May 13, 2025 • 22 mins
🎙️ TMIT 06: The Most Important Thing About Family Space (with Experiment Update)
“A room is only as good as you feel when you’re in it.” — Philip Johnson
What makes a home nourishing to its members? In this episode, we explore how space shapes family connection, creativity, and calm.
Drawing on research from the Journal of Environmental Psychology, we discuss why perceived spaciousness matters more than square footage, and how small, intentional changes can transform how your home functions emotionally.
TMIT about Family Space: How your home feels to your family matters more than what it looks like or how big it is. If you can think through the Rhythms and Relationships in your home, you can make intentional areas to fit your family's needs.
We introduce a new 3x3 Family Space Matrix—a tool for evaluating your home across three Rhythms (Create, Rest, Play) and three Relationship modes (Individual, Small Group, Whole Family).
Then we take stock of our own home: what’s working, what’s missing, and what we’re experimenting with next.
We also discuss:
- How soft flooring, turf, and gym mats changed our family’s use of space
- The excitement of kids having their own “create + display” zones
- Where we can improve our individual rhythms
🔗 Matrix Tool → TMIT 06: Family Space Matrix
🧠Research Mentioned → Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2018 study on perceived space & family functioning
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to The Most Important Thing.
I'm Danielle DeMarco Neufeld. And I'm Greg Neufeld, and
together we're exploring how ambitious busy families can
build culture at home. Because after all, family is the
most important thing. Hi, Greg.
Hey, hey. So we did something crazy this
weekend. We sure did.
(00:20):
We switched our family room in our dining room.
That's right. To allow for more flow between
the rooms. That's right, I've got the
battle scars to prove it. Yeah, unfortunately the
chandelier and Greg had quite a collision on his bald head.
That's right, it left a nice mark that I will forever
remember as episode 6. Yeah, Wow.
(00:44):
Episode 6 All right, so today we're talking about family
space. So a 2018 study published in the
Journal of Environmental Psychology found that family's
perceptions of spaciousness or crowding in their home had a
stronger impact on family functioning than the homes
actual physical characteristics like square footage or layouts.
(01:06):
Specifically, feeling crowded even in a large space was linked
to more conflict and reduced emotional closeness, while
feelings of spaciousness, even in a smaller home was linked to
better communication, cooperation, and warmth.
These effects held true even after controlling for income,
family size, and housing type. So it's the feeling.
(01:30):
Yeah, and that through intentional design, families can
experience more peace and connection even in modest or
shared spaces. You don't have to change the
square footage to shape perception.
Cool. Where I'm coming out is that the
most important thing about family space is to consider
(01:50):
rhythms and relationships. And so when thinking about these
two Rs, I asked myself 2 questions.
What are the core rhythms our family needs space for?
And what are the relationships or connection types that are
important to our family? And so honestly, I made a list
of a bunch of things and a bunchof different types of
connections. But to keep it simple, after
(02:13):
talking with you, we came up with three in each create, rest,
and play as far as the rhythms and individual pair or small
group and whole family for the types of connections.
And so the result is a three by three matrix that I'm happy to
(02:33):
share in the show notes. And I'd like to think through
them today with you so that we can figure out what we're doing
well and where we may have some gaps and we can focus our
experiments on that. How does that sound?
That sounds great. I think this is a good matrix
for us to both focus on what we're doing well, as you say,
(02:53):
and where we can improve. So the Ted Talk version of this
is everyone should be thinking about their own space and about
the space that they occupy with others from the family and how
to design for those in isolation.
So you make sure that you have your own space.
You make sure that you and I have a space and you make sure
(03:16):
that when you're spending time, let's say with Jade on her
reading, that you guys have a nice space that is good for that
activity. Is that kind of what you're
saying here? Absolutely, that's the idea.
So if it works for you, let's take a look through the matrix
because I think there are quite a few things that we're doing
well, but there are also some spots where I think we've had
(03:39):
blind spots and where I think a couple of small changes can make
a really big difference. And as I mentioned, I'll post a
link to the matrix in the show notes.
But I do think this will look different for every family,
though I'm hoping that it can bea launchpad for conversations.
So starting with the things thatwe do well play, I think that we
(04:01):
have really great spaces for whole family, small group and
individual play right outside, inside.
Now, as we discussed last episode, there's more work to do
to get you more involved in the play.
