How Whitney Experiments– Winter 2022

My daughter, Claire is a Brady Bunch-a-holic. She’s watched every episode at least three times, and she’s such a fan that the first experiment I’m going to share in this episode full of experiments is a new game we’ve invented. Actually it was my husband who invented it. Here’s how it goes:

As you may have guessed, one of the main themes for this episode is going to be screen time, as there may or may not be a bit too much of that going on in the Archibald home.

But you know me—I’ve always got lots of experiments going on in my home laboratory, so we’ll start by talking about our current bedtime and morning routines; physical fitness; teen driving; chores; and my recent, life-changing surgery. I’ll also do a little Christmas post-mortem to talk about what worked and what didn’t this holiday season. After I tackle tech, I’ll also share some experiments for How She Moms itself.

Routines

Let’s start with routines. We are going through a rough patch as far as mornings go, mainly because one of my sons just will not get out of bed in the morning. My other middle schooler is fed up with being late, so I reinstated the policy where the car leaves on time with or without him. If I have to come back and get him, he pays a $5 Uber fee. He paid me $15 last week. It did not feel like my tactic was working last week, but this morning he popped right up, so I’m optimistic. And at least my other son is getting to school on time.

Another addition to our morning routine is that I started waking my kids up with a glass of water. To drink, of course, but I may also used an ounce or two last week to drizzle over the son I was just mentioning—you know, to speed up that waking process. Did that work? No.

But, I started the water thing because 1. They just went a long time without drinking, and it feels good to wake up with a drink 2. I’ve been working on staying more hydrated myself, and realized they’re probably not drinking enough either and 3. It gets them sitting up and waking up right away.

One of my favorite new things for all of our routines is that Abel, my third son asked me if he could make a checklist for his morning, afternoon, and bedtime routines. Did you hear that? He asked me. I already had one ready, of course, from a year or two ago, so we just had to update it. Then my daughter saw his checklist and wanted one two. Big yes. Now they both walk around with their clipboards before and after school gettin’ it done. When my son actually wakes up, that is.

The last routine experiment I’ve been trying lately is at bedtime. As is typical for the youngest child, my 6 year old’s bedtime has been creeping later and later, leading up to Christmas and especially during winter break. We’re talking like 10:00. Not good.

Then of course school started and he was just not getting enough sleep. I tried to get it back in hand, but he just wouldn’t stay in bed or go to sleep. Reading to him helped a bit, but not for long. So I decided he needed a bigger incentive to get into bed earlier. Now we play a game every night in his bed, taking turns choosing each night. He has a dedicated window, from about 7:30 to 8. The longer he takes to get ready for bed, the less time he has for the game. And if he comes out, he doesn’t get a game the next night. It’s working great so far, and we’re both having a lot of fun with the games.

Fitness

Now let’s talk exercise. Typically, the only winter sport for any of my kids is skiing. Which doesn’t happen nearly as much as we’d like, because it’s an all-day thing, and it’s hard to get up there. So every year we try to figure out how to keep everyone physically active. This fall, though, a climbing gym opened up right by our house, and it’s amazing. My kids, like me are just small people, so climbing is much better suited to our body types than, say, basketball. So we got a family membership, and it’s been so much fun! One of my favorite parts about it is that we get to make our own schedule. I’m not driving kids in a billion different directions. It’s even within biking distance, so the older kids can just ride over.

To make sure we actually go and that we make the membership worth it, I schedule our climbing sessions on the calendar each week, and make sure we go at least twice, but usually three times a week. I’ve always loved rock climbing, and I love it for my kids, because they’re cheering each other on, belaying each other, and really pushing themselves to literally reach their goals.

So that’s why we signed up in the first place. I was excited to also climb once in a while and refresh my old skills, and it indeed was like riding a bike. But I was mostly just helping the kids and not doing much climbing myself. But then, I met a woman who works there and also coaches the high school team. She’s ten years older than me and an awesome climber. She started me thinking. And then I decided I’d take a movement class from her. I learned some great techniques that have really improved my climbing, but more than that, she helped me realize that I am not washed up yet! I don’t have to settle for getting back to my previous ability level—I can actually get better than I’ve ever been. I’ve got goals, my friends. By the end of the year I want level up to be able to climb a 5.11 easily and finish a 5.12 project. If you’re not a climber, just know that that’s way harder than I ever thought I’d be able to climb. But I’ve now got a regularly scheduled climbing date with a friend once a week now, and I take a few turns myself now when I go with the kids. I’m going to be taking more classes, and I’m so excited.

