More Peace in Your Home; Set up a Home EcoSystem with Special Guest Katie Keene

Hey, welcome back No Problem Parents. Today's episode I have a special guest with me who's going to talk about creating a family ecosystem. Really it's a home system for your family to help bring more peace back into your home. We're going to talk a little bit about nutrition. We're going to talk about raising kids with special needs, learning disabilities, and also nutrition and inflammation.

We kind of get into a little bit of everything with my special guest, Katie Keene. Katie is the host of the top 1% globally rated podcast called Her Home and Heart. And she's a host to a thriving community of beautiful families on the journey to generational family success. Her mission is simple, to ensure that no family ever breaks apart or destroys their relationships because they simply didn't know how simple it is to create a solid, joyful family foundation.

Katie is most passionate about helping families create strong bonds and deep roots so parents don't wake up one day to regret and broken relationships, but rather they find themselves living the life they dreamed of creating. Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Turn behavior problems into no problem with Jackie Finneman. Are you ready to become the confident leader your kids crave you to be?

Do you want to learn how to make parenting easier and more fulfilling? Whether you are at your wits end or you want to have more fun as a parent, you're definitely in the right place. Now here's your host, Jackie Fineman. Katie, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here to talk to you, Jack. I hear all the time parents saying, I need more peace. I'm always yelling.

My kids aren't listening. You know, what do we do? And it's kind of surprising to me that that's what they really desire. And really, it's so simple to achieve it.

I know. And yet we like to make things complicated for some reason, don't we? No, the world and all the stressors and all the extras, you know, that with social media and just technology in general and emails and everything, it just kind of puts an extra weight on us. And sometimes that pulls us away from just the basics of, you know, being present in the moment with our kids and with our, in our families. So today I first want to start, I want to talk a little bit about how you set up an ecosystem in your home that allows your family to thrive.

And what does that even mean? And how did you start that? Sure. OK, well, first, I'll just kind of explain what the ecosystem is.

I've noticed in homes in my own experience as well that parents sometimes fall into things like yelling because we aren't supported. Our anxiety gets too high when the kids are rowdy or we feel like we're not on the same page as our spouse. You know, and he's parenting one way and you're parenting the other way. And you feel like, oh my gosh, I'm failing my kid.

I'm failing as a parent. When actually, if we can just set up our home foundation in a way that supports the parent, suddenly everything calms down. So when we're supported and we feel safe as parents, and we feel like we kind of have this safety net to fall back into, now we can parent more confidently, more peacefully, and we're able to look into our child and really meet their needs and fill them up because we're not worrying about us. It's not focused on us and how we're failing. And so that's kind of the need that sparked this ecosystem idea. We were a military family and we have of our five kids, two special needs kids. So as we were moving around frequently, usually every two years, place to place, all these diagnoses, my husband in and out from deployments at times, you know,

I knew I needed in order to be the mom I wanted to be to figure out a way to keep myself safe, supported, even without my husband there, without my family nearby. And so it was this very long process of exploring what's out there and learning from other people and figuring out there really wasn't anything that completely fit my needs. It was a lot of bits and pieces. And so I ended up, my husband and I, we put this system together for ourselves so that we could survive. And we were able to watch how it works with our typical kids and it worked with our special needs kids. So that was the beauty of it. And yeah, and it really has made a tremendous difference in how we've felt as parents, how our relationships have been with our kids, and even the success level of our children. All right. So tell us about what this ecosystem is. Is it like a step-by-step process?

Okay. It comprises starting with a family government where there is a preset foundation for how you're going to run your home. Because if you and your husband are not on the same page, right there, you're going to start to have a lot of stress and tension. So if the kids don't have clear expectations, or you suddenly just discipline because you feel like it, then everyone's confused.

Everyone's stressed out. Kids are going to act out. When you can create that family government, then you feel safe and the children feel safe. And then from there, we look at, there's four elements I like to walk families through. Nurture, which is self-care, family, visions and goals for the parents and the family as a whole, the relationships, what's happening there, the health and mental wellbeing of each individual member and the emotional safety.