So dads out there, especially flooring, I have found unlocks
play in our playroom. The kids have very soft padded
(04:26):
flooring, which means that they can do lots of gymnastics on the
aerial swing and fall off or andnot really hurt themselves too
badly or roughhouse. And that's really great.
And in our garage we put down gym matting like 1 inch rubber
industrial grade mats for working out.
But it also turned the space into a play space for the kids
(04:50):
to do workouts with us and to play around.
So it's actually turned into another room for us.
And then out front we changed the surface from we live in
Florida where the grass is not very nice.
It's kind of thick and muddy andwe replaced it with turf and now
we're out there all the time. So space, I think especially
when it comes to play, you can change the flooring and you
(05:12):
change your world. Absolutely.
Rest is also a place where I think we're doing pretty well.
We have quite a few opportunities both upstairs and
downstairs for soft, cozy spaces.
That said, one thing that came up this weekend during our
family meeting, we realized thatwe hadn't necessarily delineated
(05:36):
appropriate quiet corners. We hadn't found a space
downstairs for the quiet corner.Really.
We know that you can always go upstairs into your bedroom and
into your bed specifically to calm down, but where else could
we make space for rest, both when you just need a break and
also when you need to cool off? And so we identified 3 spaces
(05:57):
downstairs, which I think is keybecause there are three people
that often get activated. That's the children, in case you
were wondering. So we identified 3 quiet corners
or three places to calm down in soft space alone.
(06:18):
And then finally, let's talk about create.
Great. So create, what does that really
mean? Work focus, wonder areas where
individuals and groups can open their minds.
So I think that we've done a great job in creating shared
(06:42):
spaces to create, particularly around art projects.
But individual places for creation as far as having your
own space to both work and display those creations feels
like something that has been lacking.
(07:04):
Yeah, that makes sense. And so one of the things the
kids and I did this weekend was we created space in the playroom
for each of them to display their work.
And this is not Hey mom, displaymy artwork for a week and then
(07:25):
go shove it in a drawer somewhere or hopefully sneak it
away into the trash. There is a dedicated space for
each person which they personalized.
Maverick put up a picture of himself hugging a Lego guy, Jade
put one of her creations from school and Hunter wrote keep out
don't touch all over the place on hers and immediately their
(07:47):
personalities came out. Mavericks is a complete mess,
Jade's involves mostly soft things in a ball, and Hunters is
a magical display filled with a ton of gemstones.
Yep, they really see themselves.And the first thing they did
this morning when our nanny camein was ask her to come see their
(08:08):
spaces. Yeah, they were very proud of
it. Yeah.
So thank you for giving them that.
Space. Absolutely.
So it's create, rest and play. And you're saying that create
has been lacking, especially at the individual level for our
kids with. Is that also true for us?
That's a really great point, actually.
I think it's probably also true that we've neglected our office
(08:31):
a bit. You and I love working together,
so it doesn't necessarily mattertoo much what the space looks
like. But I think that if we put some
time and effort into our individual spaces and our shared
space for work that we will alsosee the benefits.
So maybe we can add that to our experiment as well.
(08:52):
Great. So to recap that, the most
important thing about space is that how your home feels to your
family matters more than what itlooks like or how big it is.
If you can think through the rhythms and relationships in
your home, you can make intentional areas to fit your
(09:12):
family's needs. Yeah, absolutely.
And it doesn't mean a full renovation.
It can be as simple as shifting a chair or repurposing a corner
or just rethinking how you use aroom.
What really matters is that the space works for your family's
actual life, not just the ideal version.
For us, it's been about asking, is this space helping or
hindering the life that we want to live?
(09:34):
Yeah, I think that thinking through what the core rhythms
that your family needs space forand what types of relationships
exist in your home is a personalexperiment.
And for us, we've set it down asplay, rest and create individual
pairs in small groups and whole family.
(09:55):
And just to make sure that we'vethought about that, we know
where our strengths lie and where we can experiment.
And to me, I think that actuallyhaving a kitchen table is a
really big deal. It's the first time that we've
had a kitchen table here since we moved into the home.
So that's part of the experimentis seeing how that works out and
(10:19):
then setting aside the individual spaces for our
children and for ourselves for create Both create in the sense
of where you can keep your worksin progress so that they don't
get ruined by other siblings or thrown away by a mom that hates
clutter, and where you can display your work.