Climbing may not be your thing, but what is? What have you put on the back burner, or just accepted a plateau, when you could actually get better? Playing the piano? Dancing? Lifting weights? Writing? Scuba diving? You’re not washed up yet!

I’m still also lifting weights once a week with another friend, which has been amazing, mostly at preventing injuries. A few years ago, I just kept getting stupid, minor injuries, and now that I’m getting strong and balanced, not so much!

But you know what my best self-care experiment is? I had surgery this fall and I’m now the proud owner of a mid-urethral sling! Talk about life changing.

Transportation

Another brand new experiment that’s been going on for a while now is our first teen driver. My oldest is already 16, but due to some newbie mistakes on my part, won’t be getting his license until March. I thought it would be a scary experiment, teaching a kid to drive, but Jonas is actually a really great driver, maybe because of all his biking experience? I don’t know.

But once the license comes, that’s where the real experiments begin. First of all, what do you do about a car? He definitely wants one. He’s definitely not getting a nice one, like so many of the cars in his school parking lot. If we do get another car, he won’t own it—it will be another family car that he can drive and eventually share. But I’m hesitant. First of all, his school is only three miles away, and he usually bikes there now, even in the winter. It’s awesome. It starts his day off great, and gives him a little extra exercise. Plus it’s good for the environment and he doesn’t have to sit in parking lot traffic.

Second of all, at least the way it is right now, the two cars we have just sit, parked, three miles apart for most of the day because my husband’s office is so close to home. If we got a third car, we’d have three cars sitting mostly idle within three miles. So we’ve told him that we’ll share our two cars until the inconvenience outweighs the cost. But in the next experiment episode, I’ll be able to report back on what it’s like having another legal driver in the family.

Chores

If you listened to the new course I just released about sharing family work, you’ll know that the experiment of using my new charts with my kids has been going great. If you haven’t listened, you can listen for free, in episodes 80 and 81. Anyway, my kids are all currently working on leveling up from helpers to workers or from workers to managers in at least one category. Still not many managers, who don’t need to be reminded to do their chores, but we’ll get there.

One of the things that’s helping to motivate them is that we started choosing a worker of the week–someone who goes above and beyond to either take care of themselves or take care of the family. The first winner was my 6-year-old, who surprised us by tidying up the basement and his room because he was so excited his cousins were coming. For the award, I found a trophy at Target that has a dry-erase plate on the front, so you can change out the name. Then I just stuck a peppermint patty in it. He was so thrilled to be the first winner, he gave a speech and everything. I’m hoping that his enthusiasm encourages the other kids to be excited enough about it to put in a little extra effort. D

Music

In the music department, we’ve started a new instrument. Abel now plays the violin. He’s super excited about it, so it will be fun to see him improve. It’s been much less annoying than I thought it would to have a beginning violist scratching around.

Jonas has been mostly teaching himself guitar since Covid stopped his lessons, but we’ve found a great new teacher and he’s super excited about it.

The other three are still doing piano, and I’m also teaching one student who homeschools, so I can teach while my kids are in school. I’ve always loved teaching piano. I’ve been trying a different approach with Miles and Claire lately, where I have them split their practicing into thirds, based on the three skills I care most about: sight-reading, working on a project song, and playing by ear or with a chord chart.

For a practice incentive, lately I’ve been buying Jolly Ranchers or other hard candy that they can suck on while practicing, a sneaky little Pavlovian experiment to give them pleasant associations with practicing.

We performed at retirement home in December, and plan to go back every month or two, so the kids have a place to perform and a deadline for getting their songs down. We mix in songs with their instruments and singing.

Christmas

That Christmas program at the retirement home was definitely a highlight of the Christmas season, partly because I loved having the kids all practice their music to prepare. I cut a lot of corners this year, trying to simplify, but I realized that music is something I never want to simplify. I love singing music with church choirs and with my family around Christmastime.

