Everyone always says moms are true heroes, but is it true? Big surprise, I think motherhood is the quintessential hero's journey. This episode explores the idea of the adventure of motherhood, dragon-slaying and all. 

My friend Molly Liggett and I talk about the many experiments we've tried over the last decade or so to help our kids learn how to manage money. We talk about allowance vs. paying per chore, and we get into the nitty gritty details about how much we pay our kids, what we expect them to do around the house, what they pay for themselves and what we buy for them, plus what we do when they owe us money and how we encourage them to save.

A conversation with organization genius Jen Martin, founder of Reset Your Nest, about how to align our home organization with our goals, values, and routines; how to set up different organizational zones in our kitchens; and how to create systems for our comings and goings, among other organizing tips.

You can find Jen Martin at resetyournest.com and on Instagram @reset_your_nest

And for another great conversation with Jen, check out:

How Jen Martin Organizes

https://youtu.be/RncC3Q-JNjs

This is a story of a two mothers, two pandemics, and two births-- three generations apart. It's a story of poetry and hope, and about how good things can come from difficult circumstances.

Jasmine and Madison Wilson have made music, love, and laughter their family creed, as well as their Instagram handle (@musiclovelaughter). In this episode, we talk about how Jasmine has cultivated her young daughter's musical talent, helping her write and record original songs as early as age 6. 

The first in a three-episode series about one of the very best parts of motherhood--discovering each of our kids' unique talents and helping them cultivate those talents.

Andrea Davis, founder of Better Screen Time, shares how her whole family works together to set boundaries around technology, and keep an ongoing, positive dialogue about screentime.

Resources:

Betterscreentime.com

Connection Reset Challenge

Linda and Richard Eyre Article

Gabb Wireless

A rundown of the experiments we're trying in the Archibald home this summer, from cooking classes to way too many sports to chores.

I teamed up with two other moms of gluten free kids to talk about how we help our gluten free kids. As I like to do on this podcast, we'll start by talking about our gluten free strategies—our overall approach—and move to more specific tactics and then the logistics of cooking gluten free and keeping our gluten-free kids fed and healthy.

Resources: 

gfkiddos.com

glutenfreewithcoral.com

Meghann Guentensberger lost her daughter in a tragic accident four years ago. In this episode she tells her story of the accident, her family's journey through grief, and her mission to follow Rylie's example of spreading love and kindness with her non-profit organization called Rylie's ARK, which stands for Acts of Random Kindness. 

You can learn more about this amazing organization at ryliesark.org, and you can read Meghann's beautiful writing at meghannguentensberger.com.

Traveling when you have kids takes patience, planning, and creativity, even if you're leaving them home, but it can be done! And—usually—it's worth all the pain. This episode shares creative tips and tricks from planning to packing to entertaining kids in the car and making it through the airport, and then to the adventures themselves. Happy travels!

Leslie Graff rediscovered her passion for creating art around the time she also became a mom. What she didn't anticipate was how much each of these pursuits would enrich the other.

Nancy Maldonado became the CEO of the Chicano Federation of San Diego in January 2019, which meant she had about a year to prepare for the organization's COVID-19 response--without any clue that that's what she was preparing for. I talked to Nancy about how she discovered her passion for helping underserved communities and how she manages her career and motherhood. We also had a great conversation about mommy wars and mom guilt. 

Stuck in the never-ending logistics of running a home? It's time to shift to a strategy-first perspective so you can build systems that work. 

This episode talks about how to shift your thinking. Hence, you start with a strategy, then consider all the different tactics that could accomplish your strategy, and finally think about the logistics of getting it done. 

For episodes with lots of great ideas about different strategies and tactics, check out: 

How She Plans Meals: https://youtu.be/MZqkD_10IVQ?si=3vUTUtrWxvFn9oQZ

Workshop: How You Do Laundry https://youtu.be/b98f6kT3sKk?si=iAF9Ra-rKTi3uKcc

Wendy Castellanos-Wolf and Alexandra Rozo met while pursuing a shared passion for Flamenco dancing, and recently started pursing a new passion project together, as co-hosts of the Mama Cita podcast.

You'll love this conversation all about how they discovered their passions, how they pursue them as busy moms, and how they deal with mom guilt.