(10:39):
That's right. So what other experiments are we
willing to run when it comes to being intentional around our
family space? Yeah.
You know, I think it's about noticing friction because we do
a really good job of putting together lists of someday
projects and executing on them in the order that they need to
happen. But that's usually based around
(11:02):
clutter. It hasn't been until recently
about how to free up space for this growing family.
And I think that just noticing friction about spaces and how it
can free up places to create rest or play is the right way to
think about it going forward. Great.
And personally, I put the cart before the horse of it here on
this one and already started theexperiments before we talked
(11:24):
about it because I just couldn'twait this past weekend.
But for me, it comes back to oneof these overarching goals that
we have, or at least that I havefor our family right now, which
is moving from this top down structure to 1 where everyone
has a voice. And so giving our children their
own spaces to create and to display their creations is a
(11:48):
game changer downstairs. It's something new that I think
is really worth experimenting with, and I look forward to
reporting back on how that goes.Me too, and I'm going to find a
place to tack up all the emails that I'm proud of on the wall.
Look at this one. Did you see this e-mail?
Look how good I wrote it. Sweet.
(12:12):
All right, All right. Love you goosy.
Love you Goosy, and now it's time for our experiment update,
where we recap what we've tried at home, how it worked or
didn't, and what we're tweaking next.
All right. Hi Goosey.
Hi Goosey. It's a new week and we've tried
some things. We sure have.
(12:32):
How did you think our second family meeting went?
I thought it went really well. How did you think it went?
Greatly improved, yeah. My biggest take away was it
feels so nice when we are all sitting down.
It does. They do still love the Saturday
voting and that the kids are coming up with lots of ideas.
I love that about things they want to learn about.
(12:54):
This week they came up with fairies, unicorns, electricity,
how magic works, and Dragons waswhat ultimately won.
So I did my best to find in Origins of Dragons video, which
is how I thought we could learn about.
Dragons, it was a great video. But they thought it was boring.
I'm not sure that YouTube breaksare a good way to teach.
(13:16):
Maybe we just do GBT bullet points or something like that.
I don't know more to be revealed.
On the flip side, I thought thatthe problem to solve went super
well. Hunter came up with the idea,
building upon my idea of hittingand biting.
She said why don't we do all of it?
Hitting, biting, name calling, just doing mean things, and
(13:39):
that's the one that got chosen. And so we were able to really
hear everyone's voice around howit feels to be hurt and talking
about and reflecting upon when we say mean things, how it makes
the other person feel was reallygreat.
Then also coming up with an agreement around what are our
(14:01):
options instead of hurting another person with our words or
with our hands. And you had the great innovation
within our agreement of a slogantied to our family value of the
month being noble. Safe hands.
Strong hearts and we made that into a little call in response
(14:22):
array. Yeah, the innovation there was
just me typing into Chachi BT talking about this, the topic
that's going on. I got a list of eight ideas and
I thought the two of them were really good.
One was this slogan, and I thought that would work for our
family because we're pretty big on things like that.
(14:43):
And then the other was this ideaof a do over where if you are an
offender, if you're hitting or biting or being mean, you can
pause, take a do over and then that will allow you to
communicate better. Otherwise, you need to take some
space and some time for yourself.
And then I had come prepared with my ideas from traditional
(15:05):
parenting books. I would say yes, as far as tell
me with your words how you feel,show me with a doll, draw me a
picture, etcetera. But so I guess the long and the
short of it is that we came up with a series of traditional and
untraditional methods. So you, you were great.
I think that my take away here is you're always great in being
(15:28):
prepared and when it comes to things that aren't necessarily
landing for our kids. I think my job is because I'm
not never going to show up as prepared, but it is to be try to
be creative in the moment to figure out how we can leave with
a solution. Totally, I just love coming into
the week with something proactive that we can do to help
(15:49):
our family. Yeah.
And thanks again for recapping it all this morning.
I think that's really important too.
It's the Monday morning. Well, I wrote it down again,
right? I wrote it down.
The learnings from this week's family meeting along with the
ideas for next week's family meeting.
I didn't write anything about Dragons because that really
didn't didn't flow. So OK, to recap, second meeting
(16:14):
was much better than the first. Yes, sitting down, facing each
other, big improvement. Afternoons, huge improvement.
