Smart

Atomic Habits by James Clear 

To contribute to future episodes, email whitney@howshemoms.com

A few upcoming topics:

Dividing home management and caregiving responsibilities with your partner

Getting Kids to Pitch in Around the House

Teaching Kids Hygiene Habits

Building Family Culture

This is not an episode about the nitty gritty of homeschooling, though I do plan to do a more comprehensive episode or maybe even a multi-part series about that in the future. This is an episode for first-time homeschoolers and remote schoolers. I’m going to split the episode into two parts: help and hope.

We’ll start by troubleshooting some of the challenges of teaching your kids at home—including how to get your own work done while the kids are all home. Then we’ll play Pollyanna and talk about some of the positive things about teaching your kids at home. The goal here is to focus on what you’re gaining this year rather than what you’re missing out on—to replace some of your fear and dread with hope and maybe even excitement. I am not trying to minimize that fear and dread at all. Those are very understandable emotions to be having right now. This is hard! But after interviewing the moms I talked to for this episode, I felt so much more hopeful and optimistic, and I wanted to bottle that feeling up for you as well.   

Resources:

Jodi Chaffee, host of the podcast The Family Culture Movement: homeandfamilyculture.com

Instagram: @familyculturepodcast

Ceri Payne, life coach: Organizedlife.coach

Instagram: @organizedlife.coach

Family Looking Up Podcast, Episode 150: Combating Homeschool Overwhelm with Jen Bradley

The Self-Driven Child, by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson

Josie Lauducci mastered the quarantine life before quarantining was cool. She went long stretches where she saw no one but her family; she lived in tight quarters on a shoestring budget; she homeschooled—and here’s the amazing part—she did it on purpose. On a sailboat.

Read about the Lauduccis and their adventure at afamilyafloat.com

As moms, we are students of child development. We read books. We observe our own kids, and other people’s kids to figure out what’s “normal.” We recognize the different stages they go through. Some pass by as quick as a newborn’s smile, some drag like a morning diaper.

However, we are less likely to recognize our own stages of development, and the remarkable growth we mothers experience as we learn, face and overcome challenges, and perhaps most importantly, chill out a bit.

In this season of the How She Moms Podcast, we’re going to explore this theme of how we mothers evolve and grow, and how our identities shift and develop. I’ll be creating episodes about some of the more universal stages we go through that more or less follow the stages of our children--like becoming mothers in the first place, navigating those early toddler years and parenting elementary kids, teenagers, and eventually adults. But we’ll also talk about some of the stages brought about by circumstances and events that change and shape us as mothers, things like moving, meeting friends and mentors, illnesses for both ourselves and our children, losing people we love, and parenting children with disabilities.

To kick off this theme, I invited three mothers, all in different stages of motherhood, to talk about how motherhood has influenced their growth and development.

Maris Young hosts the Young Honest Mother Podcast and blogs at younghonestmother.com  She is the mother of one son, who is three. You can follow her on Instagram @younghonestmother.

Cheryl Cardall is the mother of five children, from 10 to 21. She hosts the Fight Like a Mother podcast, a show about parenting children with mental health challenges. You can follow her on Instagram @supermamas4real 

Georgia Anderson is a mother of seven grown children (14 if you count their spouses, which she does) and a grandmother as well. She is a Gottman-trained parenting coach and also hosts retreats for women and couples. You can find her at knowhowmom.com and on Instagram @knowhowmomtips.

We all know that parenting is a grand experiment. It has become my tradition with this podcast to update you on the experiments we’re trying here at the Archibald home about three times a year—summer, fall, and winter. So in this episode I’ll talk about our current experiments and update you on some of the ones from the experiment episode last February, called Routine Experiments—the sequel.

Today’s episode is part two of a two-part series about how to take the fight out of food. In the first episode, we talked about picky eating and house rules about what kind of food you eat. In this episode we’re going to talk about two other potential battles: When kids eat and how they eat.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

SNL sketch: Dysfunctional Family Dinner

Didn’t I Just Feed You Podcast: The Beast Hiding In Your Pantry

What Fresh Hell Podcast. House Rules that Work

A Helping of Happiness Blog, by Hillary Hess

French Kids Eat Everything, by Karen Le Billon

Most of us haven’t been in a sitcom-style, hurl-mashed-potatoes-across-the-room kind of food fight, but I’ll bet most of us have been in fights about food with our kids. There are so many potential conflicts here, from picky eating to table manners. The goal of this two part series is to help make eating with your kids a positive experience—with a lot of great ideas from moms on the front lines. In this first episode, we’ll talk about two potential battles: picky eating and house rules about what types of food you eat. In part two, we’ll talk about battles over when kids eat—especially snacks—and how kids eat—how they act at the table.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Podcasts:

Your Picky Eater, What Fresh Hell Podcast

Baby Food, Our Parents Did What? Podcast

The Beast Hiding in Your Pantry, Didn’t I Just Feed You? Podcast

Books:

Bringing Up Bebe, by Pamela Druckerman

French Kids Eat Everything, by Karen Le Billon

Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss

Little Pea, by Amy Rosenthal

Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoban

I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato, by Lauren Child

Video Clip:

There’s a Party In My Tummy,  Yo Gabba Gabba

Workshop:

How She Moms Meal-Planning Workshop

Motherhood is a loaded word, full of social, historical, cultural, and familial expectations and responsibilities. Yet, as we all know, there are no prerequisites and no formal training—not even a job interview—required to assume this position. 

We’ve all read articles that break down the many hats moms wear while they juggle balls in the form of children and housework and birthday parties and jobs and side gigs. But rather than being intimidated and utterly overwhelmed by this long list of duties, we can choose to be liberated by it. Since no one person can possibly be good at all of them, we get to choose the ones that we’re going to prioritize, which our spouses are going to take on (if we have one), what we’re going to outsource to someone else, and which of the balls we’re just going to drop. 

 We get to write our own job descriptions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

“Housekeeping Is Not Motherhood,” by Rebecca Brown Right, rebeccabrownwright.com

Marriagelaboratory.com (Celeste Davis)

Chantelallencoaching.com

Brookeromney.com

Your Kid—A Novel Problem

Raising Seabiscuit

All Joy and No Fun, By Jennifer Senior