The Family Lab: Experiments in Parenting and Home Management

My friends Callie Crum and Lanae Jones join me to talk about how to challenge our kids to try new things and get out of their comfort zones--even deliberately putting them in tough situations. The goal is that they will learn how rewarding it is to do hard things and ultimately choose it for themselves. They'll decide to tackle a big project, do something that scares them, take a hard class, train for a race, or power through a difficult trial.  

In some ways, this podcast episode saved my life. It was the last podcast interview I did before my rock-climbing accident, and I used it as a lifeline during my recovery. Hopefully your versions of survival mode are not as extreme as mine, but this episode is a blueprint for the continuous cycle from surviving to reentry to normalization to exploring to thriving. This is a re-edit, now with video.  You can find more from Jessica Jackson at thrivinginmotherhood.com 

Five experiments to help you organize your to-do list, focus on the task at hand, and get things done! To follow along in the Family Lab app, try it free for a month at familylab.lovable.app.  

A quarterly update on the experiments we've been trying in the Archibald home, with guest Andi Smiley to share her own summer experiments with her kids (5,7, and 9). We talk about experiments - and the lack thereof—eating in while on vacation, road tripping, chores, finding each kid's currency, audiobooks, and pushing ourselves to try scary new things.   Andi hosts her own podcast, The Friendy Podcast Guide, to help women create, launch, and grow their podcasts. 

I did a scary thing and entered a podcast competition for a show I love, Twenty Thousand Hertz. I didn't win, but I wanted to put this out into the world anyway! Do something that scares you (at least a little bit) today!

I made an app! This summer I organized all of our family systems and organization into one app to help teach my kids skills, manage our home, distribute labor, and keep track of fun things like traditions, favorite things, and bucket lists. In this episode I talk about how we run our home and how this app reflects our evolving systems and routines.     You can sign up for a free month at https://familylab.lovable.app. After that month, it's $3 a month. 

Motherhood is a team sport. We need coaches, heroes, teammates, both in the game and on the bench, ready to come in. In this episode, I share lessons from some of my earliest motherhood mentors, from how to pursue your passions to how to keep kids from making such a mess.  

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. 

Everything is more fun with a game—even household chores. I've always invented cleaning games, with my siblings, for myself, and with my own kids. So I thought I'd share my Top 20.  

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.