Didn't feel rushed. Everybody was looking forward to
it. I don't know if we mentioned
last time, but Hunter has been leading us in a mindful minute.
I think that's an important practice.
I feel like we are improving in our compliments and
(16:37):
appreciation. We did get full participation
this time. The learnings still want want
not so great. That's the really the weakest
part of the meeting. But the problem solving felt
strong, strong to very strong. And the fact that we were able
to make an agreement. This was the on the topic of
(16:58):
hitting, biting and saying mean things.
And not just make that agreementbut reiterate it.
This morning really felt like building family culture.
It did. It really did.
OK. So progress, significant
(17:18):
progress. We will.
We'll keep it going. Yeah, next Sunday afternoon.
Next Sunday afternoon I'm wondering if we vote on the
learning and then one of us has to own that learning and teach
it to the rest of the group. Oh, interesting.
Meaning like hunter could go to school and say hey I need to
learn about Dragons. Or could it be more hands on
(17:40):
like I want to learn how to build a paper airplane?
Sure, I will suggest next week something hands on.
Sounds good. OK, family stories.
We have some updates here as well.
We do. We do.
Where do you want to start? Well, you came up with a
birthday trivia game for me, which I thought was great and
something we wouldn't have done prior to this experiment.
(18:01):
That was fun. So on the topic of family
stories, it happened to be Danielle's birthday and I came
up with a little game that was Danielle Trivia.
The idea being that we could asksome questions to everybody in
the room and whoever got it closest was right and Daniel was
obviously there to be the judge.So it's a fun little game.
We can play it for anyone's birthday or any celebration.
(18:23):
Anyone can make this up as they go, and I thought that it was a
great way to share some family stories in the process.
Yeah, I thought it was a nice way for me to reflect and for
you all to get to know me a little better.
Like, what did I want to be whenI was seven years old?
A. Veterinarian.
Mm hmm. Or what's my favorite trait of a
friend? Commutative.
(18:44):
That's right. Yeah.
So I felt it like a nice way to honor me in a playful manner.
Sure. Did and then we watched some
home videos. Yeah, so then for Mother's Day
we watched some home videos and I even got out my elementary
school yearbooks. 2 things we have never done before.
Never, and I don't think we would have ever thought to do
had we not done an episode on Family Stories.
(19:07):
Yeah, no, I thought it was great.
And I'm also inspired to do somemore creative activities around
the family story and things thatinvolved photos, and we'll get
to that. Yeah, the videos really built
upon some of the stories that I had already talked to them
about. So we had talked about some of
my birthday's growing up, and then to watch them in action.
So cool. 1 Memory is a really funny thing because there were
(19:29):
definitely parts that I misremembered which Hunter was
big to call me out on and Jade was just confused.
But they all loved watching little me and telling me how
cute I was. It was weird but in a great way.
I really spoke to this intergenerational self for them
to see me as a little kid, especially with my mother and
(19:54):
father who are their grandparents.
And then I asked them, how do you think it's going to feel
when you grow up if you have kids?
To watch you on the videos that we take of you and you can see
their little brains working figuring that out.
It was very cute. And this morning they asked me
when we could watch more. So I think it was a success.
(20:15):
It was a success and $13 on Amazon you can buy a DVD player
so they still exist. Yeah, one of my relatives had
kindly put all of our home videos on 2 DVDs, so we used
that. And then we also have an update
on family values. So I think on the episode itself
we said we were going to pick two, but we ultimately ended up
(20:38):
just choosing one for the month.One a month.
Feels good and so we're startingwith Noble, which is the end in
Neufeld and we've done a couple things so far.
We started that Kotcha jar and as Greg had guessed, we
immediately had about 6 or 7 pieces of paper in there.
All the things and some of them were confused.
(21:00):
Jade was confused and thought ifshe did a bunch of noble acts in
a row we would watch a movie immediately.
It was a quid pro quo mentality that was going on.
She was like, but I did all those things for you.
Can we watch a movie? No.
Yeah. Why did I do all those things?
We said we didn't want to put a number on it, but we said after
we have critical mass in the Kocha jar, we can watch a movie.
(21:21):
Yeah. We need like a kocha text.
Yeah, anyway, so the Kocha Jar is, it's catching on, if you
will. And then I've been playing
around with chat TPT before bedtime to try to come up with
some short stories based on either Noble Fables or tonight
I'm going to try historical figures.