So we need to nurture our family and the family government can actually help with that because it brings enough peace and stability that you can look at those deeper, more important elements. Then there's the environment. so the home um toxins the boundaries that you set with other people that creates a real stressor in your environment if you're not really focused on saying no where you need to say no and understanding your limits as a parent and your child's limits too um it's things like activities and screen time and we walk through a lot of those types of topics that really affect the home and then we work on stewardship. That's where we talk a lot more about the family government and systems,

even just simple things like getting your schedule under control. How about the process of meal planning and shopping? How can you make that simple so that you don't feel like it's such a weight and a burden? Finances, that's the other one inside of, you know, looking at stewarding our home, being that person who, you know, provides. And then the last thing is I love to walk families through teaching and training, where we look at homeschooling and discipleship, and how are you teaching the Bible, citizenship, you know, what are the giftings and passions of each person, and how does that come into play in your home, and then how do we teach chores and self-control, so all of these are aspects that go into, and that actually comes out to nest,

nurture, environment, stewardship, teaching, and training. I go into those four elements with parents when I talk to them. And it's amazing. Each family will have a different challenge.

So it might not be always in the nurture area. It might just be in the environment area and they have something triggering the kids behavior. And we start looking at that and seeing how we can help support the kid. And suddenly peace comes to the home through that, you know, every family is unique, but each of these areas is really important.

This is really cool. It's sort of like a game plan for your family. Yes. And when it's something that is done with intention and thought out ahead of time, the reason that it brings so much peace is in those times when the kids are yelling and fighting and mom is tired, dad's had a long work day and mom and dad just want peace.

Instead of resorting to yelling, which does not create peace, it creates damage and trauma in everybody. You have a preset game plan, like you said, you can go to. And actually in our home, we have it posted in our common area so that when I'm having that moment of high anxiety, stress, and tending toward, oh my gosh, I'm failing as a mom, I don't have to go there. I can walk over to where we have posted our family game plan and I can bring the children and in a calm and respectful way, we can step through.

Okay, what is our family government? What has broken down here? What could we have done differently? And what will we choose to do next time?

And instead of it becoming this tension and this frustration, it's actually an opportunity to bond and to train and to prepare our children. And it allows them to fail in a safe environment, which is critical. A lot of people don't understand the value of failure, letting our children fail forward. And so when we have this ecosystem set up that keeps us safe, we can then allow our children to fail and then improve step by step in a safe environment.

And they learn quicker, they learn deeper, and we all learn and grow together, which is a tremendous benefit. Well, this sounds pretty amazing. how long does it take to actually do this? Does the whole family get involved? Do you coach these parents and like help them create this family government, um, give them assignments to do to work with their kids on it. But you know, if they have littles, their littles, aren't probably going to be contributing a whole lot to that. It's going to be mom and dad. Yeah. Um, it varies.

It really depends on, you know, is the family do both parents work is mom home. What's the relationship like to begin with, with mom and dad. So some of those factors will change the timeline. When Steve, my husband and I put this into a course, initially we made it eight weeks and ran families through that. But we also have just worked on the specific area of need in coaching sessions. So it really is up to whatever the family needs. We can meet them there. And we have, I'm looking to make the course much shorter for this spring, because I've heard a lot of families say when we're in crisis, we want it now and we want the solution fast. I can't say that these are fast changes, but I can try to teach it to you faster. So I'm aiming for that. So if somebody is interested in this is, this sounds good to them. What do they do? What, what steps do they take? Do you mean if they want to start working on improving this stuff at home? Yeah.

Okay. So let's say there's listeners out there today that are like, Hey, I want that. That sounds good to me. What do they do? Well, the first thing they can do is go to the podcast because in my podcast, I really have been digging deep into a lot of these elements and I'm going to be continuing to. So if they want, that's a nice free resource where, you know, they don't have to sign up for the course if they don't want to, but, um, in the podcast description and then on my page that's going to be in your link. They can also go there and look at my coaching.

