Just three days ago, we had the perfect family beach day. It was warm but not too hot. Everyone saw at least one sea turtle while snorkeling. The kids worked together to dig an epic hole in the sand. They enjoyed each other and didn’t fight or whine.
As we were getting ready to leave, the woman we were sitting next to told me how much she’d enjoyed sharing space with us and complimented my well-behaved children who got along so well. I fumbled the compliment a bit with the old—I don’t know how much we have to do with it, we got pretty lucky to get such good kids. She insisted that it was more than that–she has children of her own and could tell good parenting was afoot.
A photo bomb from the complimentary woman.
It was a lovely and sincere compliment. But it was also very easy to be a good parent on an idyllic day like that. I couldn’t help but think about the reverse scenario—which we had experienced plenty of times that week.
Sometimes my kids are just mean to each other for no reason. They hurt each other, with words, with fists, with teeth. I’ve had moments of hopelessness, thinking that my only choice was to ship a couple of them off to my parents—who could do a much better job than I could. What if that woman had witnessed one of those days instead? If I take credit for my angelic kids on an extraordinary day, do I have to take the blame for the bad days? For every beautiful seashell in the beach bag of motherhood, there’s a sandy grape or two.
All of this opens up the age-old paradox of motherhood—nature or nurture. How much impact do we have as mothers? How much of a child’s behavior has to do with our parenting and how much is just who they are? There are plenty of examples of good parents with children who go off the rails, and vice versa—people with horrific childhoods who go on to become terrifically resilient, remarkable people.
I know that woman didn’t intend for her compliment to send me down an existential rabbit hole. She saw a good mom, trying hard, and she acknowledged it. It felt good to be seen. We should pay each other compliments more often. But we also need to be careful not to judge moms whose kids are misbehaving or struggling, even if they don’t handle the situation perfectly.
We’re all part of a grand experiment—sometimes getting it right, other times really messing up. All we can do is keep doing our best and savoring those great moments, and learning from the not-so-great ones.
So here are some of the experiments we’re trying here in the Archibald home—from sleep to chores to allowance to travel.
Allowance
I’ll start with an update on our allowance system. This is the longest we’ve ever stuck with one money system—ever. Over a year ago we switched from paying per chore to giving the kids a monthly and weekly allowance. It just seems to be the best fit for our family, partly because I hated the logistics of keeping track of paying them for each chore they did. They still have to do chores. But if they don’t do them, they have to pay someone else, usually me, to do them.
I’ve been working extra hard to enforce this lately, to teach them that being a part of a family, and being a person in general requires a certain amount of work. And it has to get done one way or another. If you’re not going to do your work, you’re still responsible for getting it done, even if it means outsourcing it to someone else. Mom isn’t just going to pick up the slack. At least not for free. I still pay them for extra chores, which they sometimes do when they need some extra cash. And by cash, I don’t really mean cash, because I rarely keep it on hand. I’ve mentioned this before, but we use the Bankaroo app to keep track of their money.
The main reason we decided to give allowance was to give the kids experience with managing money, and this is where we’re starting to see a payoff now that we’ve been consistent for so long. Our oldest son especially has started taking really good care of his clothes and other purchases, because he bought them himself and he knows how expensive it is to replace them. The best part was Christmas time when, with no prompting from us, they were so generous in buying really thoughtful gifts for each other.
Bedrooms
Since we’re talking about Christmas, our gifts this year were another of my favorite experiments. We decided that our gifts to our kids this year would be redoing their bedrooms. We started by painting them in late November, which was an experiment unto itself. All the kids wanted to help, so I let them help with one of the rooms. It was pretty interesting to see which ones actually had the patience to help and do a careful job, and which ones left splotches on the ceiling when I wasn’t watching. And of course which one stepped right into the paint tray. This was by far the messiest experiment, and of course added a lot of time, but they all learned from it, including me, and somehow I cleaned up the mess.
We had two main objectives for redoing rooms. The first objective was to create rooms that helped them develop their talents. We made a great space for our oldest son’s guitars and amps in his room, and he added a record player, so it’s a great place to make and listen to music. He actually shares a bunk bed with our youngest son who is soaking up all the music as well.