I accidentally simplified our Christmas lights this year because our house painters took down the hooks we used to use. By the time I figured out what we wanted to do and ordered what we needed, it was just 2 weeks before Christmas, and I wasn’t going to put them up just to take them right down. I thought this would be kind of liberating, not to have deal with the lights, but honestly, I just felt really grinchy and like we were not fully participating. So next year, I’ll get the ladder out and put up the lights again.

Something I thought would be fun but turned out not to be, was doing the 12 days of Christmas for a family. I loved thinking of the gifts and the idea of it, but I realized I do not have the logistical bandwidth in December to make sure all the presents were wrapped and to deliver them 12 nights in a row. A few nights in, my kids got tired of helping with the drop off, and by the end it was just me, remembering way too late at night that we hadn’t dropped it off, and sneaking it onto their porch. I hope the family enjoyed them, but next year, we’ll choose a different way to serve another family.

It’s weird, but this is also the first year we drove around specifically to see the neighborhood Christmasa lights. Especially ironic since it’s the year I didn’t put any up. The HOA puts together a great list of the really decked out houses, and we had so much fun singing and being amazed at the great lengths some of these families go to with their Christmas lights. We had no idea how extreme, and they’ve been there all along.

Otherwise, our Christmas traditions stayed much the same as usual.

 Tech

So let’s jump right in to some tech talk. The month of December was a bit of a tech free-for all in our family. In fact, it really started in November when we started having network problems and I couldn’t use Circle to control our TVs. We’ve used Circle, a parental control device, for several years now. It basically allows me to control the WiFi in our house—filtering content for specific kids and devices and setting time limits. When it’s working, I can pause all of the TVs until chores and homework is done, and set bedtimes, etc.

When the network went wacko and I couldn’t use Circle, TV kind of became the default when the kids got home from school, and then I would get busy making dinner and helping one or the other with homework or music, and suddenly realized that my six-year-old had watched two hours of cartoons on a school night.

My kids were loving it. One son decided to rewatch his favorite show, Psych. As you heard earlier, my daughter decided to become an honorary member of the Brady family. My oldest watched The Office. Others spent hours playing Minecraft on our computers.

I’m exaggerating a bit. It’s not all they did. But it was more than I was comfortable with.

Screentime had become the default activity, and I do not like defaults.

We eventually were able to get the network fixed, but they definitely still wanted more screen time and it became more of a battle.

Then began the Great Xbox campaign. Somehow, we had gotten to the point where we had a 16-year-old son, without giving in and buying a game console. The kids have played Minecraft on our computers for years, so we weren’t completely game free, but no console. We tried to convince our oldest son that it would be so cool and unique if he could say at high school graduation that he had made it through his entire childhood with no console—but he wasn’t buying it.

And so, in the spirit of experimentation, and with all sorts of promises from the kids about setting boundaries, we caved, and decided they could get an Xbox for Christmas.

Big surprise, the first boundaries my kids wanted to set were none. I decided to let them try this during the second week of winter break. The kids were excited about their new Xbox, it was a vacation, and I just let them enjoy it. They loved it as much as I thought they would. I actually liked it a little more than I thought I would. They were having so much fun together, and doing a pretty good job of sharing. I’d hear the laughter coming from the basement, and smile. I decided this Xbox wouldn’t be so bad, and would even help me teach them some time management skills.

I took them up skiing on Monday, January 3, the day before school started back up, and started phase 1 of a little time management lesson. We listened to Laura Vanderkam’s Ted Talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time. At her suggestion, we did this exercise where you imagine you’re writing next year’s Christmas card, and we talked about what we wanted to accomplish by the end of the year and how we wanted to spend our time. There was a lot of silliness and fun, but we also talked about real stuff we wanted to do. I didn’t even mention video games.

Then school—and reality—hit. The first week, I said they could still play any time they wanted, as long as homework, kitchen jobs, music practice, exercise, and one of their weekly chores was done. It was awesome at first. They did such a good job of getting their chores and homework done. They were proving they could handle it. But by week two, the honeymoon was over. They were sneaking down to play before they got anything done, and fighting over Xbox time. As for me, I now had another thing to monitor. I started to hate the Xbox as much as I thought I would. When Saturday came around, it was all they wanted to do.

That Sunday, we had part two of that family meeting I started on the ski trip. where I gave them each a pile of 168 beans—one bean for every hour of the week—inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s book 168 Hours.