And then I will have a wait list set up soon for the course if they want to do the course. So they can contact me through the podcast. And the podcast is her home and heart. Yes. So they can go there and they're going to get a bunch of free information from that, but then also going to have the link in the show notes for how they can connect with you on your website, get some coaching on how to develop that family government, set up that family government, and then all the systems of environment, stewardship, teaching and training, and nurture. Okay. So that's, that is one area of expertise that you help coach parents on or families on. And another one that I absolutely love, and I know there's a great need for this out there is special needs parenting and homeschooling kind of out of the box learners. So tell us a little bit about your background and experience with that and why that's so such a passion of yours. Yeah. So we were never going to be that weird homeschool family. We came from families of public educators, my mother,

my sister, my husband's father, his sister. And, you know, we really have a great love for teachers and the passion that they bring. But we were able to see through some of our military moves that that wasn't a good environment where we were stationed for our oldest child. And that led us with this community of beautiful homeschoolers who we were surrounded by. And we kept seeing how successful their kids were. It led us into, okay, well, maybe we'll take a look at this and try it one year at a time. Well, we then ended up with our daughter having a lot of learning challenges and we were already homeschooling part-time at that time and ended up realizing think that the flexibility and the, my options for her were so much wider when I took it on to myself. And not only that, her self-confidence was very high because she, we could emphasize all the success. She was not comparing herself to the other students, even though we were in a tutorial and had a wonderful community of friends and field trips and all of that, there was a much different tone that was set there. And so from there, it went on and we had our fourth child.

he is profoundly disabled. And we did three years of training in a neurodevelopmental program. We were able to teach a child who cannot speak how to read and how to even communicate with us on a card filled with letters. Very amazing, very amazing. So we have a large background and we have such a heart for special needs parents and understanding the overwhelm, the exhaustion, the confusion, the lack of resources, or the expense of resources. And it's an area that we are really passionate about because you can change the trajectory of your entire family, of all the relationships when you know certain tools. And it can become a beautiful thing, even though it's still challenging. How do you incorporate that ecosystem within your parenting and homeschooling of your kids? So the ecosystem actually is what really sets the foundation. Like when, because the ecosystem includes things like our health, like getting rid of toxins. When we are working through making our home foundation, a place that's safe,

that's nurturing us as parents and our children, suddenly you improve the homeschooling automatically. You know, we can also look at things like maybe a curriculum switch or maybe a modification in what the child needs during the day to help bring more peace to that, that schedule, because that can really make a big difference. But automatically when you set in place a home ecosystem that includes that family government, and it includes supporting the body, and it includes making sure that everybody, you know, holistic living is mind, body, and soul is, is receiving their fundamental needs. And those are satisfied.

it's like this incredible miracle where peace just sort of starts to happen. And you didn't even really feel like you were making it happen. So it's a big piece of the puzzle. Well, I love that.

And it sounds like something that, I mean, our kiddos like all grown and almost ready to leave the nest. And so it's like, this is such a great opportunity for parents, especially, well, if you're in the thick of it now, that's great too. But beginning your journey as a parent. And when you have those littles at home and things are a little bit stressful, especially if you have both parents working outside of the home, this can really kind of get everybody on board, on track and kind of a good game plan.

I like the word game plan for this. It just keeps coming to my mind that it is like a game plan for and a map. All right. Then the last thing I wanted to talk with you about today is why holistic living is so impactful on family happiness and success and how, you know, health issues. Yes, you have children with some special needs, also just health in general and how health issues can cause a family to struggle or extra needs or different needs can cause a family to struggle and what you can do to support your family into vibrant living. It's really important.

Looking at the mental health, the spiritual health and the physical health of each individual member of the family is such a wonderful, almost like a hat, if you would say, to helping the family thrive. Because if any of the family members are struggling in one of those major areas, it can really cause a challenge for the whole family. And when you have already got challenges, like learning disabilities or, you know, physical disabilities of any kind, you're already going to be more than more likely than not. I don't know a single special needs family that says, I don't struggle.

you will be struggling. So taking a look at those foundations, you know, if a kid has ADHD and they're ricocheting off the wall, mom has depression, dad has arthritis, the family, no matter how much they pour into, we're going to develop this family government. We're going to make sure that we are homeschooling in the best way. Everyone feels yucky. So they're not going to do it at an optimal level, or it's going to take a lot longer. And so when we can look at that holistic whole person view and just analyze and then support each person where they need it most, that is very, very effective. And I've seen the result of not doing that in quite a few families. And unfortunately, when, you know, somebody's needs are very neglected at an emotional level, let's say, maybe they're fed, maybe they're clothed, maybe they're given the best of schooling, but at an emotional level, they're neglected. It breaks apart the relationship.