We turned my daughter’s room into an art studio, with clothelines to hang her creations. We made more creative spaces in our other son’s room as well, but lately it’s mostly turned into a greenhouse. He wanted a bunch of plants for his birthday and he’s really good at taking care of them and developing a real interest in gardening.
The last bedroom, in the basement, was already new, so that son requested that we furnish his room with more books. Didn’t take much persuasion. We also got him a nice camera to develop that talent.
Our other objective for changing their rooms was to help with our perennial problem of bedtime. We thought that maybe if we made their rooms places they loved to be it would help them go to bed and stay in bed. And another main tactic was getting tall beds for the two kids who are most notorious for getting out of bed. We bought a bunk bed for one room and a loft bed for another. And it’s really worked. Just that little bit of effort getting in and out of bed has made a difference. Plus, they’ve made cozy little nests up there that they like to snuggle into. In fact, it’s worked so well that our third son has stopped hanging out with the older boys downstairs at bedtime, for what we call teen time, because he prefers to spend time in his room winding down at the end of the day. He’s always struggled with getting to sleep, and his new routine is really helping.
Teen Time
And teen time itself has been going for close to a year now, and honestly, it’s kind of performed a miracle. Basically, Teen Time is just letting the older kids stay up later and hang out in the basement while I put the younger ones to bed. It probably would have happened organically, but naming it makes it feel like more of a privilege.
For a while I had just resigned myself to the fact that my two oldest boys were not going to ever be good friends. Who knew that TV would bring them together? Having their own shows that they watch together, with their own inside jokes and just the fact that they spend an hour or two together every night has done wonders for their relationship. Or maybe it’s just that they’re older and more mature, I don’t know, but it’s my favorite new thing. They actually love being together.
Hygge
Another thing we’ve been experimenting with to help bedtime, at least on the nights when we can get our act together, is incorporating the Danish concept of Hygge. Dimming the lights during and after dinner, even lighting candles sometimes. It really helped us all calm down, work together to clean up (also a part of hygge), and then spend some family time in front of the fire before bed. We started this after I listened to a fabulous episode of the Family Looking Up podcast, where they interviewed Jessica Joelle Alexander, one of the co-authors of the book The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids. It’s episode 164, if you want to go back and listen to it.
I had heard of Hygge before, and thought it was a nice cozy concept, but the way Jessica described it just clicked for me. She thinks of Hygge as a state of group mindfulness—what she calls “we-fulness.” I immediately bought the book after listening, and loved it. Several of the refreshingly simple concepts are already part of my parenting style, like reframing things positively—I’ve always been a Pollyanna.
Training Managers
But the other concept I’m really working on is getting rid of ultimatums. This book came at a perfect time for me. I had just noticed how transactional my parenting had become: “If you do this I’ll do this.” And the reason I noticed is because my five-year-old started wheeling and dealing about everything. “I’ll brush my teeth if you read me an extra story.” “I’ll take my plate over if you give me a treat.” This helped me realize just how much I had been doing this, both positively, with rewards, and negatively, with ultimatums. Ever since, I’ve been really working on avoiding ultimatums and power struggles and noticing when I do use them. Jessica even recommends that we write down the ultimatums we use so we’re more aware of them.
This has also helped me realize one of the main sources of power struggles with one son in particular–one I should have noticed far earlier, because it’s one of those situations where we’re so alike that we drive each other crazy. No one likes to be micromanaged, but for this son and for myself, micromanagement is one of our main triggers. Once I finally started to see that he’s like me in this, I’ve been backing off a lot more and letting him be in charge of more things.