In this episode, nine different women share how they discovered their passions, from law to flamenco. Some of these women have pursued their passions through their careers, some through hobbies, some through volunteer work. Others weave their passions through everything they do. This episode will be especially helpful if you are not quite sure what you're passionate about right now, if you can't figure out how to fit your passions into your current circumstances, or if you've lost sight of what lights you up.

Monica Tanner is passionate about marriages and families and, well, passion itself. In fact, she's made a career of it. She started a company called On the Brighter Side of Marriage, to combine marriage and business coaching. In this episode, we're going to talk to Monica about how she prioritizes marriage, family, and work--in that order. 

Buried in laundry? This workshop will help you craft your own realistic laundry system, using ideas from lots of different families. To get the most out of the workshop, you can buy a $5 workbook at howshemoms.com.

How Dana White does laundry: A Slob Comes Clean Podcast 

How Kendra Adachi does laundry: The Lazy Genius Podcast

Lubna Jamal immigrated to the United States from Pakistan about 20 years ago to marry her husband, a recent immigrant himself. Last week, I invited her into my fancy podcasting studio/aka my bedroom closet to talk to her about how she teaches her two sons about their cultural heritage and family history.

To work or to stay home with your baby. That is the question. Or that used to be the question. Or maybe we just thought it was the question. The truth is, we have more than two options when it comes to motherhood and work—more options than mothers have ever had, thanks in part to pioneering feminists who came before us, advances in technology, and changes in the way we do business. Not to mention the fact that our life spans are getting longer and longer, so we have more time to reimagine our careers in different stages of life. Today, we'll focus on this pivotal time for making career decisions, right after you have your first baby. 

Ashley Freehan mastered the work-from-home mom routine well before the pandemic. She not only knows how to take care of business and her two kids; she's good at taking care of herself too. Ashley shares her great ideas from how to entertain kids while you're working, to helping them understand your work, to figuring out a viable daily schedule, to convincing your kids to wear underwear. 

It's that time again—about three times a year, I do a whole episode updating you on the experiments we're trying here in the Archibald home—from sleep to chores to allowance to travel.

Delphine Brandt grew up in France, then married an American and moved to the U.S. shortly after they had their first child. She talks about adjusting to motherhood while adjusting to a new culture, and how they have merged the two cultures in their family--from food to discipline to wardrobe. 

One day you're the same you you've always been--the next day you're a mom. In this episode I talk to moms about how becoming a mom affected their sense of identity, from defining this new role to reevaluating goals and behaviors to rekindling past interests. 

Tired of meltdowns? And I'm not just talking about your kids! Emily Hamblin is here to help us deal with our big emotions and teach our kids to deal with theirs. She gives practical tips about how to talk to our kids about their emotions, how to identify the skills they're lacking, and how to teach emotional regulation and empathy. Then we both share experiments you can try at home.

For more resources from Emily, check out enlighteningmotherhood.com.

Kathleen Stout was visiting friends in Scotland when she found out she would become a foster mom. A couple weeks later, she was suddenly a single working mom raising a teenager and a three year old. And almost a year after that, she was able to adopt the kids and make them her permanent family. She shares her beautiful story about transitioning to motherhood. 

We can plan and prepare and imagine what this new world of motherhood will look like for us, but there's only one guarantee: the element of surprise. In this episode, fourteen different moms share about how their expectations of motherhood met reality. 

Becoming a mother is hard. But at 14, Emily was still figuring out who she was, let alone how motherhood would factor into her identity.

Maria Kemp's kids start riding horses as soon as they can ride along in a front pack. For them, work is a way of life.

Chances are, you saw motherhood going a little differently. When the rubber pacifier hits the road, we rarely turn out to be the moms we thought we would be—but in so many ways we're better than those fantasy moms we dreamed up.

You can learn more about some of the moms I featured in this episode here: 

Devon Smiddy: Meagghanthompsoncoaching.com

Celeste Davis: marriagelaboratory.com

Rachel Nielson: 3in30podcast.com

Today, I'm delighted to share some of the highlights from a conversation I had with Chantel Allen, a mom of four and a life coach. She'll talk about some of the different stages of motherhood, and her career path from preschool teacher to life coach. We also talk about how she has learned to live with anxiety and help her children through some of the same challenges.