(21:43):
Cool. Yeah, See if we can learn a
little bit about history in the same way.
Love it. It's so cute.
Just the idea that you're showing up with like book ending
the day, you know? It takes about 90 seconds it.
Really does so. They're not perfect stories by
any means, but it's a quick story.
We read books at night anyway, so why not start with a little
(22:05):
story about something that's super relevant to us?
That's right. I think that's it, Greg.
I think that's it. I think those are enough
experiments for now. We'll have an update on family
meals next week and family play as well.
That's right, family play as well.
(22:26):
OK, so stay tuned hoe everybody has a great week.
All right, see ya.
Welcome to The Most Important Thing.
I'm Danielle DeMarco Neufeld. And I'm Greg Neufeld, and
together we're exploring how ambitious busy families can
build culture at home. Because after all, family is the
most important thing. Hi, Greg.
Hey, hey. So we did something crazy this
weekend. We sure did.
(00:20):
We switched our family room in our dining room.
That's right. To allow for more flow between
the rooms. That's right, I've got the
battle scars to prove it. Yeah, unfortunately the
chandelier and Greg had quite a collision on his bald head.
That's right, it left a nice mark that I will forever
remember as episode 6. Yeah, Wow.
(00:44):
Episode 6 All right, so today we're talking about family
space. So a 2018 study published in the
Journal of Environmental Psychology found that family's
perceptions of spaciousness or crowding in their home had a
stronger impact on family functioning than the homes
actual physical characteristics like square footage or layouts.
(01:06):
Specifically, feeling crowded even in a large space was linked
to more conflict and reduced emotional closeness, while
feelings of spaciousness, even in a smaller home was linked to
better communication, cooperation, and warmth.
These effects held true even after controlling for income,
family size, and housing type. So it's the feeling.
(01:30):
Yeah, and that through intentional design, families can
experience more peace and connection even in modest or
shared spaces. You don't have to change the
square footage to shape perception.
Cool. Where I'm coming out is that the
most important thing about family space is to consider
(01:50):
rhythms and relationships. And so when thinking about these
two Rs, I asked myself 2 questions.
What are the core rhythms our family needs space for?
And what are the relationships or connection types that are
important to our family? And so honestly, I made a list
of a bunch of things and a bunchof different types of
connections. But to keep it simple, after
(02:13):
talking with you, we came up with three in each create, rest,
and play as far as the rhythms and individual pair or small
group and whole family for the types of connections.
And so the result is a three by three matrix that I'm happy to
(02:33):
share in the show notes. And I'd like to think through
them today with you so that we can figure out what we're doing
well and where we may have some gaps and we can focus our
experiments on that. How does that sound?
That sounds great. I think this is a good matrix
for us to both focus on what we're doing well, as you say,
(02:53):
and where we can improve. So the Ted Talk version of this
is everyone should be thinking about their own space and about
the space that they occupy with others from the family and how
to design for those in isolation.
So you make sure that you have your own space.
You make sure that you and I have a space and you make sure
(03:16):
that when you're spending time, let's say with Jade on her
reading, that you guys have a nice space that is good for that
activity. Is that kind of what you're
saying here? Absolutely, that's the idea.
So if it works for you, let's take a look through the matrix
because I think there are quite a few things that we're doing
well, but there are also some spots where I think we've had
(03:39):
blind spots and where I think a couple of small changes can make
a really big difference. And as I mentioned, I'll post a
link to the matrix in the show notes.
But I do think this will look different for every family,
though I'm hoping that it can bea launchpad for conversations.
So starting with the things thatwe do well play, I think that we
(04:01):
have really great spaces for whole family, small group and
individual play right outside, inside.
Now, as we discussed last episode, there's more work to do
to get you more involved in the play.
So dads out there, especially flooring, I have found unlocks
play in our playroom. The kids have very soft padded
(04:26):
flooring, which means that they can do lots of gymnastics on the
aerial swing and fall off or andnot really hurt themselves too
badly or roughhouse. And that's really great.
And in our garage we put down gym matting like 1 inch rubber
industrial grade mats for working out.
But it also turned the space into a play space for the kids
(04:50):
to do workouts with us and to play around.
So it's actually turned into another room for us.
And then out front we changed the surface from we live in
Florida where the grass is not very nice.
