Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 78 | How Can You Rest with Young Kids?

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Ep. 78 | How Can You Rest with Young Kids? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Man, I cannot emphasize enough the critical nature of training your kids for those two kind of rest periods. Hey, guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 0:32
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Today is a Q&A for 5-Minute Fatherhood. And the question is, how can you rest or how to rest with young kids? This one's important for two reasons. One, we talk a lot about rest on family teams, on 5-Minute Fatherhood, on homeroom, on everything you see from us. Crafting a rest work rhythm is deeply important for a million different reasons. But then the inevitable question is, how do you do that with young kids? And my short answer is, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out.
• 0:59
  because it's not very restful when you want to sit down and read a book and maybe have a nice little drink and do this and then you literally have kids climbing on your head breaking your neck you have to go to the chiropractor the next day they're yelling they're screaming etc now of course that's just a joke but it is something that we do have to practice and that's what me and Alyssa have realized is it's not like here's what I'll say before I asked Jeremy and want to hear Jeremy's answer because like I said I actually don't know but one thing I'll say that I've we have learned is it doesn't go well if you kind of have this weird feeling
• 1:27
  fantasized version of rest. Meaning like if you kind of have this ideal of like, it's going to just be perfect and ideal and butterflies and quiet. And then it doesn't turn into that because then you usually get angry and frustrated and intense, et cetera. When in reality, it's like, no, no, what is restful? What we've had to learn is like, we actually have to train that direction. We have to train towards a restful moment or a restful day.
• 1:50
  We have to train towards giving them the tools to have quiet time, individual time so that we can as well. And so, yeah, there's a couple other different things, but I would say that is the first one is it's not going to happen by accident. You have to train towards time of rest. And it's deeply important for you to be able to breathe, to be able to have margin, to be able to fill up.
• 2:12
  when you have little kids. And so we've done that with our sleep schedules. You guys know, we've talked about before we do that with nap time and we do that with some kind of structured quiet time as well. But yeah, Jeremy, what would you say to this?
• 2:22
  Yeah, I totally agree. I think you guys need to understand kind of how much energy you have. So for April and I, we're both very introverted. We have five kids. So for us, it was absolutely critical that we trained our kids to be able to rest during these two periods of the day. One was in the kind of early afternoon, and then obviously one was their bedtime, where they were able to stay in bed and really give us time in the evening.
• 2:48
  And depending on where you're at from an energy perspective, I know that some of you guys are really high energy people and can just play around with your kids a lot. Some of you guys are low energy people when it comes to, like you really need to be recharged. You need seasons and times of real rest. And so wherever you're at in that spectrum, especially if you're kind of like where April and I are at,
• 3:05
  man, I cannot emphasize enough the critical nature of training your kids for those two kind of rest periods. And a lot of times even we tell a lot of parents are like, well, my kids stopped napping when they were three years old. It's okay to train your kids to have like an hour of R&R, right? And like rest and relaxation, that can take a lot of training and it's worth it. And so
• 3:27
  We talk a lot about how to train kids in the skill of fatherhood. A lot of times this does not happen by accident, and so there are tools you need to develop. We use something called Blanket Time, which we talk a lot about in 31 Creative Ways to Build a Family Team, but basically we created a time where…
• 3:46
  where we would slowly train our kids to play quietly with a few toys, even at two or three years old, when we put down this blanket to give us this time of peace. And so we really had these three tools. We trained our kids to relax in the middle of the day for at least an hour or two, and oftentimes they just napped during that time, but to stay in that quiet space.
• 4:05
  to really stay in their beds and to go to bed. That takes training. Don't think that's going to happen immediately. That's going to be a challenge for a lot of kids. And then the third one is anytime we needed like just 15 minutes of just peace in the house, we would use the blanket time tool for that. So it takes tools. It takes training. And if this is a big deal for you, if you find that you're just tapping out and getting really frustrated and finding resources,
• 4:31
  that the low energy is really taking over your home, taking over your parenting, then redirect a lot of that attention from surviving and just sort of getting through the day to training your kids during certain periods to know how to rest and relax. And I know that's a process and that's hard and kids are different, but that's definitely one way to think about how to really make sure that you're getting some of the rest that you need.
• 4:54
  Totally. And one last thing I'll say is this, guys, that you have to, it's worth it. This one is one of the biggest ROIs, I think, of crafting a home that is peaceful, crafting a home that is restful. Now still it's active and still there's mission and we're doing things, etc. But a peaceful community.
• 5:10
  And here's the thing. Peace doesn't happen by the absence of conflict. But even in Scripture, we see, right, with chaos and the primordial waters over the very first verse of Scripture, and then God has to actively create order and peace and shalom and blessing. So you kind of have to actively create it. And it takes that mentality and it takes that vision rather than just thinking it's going to happen by accident or reactionary by just saying, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. You have to craft it and go towards it. But we promise you guys, it is worth it.
• 5:39
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