Naming a baby is one of the first big decisions we make as parents—and it's a huge one! Talk about pressure! This is the name they're going to be known by their whole lives. It sounds so stressful--so why is it so darn fun?

In this episode we're going to talk about some of the common—and uncommon--ways parents come up with names, and how they actually come to an agreement on those names. We'll also take a fun intermission with a little quiz we'll call Spot the Urban Legend.

Sources: 

How To Name a Baby, by Tim Urban

Baby Name Voyager

Every year, Leisle and Vinh Chung take a couple retreat to come up with a new version of their Plan with a capital P--a 30-year blueprint for their family. In this episode you'll learn about their plan and how they infuse their values--including hard work, compassion and service--into parenting and family life.

In this episode I'll share what bedtime looks like for several different moms, some with just young kids and some with older kids and teenagers, including some really sweet ideas about how to connect with your kids at bedtime. Then I'll share some of the advice and research that's helped me improve our bedtime routine this year.

Resources: 

howshemoms.com

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth MD

routineandthings.com

jenbrewer.com

thepurposegathering.com

meckmom.com

rebeccabrownwright.com

Inspiring stories of women who love and serve their communities and the world and teach their children to do the same. 

Join a coven of Halloween experts--my mother and her three sisters--for a costume parade through history as they reminisce and share photos about Halloweens past. We talk about the antics of my Grandpa, the Halloween king, and his legacy of papier mache and discuss useful skills like how to black out your teeth and create a lifelike beard with nothing but vaseline and coffee grinds. 😂

Beth Millward is the mom version of Buddy the Elf. In this episode she shares her many Christmas traditions, from Santa's Workshop to the twelve days of Christmas. I dare you to listen without getting excited to celebrate!

In this episode we'll  talk about 10 tactics to bring a little more play into parenting. Along the way, we'll dig into the guilt a little bit and examine that pressure we feel to entertain our kids, we'll talk to moms about specific ways they play with their kids—including march-madness style taste tests, airborne pancakes, and competitive toilet wiping—and we'll even learn some techniques for making those pretend-play sessions something you can actually enjoy once in a while.

Brooke Romney is one of my favorite writers on the topic of being a mother and being a good person in general. Her first book, I Love Me Anyway, released this fall, and it's as beautiful and inspiring as I expected. Here, I talk with Brooke about some of the different stages she's experienced in motherhood, and what she's learned along the way, especially from other moms.

In the last episode, we talked about why self-care is important and some great ideas of how to make it happen. Today, we're going to talk to three moms who have figured out how to take care of themselves while taking care of their kids, in three very different ways and in three different situations.

As a mom, you know what human beings need and how to take care of them. So why don't you take care of yourself? In this episode, I talk to 10 different moms about self-care—the why, the what, and the how.

This episode is all about how to find islands of our own—islands of time and islands of space where moms can be alone and recharge.

This is the first of two episodes about self care. The next one will include lots of different ways to care for ourselves, but I wanted to start with this episode because I feel like this desperate need for alone time is pretty unique to motherhood, and especially to motherhood right now, in a time of homeschooling, remote schooling, and working from home.

Ten experiments going down at the Archibald home, from a family retreat to chore routines to bedtime bribery. 

This week's episode is another bonus interview, and a glimpse of what life is like for a mom of 11 children! I recorded this conversation with the incredible Emily Fillmore about a year ago for my episodes "How She Teaches Kids to Work" and "How She Teaches Kids to Be Tidy," and I thought it was time to bring you the whole interview, now that we're all figuring out our fall routines.

Links:

Family Do Dots

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

My friend Ashley McGavin and I share all the experiments we tried this summer–in Ashley's case with a brand new baby! We talk about feeding kids in the summer, keeping them entertained, summer jobs, chores, personal development, a senior trip, and how to achieve a throwback 80s and 90s summer. 

We both have 5 kids, but our families are in very different stages. My kids now range from 10 to 19, and her kids now range from four months to 14 years old.

Join us at our weekly Open Labs! Tuesdays at 10:00 MT

www.familylab.com/events

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