It's kind of thick and muddy andwe replaced it with turf and now
we're out there all the time. So space, I think especially
when it comes to play, you can change the flooring and you
(05:12):
change your world. Absolutely.
Rest is also a place where I think we're doing pretty well.
We have quite a few opportunities both upstairs and
downstairs for soft, cozy spaces.
That said, one thing that came up this weekend during our
family meeting, we realized thatwe hadn't necessarily delineated
(05:36):
appropriate quiet corners. We hadn't found a space
downstairs for the quiet corner.Really.
We know that you can always go upstairs into your bedroom and
into your bed specifically to calm down, but where else could
we make space for rest, both when you just need a break and
also when you need to cool off? And so we identified 3 spaces
(05:57):
downstairs, which I think is keybecause there are three people
that often get activated. That's the children, in case you
were wondering. So we identified 3 quiet corners
or three places to calm down in soft space alone.
(06:18):
And then finally, let's talk about create.
Great. So create, what does that really
mean? Work focus, wonder areas where
individuals and groups can open their minds.
So I think that we've done a great job in creating shared
(06:42):
spaces to create, particularly around art projects.
But individual places for creation as far as having your
own space to both work and display those creations feels
like something that has been lacking.
(07:04):
Yeah, that makes sense. And so one of the things the
kids and I did this weekend was we created space in the playroom
for each of them to display their work.
And this is not Hey mom, displaymy artwork for a week and then
(07:25):
go shove it in a drawer somewhere or hopefully sneak it
away into the trash. There is a dedicated space for
each person which they personalized.
Maverick put up a picture of himself hugging a Lego guy, Jade
put one of her creations from school and Hunter wrote keep out
don't touch all over the place on hers and immediately their
(07:47):
personalities came out. Mavericks is a complete mess,
Jade's involves mostly soft things in a ball, and Hunters is
a magical display filled with a ton of gemstones.
Yep, they really see themselves.And the first thing they did
this morning when our nanny camein was ask her to come see their
(08:08):
spaces. Yeah, they were very proud of
it. Yeah.
So thank you for giving them that.
Space. Absolutely.
So it's create, rest and play. And you're saying that create
has been lacking, especially at the individual level for our
kids with. Is that also true for us?
That's a really great point, actually.
I think it's probably also true that we've neglected our office
(08:31):
a bit. You and I love working together,
so it doesn't necessarily mattertoo much what the space looks
like. But I think that if we put some
time and effort into our individual spaces and our shared
space for work that we will alsosee the benefits.
So maybe we can add that to our experiment as well.
(08:52):
Great. So to recap that, the most
important thing about space is that how your home feels to your
family matters more than what itlooks like or how big it is.
If you can think through the rhythms and relationships in
your home, you can make intentional areas to fit your
(09:12):
family's needs. Yeah, absolutely.
And it doesn't mean a full renovation.
It can be as simple as shifting a chair or repurposing a corner
or just rethinking how you use aroom.
What really matters is that the space works for your family's
actual life, not just the ideal version.
For us, it's been about asking, is this space helping or
hindering the life that we want to live?
(09:34):
Yeah, I think that thinking through what the core rhythms
that your family needs space forand what types of relationships
exist in your home is a personalexperiment.
And for us, we've set it down asplay, rest and create individual
pairs in small groups and whole family.
(09:55):
And just to make sure that we'vethought about that, we know
where our strengths lie and where we can experiment.
And to me, I think that actuallyhaving a kitchen table is a
really big deal. It's the first time that we've
had a kitchen table here since we moved into the home.
So that's part of the experimentis seeing how that works out and
(10:19):
then setting aside the individual spaces for our
children and for ourselves for create Both create in the sense
of where you can keep your worksin progress so that they don't
get ruined by other siblings or thrown away by a mom that hates
clutter, and where you can display your work.
(10:39):
That's right. So what other experiments are we
willing to run when it comes to being intentional around our
family space? Yeah.
You know, I think it's about noticing friction because we do
a really good job of putting together lists of someday
projects and executing on them in the order that they need to
happen. But that's usually based around
(11:02):
clutter. It hasn't been until recently
about how to free up space for this growing family.
And I think that just noticing friction about spaces and how it
can free up places to create rest or play is the right way to
think about it going forward. Great.
And personally, I put the cart before the horse of it here on
this one and already started theexperiments before we talked
(11:24):
about it because I just couldn'twait this past weekend.