To help with this, I created a new chart for my kids, really more like an evaluation form. I wrote down the main things each of them is responsible for—or will be eventually—keeping their bedroom and bathroom clean, doing their laundry, their kitchen chore, and their other chores, and I let them evaluate whether they are a manager, competent and in charge of when and how they do the job; a worker, doing their job with help, reminders, and/or supervision from me; or a helper, helping me do the job. I had them go down the list and evaluate where they were, and we talked about how to get to the next level. I encouraged them all to pick one area where they could level up. We revisit it once in a while to check their progress. The best part of it is that they can see that the end goal is being in charge, without me having to nag or remind them to do things. Freedom for all of us. Most of them have at least one area in which they are the manager, so they can see how much better it is to get to that level. It’s been great for that particular son, who doesn’t even follow the same chore schedule as the rest of us anymore. He has his own timetable, and he consistently gets everything done. He still has some areas to work on, but he has caught the vision. I’m so proud of him, and we have much fewer power struggles.
Family Fitness
Another big experiment has been with physical activity. With so many things cancelled, only one of my kids did any fall sports. Then winter always naturally limits our physical activity. We haven’t even been skiing very much this winter. So when my oldest son’s tennis coach offered three weeks of personal training this January, we jumped at the chance. For anyone in the Denver/Castle Rock area, I highly recommend doing one of these three-week training sessions, or any other tennis or training program with Ben Wolfe at benwolfetennisandfitness.com. He did a phenomenal job personalizing workouts and encouraging him and holding him accountable. It’s not just for tennis players!
Anyway, once my son started his daily workouts, it was contagious. We bought some simple equipment like jumpropes, bands, a medicine ball, and some weights, and everyone—including me–has started using them and joining Jonas in his workouts. It’s been so great for both our physical and mental health.
Since I opened with a scene from our Spring Break trip, I’ll end with some of our travel experiments. We wanted to do something exciting for Spring Break after such a tough year, and we had lots of airline miles to burn, after a year of no flying, so we booked a trip to Maui for Spring Break. First time to Hawaii for any of our kids.
Traveling with five kids is always an experiment—but it sure is a lot easier now that they can all carry or wheel around their own bags at the airport!
Here are five experiments from our Spring Break trip to Maui that can apply to any trip anywhere:
1. Packing. I type up a packing list and all the kids 8 and up are in charge of packing their own bag. I don’t even check the bags (unless we’re going to a place that doesn’t have stores). This trip they did pretty well. All we had to buy there were a couple of rash guards (which I forgot to put on the list).
2. Flexible agenda. At the beginning of our trip we had a big discussion about everyone’s main priorities, made a list of must-dos, and then based our daily plans on the weather, what we felt like doing, and fitting in those priorities. We also roughly tried to alternate adventurous days with lazy beach days.
3. Trial Run. Early in the trip we experimented with a rainforest hike that was close by to determine whether we wanted to take the much more ambitious trip on the road to Hana. We’re so glad we tried it first. Some kids loved the mud and the adventure. Others not so much. There was also significant quarrelling, but only in the car. We decided that the first hike would suffice and skipped the longer road trip.
4. Buying Souvenirs. Vacations are a great way to teach kids about money—we make them use their own money to buy souvenirs, so it was interesting to see how they weighed their options and decided how to spend their money. It was also good for my habitual spenders to see how many more options the kids who like to save had.
5. Using a Gypsy Guide. One of the highlights for all of us was using the Gypsy Guide for Maui. As you drive past the arrows you can see on my screen shot, commentary just automatically plays, telling you good places to stop and fascinating info about history, geology, geography, and culture. We’ve used them in four national parks: Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Canyonlands and Arches as well, and we’re excited to use it in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer. There are guides for all the Hawaiian Islands and National parks all over the US, Canada and Australia. You’ll love them!
I also love reading books about the place I’m visiting while I’m there. It was pretty amazing to read the book Moloka’i while sitting on a beach looking at that island. Such a great book!
We ended up having a fabulous trip, with lots of great days at different beaches, a trip to the top of a volcano, and several adventurous hikes.
I’d love to hear about some of your experiments! Email me at whitney@howshemoms.com to tell me some of the things you’re trying with your own families these days. I’d love to incorporate your great ideas into future episodes and Instagram posts—and try some of them myself. I’m always looking for ideas to try in this grand experiment called Motherhood.
