Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 264 | How to Keep Your Family's Spirit Up

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Ep. 264 | How to Keep Your Family's Spirit Up · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  When they see the dad leading a themed night, something happens to the family.
• 0:09
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Another episode of 5-Minute Fatherhood. Fun episode for today and a question or how-to is how to keep your family's spirit up. Now, this is deeply important, you know, coming off kind of the crisis or still in the crisis, actually. But wherever you're at in it, knowing that it's the job of a coach to really make sure that they are conjuring up, if there is the right word, or making sure they're keeping a pulse on the family's tone and spirit.
• 0:32
  And we all know what that means, right? You know those days when your kids are down, you know those days when your kids are happy, and you know you probably get more obedience, more joy, more blessing when the kids are doing well, right? Or when the family feels like it has a better tone and spirit. So it's the coach's job to find that pulse, to craft that, to pull that out of them. And we only have toddlers, so I do feel like that's...
• 0:49
  I wouldn't say easy in the sense of actually doing it, but it is really easy in the sense of like, you know, there's very easy, small, actionable things in regards to like, let's run around, let's play a game. Let's work on our heart. Let's talk to kind of do that. But I do think it's more complex in the older, bigger family realm. And you guys have done a really good job with this, Jeremy. So how have you guys done this?
• 1:09
  Yeah, one of my favorite tools is if you find that your family's just getting bored, frustrated, bickering a lot, there's a lot of negative attitudes, my favorite tool for this is to start to introduce evening themes or evening rhythms. And so the way you do this is that could be game night, craft night, movie night, story night, Bible night, different things that you can do and you can just declare Monday is craft night, Tuesday is movie night.
• 1:33
  you know, whatever it is. And so you want to get your kids really excited about this. And so you want to just take a few minutes to think about how to present this, this thing. And so you guys say, Hey, okay, okay guys tonight. Um, we're going to do something awesome. We're going to do like movie night and we're going to, this is the kind of movie we're going to watch. And then we're going to usually the thing that really gets them excited is to have some treat or food element involved. You're trying to make it, you're trying to elevate the moment.
• 1:58
  Yes. Yeah. Cause it also makes it more immersive for them. All their senses get involved in that night. And so that night has a certain smell that night has a certain anticipation. And so you get, you get a little surge from when you first introduced the idea. So you say it's movie night, we're going to do popcorn or, you know, we're going to do like a Bible or we're going to do like a read along. And so we're going to like read through the Chronicles of Narnia, you know, in the evening and, you know, come up with some kind of food that's related to that. Don't use Turkish delight. That stuff is terrible. Yeah.
• 2:25
  It is. Oh, it's so bad. I was so like, what's the word? Aghast or offended because I'm such a Narnia fan when I first tried it. I know. I tried it when we were in Istanbul and it was kind of nasty. Yeah. And then, yeah, one of my buddies was like, oh, you got to try the real stuff. And then you try the really authentic stuff. You're like, nope, just as gross. That's right.
• 2:45
  But some kind of treat that you can replace that with or whatever. So that causes your kids to get excited. Now, what really gets magical is after two or three weeks of doing this rhythm, so Monday night, oh, it's game night. Yeah, I love game night. This is when we eat peanut M&Ms or whatever it is and drink this special drink. They'll get so excited. And so what will start to happen, and you can just, like I said, introduce as many of these as you want. They're seven days in a week, right?
• 3:12
  You can have up to seven. And what starts to happen is throughout the day, your kids have something to look forward to. You kind of have got in the evening a little bit nailed. And so it takes a little bit of creative, a little bit of planning. But after three or four weeks, then your kids are just like, oh, my gosh, it's...
• 3:30
  It's Tuesday, you know, and so they get so excited about what's coming up. And then you can really experience like fun. And this just causes the family spirits to go up. So and just get into stuff like you get into puzzles, get into certain games, you know, whatever kinds of things that you might be able to get into as a family, Legos or whatever. But it's really good when they see the dad leading a themed night. Something happens to the family.
• 3:54
  And when the dad leads it rhythmically and thoughtfully, then that's when the magic starts to happen, like I said, after two or three or four weeks. So I've seen a lot of dads do this. We've tried this a lot in our family, and it's really powerful. And so if you're kind of in that state where you're like, man, I just feel like people are down, people are bickering, people are bored, people are frustrated, then go in there and declare a theme. Like, again, be thoughtful about it. Have some really fun elements around it. And just really consistently lead into it.
• 4:23
  And yeah, guys, if you like tips like this and stuff like this, we're always throwing these out in all of our podcasts, but specifically if you saw us launch one of our new ones, the Family Teams podcast, a lot of you guys were saying, hey, we love 5-Minute Fatherhood, but can we do something, have something longer and have something where Alyssa and April are involved? We answered those prayers. We said, yes, we will bless that. No, joking. But yes, all jokes aside, it is phenomenal. We love those conversations. We love doing it. And so yeah, check it out. It's on wherever you can find podcasts, but Family Teams podcast.