I've seen numerous 18 year olds say, that's it. I'm out of here. And not in a good way, not a, Hey, I'm going to college. Can't wait to see you at Christmas. It's a, I don't want to speak to you ever again. And, you know, there's so much damage that comes from that and yet it can be prevented. And honestly, it doesn't have, it's, you know, way better if it's in early years, but parents who find themselves at this place with a child in junior high or high school can apologize and start over and begin the mending process. All hope is not lost. You know, you just have to humble yourself, admit what went wrong and start over. And so, you know, for each person, just getting that really big, you know, I guess you'd say what 360 degree view of the mind, the body, and soul is really, really important. And health itself is really valuable.

When you can support each person to physically feel better, now you can make the mind feel better and the spirit feel better more quickly. And I know that you, we didn't plan on talking about this today, but I would like you, because I know a little bit about your family has found sort of that, that thing that has really helped you all with your physical health, but also your emotional health. And that is in a product. And I know there are tons of products out there that everybody likes to pitch and sell and promote. And you've tried many of them just with all the different dynamics in your family. I would like you to share with us, if you don't mind, what is life advantage and how has it helped you? I don't mind. So I will first tell you, I'm the biggest skeptic in the whole wide world. As a special needs mom, I could tell you I've probably been exposed to every form of snake oil out there. I've probably researched most of them and avoided most of them.

And so prior to finding this product that's really helped my family, which is actually a cellular activator with herbs. I won't go into the science of what that means, but basically it jumpstarts your cells, kind of like jumper cables on a dead battery. And for my family, that has been so, so hugely impactful because with my, I was on a search for epilepsy solutions for my son. Now I'm not claiming any solutions from any product ever, but to support his body better through his epilepsy and my daughter with her ADHD and me with long hauler and all these different things that my family was experiencing. And, um, it was such a relief because I've done so much research on products and product quality and over time paid, I won't even say how much to get help with doctors and, you know, a lot of stuff did not work and many things did. But when we found this, it was a relief because I went from a detox program that I was spending $500 a month, just in supplements alone to being able to go to baseline $60 a month. And then I, of course I stepped it up personally, but now my $500 a month came out to about 130 a month, humongous savings. And I was getting more benefit than what I was doing before. So the power of activating yourselves to work the way they're supposed to will in every person, because the body's innately wise, look different.

But for my family, the result has been tremendous. And I love it because I feel like it's a hack for a family that has these needs because the research is very, very clear. Huge institutions have done research on this. Harvard, I was telling you earlier, like American Cancer Society and Institute for Aging, like it's mind blowing who has researched this and it can help dad with his arthritis.

It can help mom with her depression and it can help kiddo who is jumping off the couch and leaping off the dining room chairs. And, you know, with his ADHD, because each person's body is expressing their inflammation problems, um, differently. And so it's, it's been such tremendous blessing for my family and completely natural, which for me is very important because we get side effects to things that aren't. Absolutely.

Well, and we have a link we can put in the show notes for that as well. If they want to learn more information about life advantage. Absolutely. Yeah.

I'll send that over to you. Very good. Oh my gosh. Okay.

So we've covered, you know, three different topics here in the episode today in a very short period of time, but I do encourage people to go find you at your website, her home and heart.net and backslash coaching. Yep. And so they can get all the details on how to work with you and just a little bit more about your system and how you can help people set it up.

But then also to go to her home and heart podcast, you are a top 1% podcast. I've listened to it. I've subscribed. I follow.

I've commented, I've shared, I've done all the things that all of us podcasters hope that people will do so that we can continue to put free resources out there and reach more parents and kids. And, and I absolutely love it. It's they're short and sweet and informational. And it's just a wonderful resource for parents. So Katie, I just I do I really appreciate you and all that your family has endured and gone through and how clearly LifeVantage is doing something because you have energy despite having a very busy household. Yes, it has made a massive difference.

I am very blessed. That is family success.lifevantage.com. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I'm really glad and thankful that you were able to be here with me. Yeah, thank you for having me. This was such a blessing and I'm so glad I got to see you.

Thank you for tuning into the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Join Jackie next time for more tips, tools, and resources that will help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. Who do you know that we could support on their parenting journey? Like this podcast, subscribe, share, or leave a review of the show. Your support of the No Problem Parenting podcast pays it forward and helps us help more families.

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