But for me, it comes back to oneof these overarching goals that
we have, or at least that I havefor our family right now, which
is moving from this top down structure to 1 where everyone
has a voice. And so giving our children their
own spaces to create and to display their creations is a
(11:48):
game changer downstairs. It's something new that I think
is really worth experimenting with, and I look forward to
reporting back on how that goes.Me too, and I'm going to find a
place to tack up all the emails that I'm proud of on the wall.
Look at this one. Did you see this e-mail?
Look how good I wrote it. Sweet.
(12:12):
All right, All right. Love you goosy.
Love you Goosy, and now it's time for our experiment update,
where we recap what we've tried at home, how it worked or
didn't, and what we're tweaking next.
All right. Hi Goosey.
Hi Goosey. It's a new week and we've tried
some things. We sure have.
(12:32):
How did you think our second family meeting went?
I thought it went really well. How did you think it went?
Greatly improved, yeah. My biggest take away was it
feels so nice when we are all sitting down.
It does. They do still love the Saturday
voting and that the kids are coming up with lots of ideas.
I love that about things they want to learn about.
(12:54):
This week they came up with fairies, unicorns, electricity,
how magic works, and Dragons waswhat ultimately won.
So I did my best to find in Origins of Dragons video, which
is how I thought we could learn about.
Dragons, it was a great video. But they thought it was boring.
I'm not sure that YouTube breaksare a good way to teach.
(13:16):
Maybe we just do GBT bullet points or something like that.
I don't know more to be revealed.
On the flip side, I thought thatthe problem to solve went super
well. Hunter came up with the idea,
building upon my idea of hittingand biting.
She said why don't we do all of it?
Hitting, biting, name calling, just doing mean things, and
(13:39):
that's the one that got chosen. And so we were able to really
hear everyone's voice around howit feels to be hurt and talking
about and reflecting upon when we say mean things, how it makes
the other person feel was reallygreat.
Then also coming up with an agreement around what are our
(14:01):
options instead of hurting another person with our words or
with our hands. And you had the great innovation
within our agreement of a slogantied to our family value of the
month being noble. Safe hands.
Strong hearts and we made that into a little call in response
(14:22):
array. Yeah, the innovation there was
just me typing into Chachi BT talking about this, the topic
that's going on. I got a list of eight ideas and
I thought the two of them were really good.
One was this slogan, and I thought that would work for our
family because we're pretty big on things like that.
(14:43):
And then the other was this ideaof a do over where if you are an
offender, if you're hitting or biting or being mean, you can
pause, take a do over and then that will allow you to
communicate better. Otherwise, you need to take some
space and some time for yourself.
And then I had come prepared with my ideas from traditional
(15:05):
parenting books. I would say yes, as far as tell
me with your words how you feel,show me with a doll, draw me a
picture, etcetera. But so I guess the long and the
short of it is that we came up with a series of traditional and
untraditional methods. So you, you were great.
I think that my take away here is you're always great in being
(15:28):
prepared and when it comes to things that aren't necessarily
landing for our kids. I think my job is because I'm
not never going to show up as prepared, but it is to be try to
be creative in the moment to figure out how we can leave with
a solution. Totally, I just love coming into
the week with something proactive that we can do to help
(15:49):
our family. Yeah.
And thanks again for recapping it all this morning.
I think that's really important too.
It's the Monday morning. Well, I wrote it down again,
right? I wrote it down.
The learnings from this week's family meeting along with the
ideas for next week's family meeting.
I didn't write anything about Dragons because that really
didn't didn't flow. So OK, to recap, second meeting
(16:14):
was much better than the first. Yes, sitting down, facing each
other, big improvement. Afternoons, huge improvement.
Didn't feel rushed. Everybody was looking forward to
it. I don't know if we mentioned
last time, but Hunter has been leading us in a mindful minute.
I think that's an important practice.
I feel like we are improving in our compliments and
(16:37):
appreciation. We did get full participation
this time. The learnings still want want
not so great. That's the really the weakest
part of the meeting. But the problem solving felt
strong, strong to very strong. And the fact that we were able
to make an agreement. This was the on the topic of
(16:58):
hitting, biting and saying mean things.
And not just make that agreementbut reiterate it.
This morning really felt like building family culture.
It did. It really did.
OK. So progress, significant
(17:18):
progress. We will.