It was actually a much better idea in my head. It was quite tedious counting out that many beans, even with their help, and they got all over the place. But the idea was that they could get a visual of how much time they spend doing different things during the week. By the time we accounted for sleep and school, there weren’t many beans left. They thought about how much time homework and instruments and exercise would take, plus church activities and about 4 hours a week at the climbing gym, and suddenly there was very little time left over. Then we looked at their average screentime for the week, and it just didn’t add up.

Luckily, one of my sons was smart enough to find us a free pie chart app which was much more user friendly than the beans to help us visualize the time we have each week, so I recommend doing that if you want to do this exercise.

I told them they had one more chance to have Xbox during the week. It did go a little better, but it was still really annoying, with skirmishes over who got to pick the game, and lots of fudging about homework and chores being done. Several days, I hid the controllers, and didn’t hand them over until I had inspected all of their work, but that was pretty annoying too.

That Sunday, I tried a new experiment. I printed out a signup sheet with 1 hour slots, and told them they could each be in charge of the tv for an hour. The problem with that was that things just come up. Some kids’ time started later than expected and then got cut off for dinner, or bedtime, etc. And again, it was one more thing to manage.

So this week, I get to pick the experiment. I’ve finally figured out the Xbox parental controls—I think—and I restricted them to weekends only. We’re still doing teen time, where the middle school and high schoolers stay up a little later and watch or play something while I put the littles to bed, so I can give them bonus time if they’ve got their stuff done by then.

Of course they’re not happy about this week’s experiment, but I’m quite excited to see how the week goes. After this week, we’ll have another family meeting to evaluate all the different experiments and try to firm up our Xbox, phone, and tv boundaries. Most of these will be family boundaries, but it’s pretty tricky with the age ranges from 6 to 16. So we also have to customize the rules a little bit.

Do I regret buying the Xbox? Yes. I knew I would. It’s definitely created more work for me, wasted a lot of my kids’ time, and caused some fights. Do I also think it’s probably a good way to teach my kids about boundaries, time management, and self control? Also yes. So we’ll keep working on it and keep you updated. It’s hard work!

Business

The last thing I want to talk about is some experiments I’m doing with How She Moms. My favorite part about doing this podcast is interviewing and meeting so many wonderful people, being able to write so much, and just the whole craft of putting episodes together. I love the audio side of it, and being able to incorporate so many voices, ideas, and stories. It’s just a really fun medium, even better than just writing itself.

What I don’t love and what I’m not very good at is the business and marketing side of things. Now that I’ve got the technical podcasting stuff figured out and I have a good writing and interviewing system down, it’s time to focus on learning the other aspects of running a podcast. So I’ll be doing lots of experiments to grow my audience and sell some resources.

One experiment that I’m really excited about was that I hired a fantastic Web designer, Erika Christiansen of It’s So Design to entirely revamp my Web site. Now that I have such a big catalog of episodes on so many topics, I wanted a place where you could go with a parenting problem and be able to find an answer quickly. Right off the bat, you can see a ton of topics you can click on and link to episodes and other resources. Then we’ve created some collections of episodes, like the most popular episodes, series of episodes that go together, etc. I’m hoping this will make my back episodes much more accessible and helpful.

My other big project was releasing my new course at the beginning of this month, called How She Shares Family Work, in episodes 81 and 82. Since I’m still working on growing my audience, I decided to make the course free and charge for the charts that go with it, designed by my talented graphic designer, Mackenzie Carlisle of Carlisle Creations. Not sure if that was a great move, but so far I’ve sold a few. If you are one of my listeners who bought them, thanks so much! If you’ve been considering it, I really do think you’ll love them, as a way to help teach your kids responsibility, divide labor in your household, and make invisible work visible. I’ve been tweaking them for my own family for many years, and I love the way they’ve finally evolved.

This new course is a strategic level course that really gives an overview of everything that goes into managing a home and family. I’ll use this course as the basis to create a bunch of other courses that drill down to the tactical and logistical level of creating systems. In fact, I’ve already released worshops on laundry and meal planning, which, for now at least, you can also access for free while I figure everything out. You can also buy the workbooks that go along with each course, which I think are really helpful.

I’d love to hear any feedback on the courses, or about courses you wish I would write. You can always email me at whitney@howshemoms.

Mostly, I just want to be able to keep creating this podcast and learning from this great community of moms.