We'll keep it going. Yeah, next Sunday afternoon.
Next Sunday afternoon I'm wondering if we vote on the
learning and then one of us has to own that learning and teach
it to the rest of the group. Oh, interesting.
Meaning like hunter could go to school and say hey I need to
learn about Dragons. Or could it be more hands on
(17:40):
like I want to learn how to build a paper airplane?
Sure, I will suggest next week something hands on.
Sounds good. OK, family stories.
We have some updates here as well.
We do. We do.
Where do you want to start? Well, you came up with a
birthday trivia game for me, which I thought was great and
something we wouldn't have done prior to this experiment.
(18:01):
That was fun. So on the topic of family
stories, it happened to be Danielle's birthday and I came
up with a little game that was Danielle Trivia.
The idea being that we could asksome questions to everybody in
the room and whoever got it closest was right and Daniel was
obviously there to be the judge.So it's a fun little game.
We can play it for anyone's birthday or any celebration.
(18:23):
Anyone can make this up as they go, and I thought that it was a
great way to share some family stories in the process.
Yeah, I thought it was a nice way for me to reflect and for
you all to get to know me a little better.
Like, what did I want to be whenI was seven years old?
A. Veterinarian.
Mm hmm. Or what's my favorite trait of a
friend? Commutative.
(18:44):
That's right. Yeah.
So I felt it like a nice way to honor me in a playful manner.
Sure. Did and then we watched some
home videos. Yeah, so then for Mother's Day
we watched some home videos and I even got out my elementary
school yearbooks. 2 things we have never done before.
Never, and I don't think we would have ever thought to do
had we not done an episode on Family Stories.
(19:07):
Yeah, no, I thought it was great.
And I'm also inspired to do somemore creative activities around
the family story and things thatinvolved photos, and we'll get
to that. Yeah, the videos really built
upon some of the stories that I had already talked to them
about. So we had talked about some of
my birthday's growing up, and then to watch them in action.
So cool. 1 Memory is a really funny thing because there were
(19:29):
definitely parts that I misremembered which Hunter was
big to call me out on and Jade was just confused.
But they all loved watching little me and telling me how
cute I was. It was weird but in a great way.
I really spoke to this intergenerational self for them
to see me as a little kid, especially with my mother and
(19:54):
father who are their grandparents.
And then I asked them, how do you think it's going to feel
when you grow up if you have kids?
To watch you on the videos that we take of you and you can see
their little brains working figuring that out.
It was very cute. And this morning they asked me
when we could watch more. So I think it was a success.
(20:15):
It was a success and $13 on Amazon you can buy a DVD player
so they still exist. Yeah, one of my relatives had
kindly put all of our home videos on 2 DVDs, so we used
that. And then we also have an update
on family values. So I think on the episode itself
we said we were going to pick two, but we ultimately ended up
(20:38):
just choosing one for the month.One a month.
Feels good and so we're startingwith Noble, which is the end in
Neufeld and we've done a couple things so far.
We started that Kotcha jar and as Greg had guessed, we
immediately had about 6 or 7 pieces of paper in there.
All the things and some of them were confused.
(21:00):
Jade was confused and thought ifshe did a bunch of noble acts in
a row we would watch a movie immediately.
It was a quid pro quo mentality that was going on.
She was like, but I did all those things for you.
Can we watch a movie? No.
Yeah. Why did I do all those things?
We said we didn't want to put a number on it, but we said after
we have critical mass in the Kocha jar, we can watch a movie.
(21:21):
Yeah. We need like a kocha text.
Yeah, anyway, so the Kocha Jar is, it's catching on, if you
will. And then I've been playing
around with chat TPT before bedtime to try to come up with
some short stories based on either Noble Fables or tonight
I'm going to try historical figures.
(21:43):
Cool. Yeah, See if we can learn a
little bit about history in the same way.
Love it. It's so cute.
Just the idea that you're showing up with like book ending
the day, you know? It takes about 90 seconds it.
Really does so. They're not perfect stories by
any means, but it's a quick story.
We read books at night anyway, so why not start with a little
(22:05):
story about something that's super relevant to us?
That's right. I think that's it, Greg.
I think that's it. I think those are enough
experiments for now. We'll have an update on family
meals next week and family play as well.
That's right, family play as well.
(22:26):
OK, so stay tuned hoe everybody has a great week.
All right, see ya.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.