Intentional Parenting with God at the center of your Family Huddle Special Guest Amy Weichel

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I'm excited to introduce Amy Weichel to you today. Amy and her husband, Derek, live happily with their family in Nebraska, where Derek works as an orthopedic surgeon and Amy homeschools their four children. In their free time, Derek and Amy, along with their kiddos, enjoy traveling. And both Derek and Amy are lifelong learners who enjoy reading and learning individually and together as a couple. They founded Faithful Parent, a ministry that is dedicated to providing help to parents with free guides, blog posts, courses, and additional information about intentional Christian parenting to help them keep their children and families focused on Jesus for this generation and future generations. They've created their own intentional parenting plan that has transformed how they raise their children in all aspects, especially in their intentional teaching of God's word in the home, and they have a new book out. So we're going to talk about all the things today in this episode. Welcome to the show, Amy. Thank you so much for having me. One of the things that we're going to talk about today, how you're intentionally parenting through the development of a parenting plan and the family huddle. So why don't you just give our listeners a little bit of background and how you came up with this concept? Yeah,

So it kind of comes just from our own experiences in our own life. We had four children age five and under when the youngest was born. And so it was very chaotic and crazy. And I was basically in survival mode.

No kidding. Oh, my gosh. It was very crazy. And, you know, being, you know, younger parents, we were just doing things the way that we were taught, you know, what our parents did with us.

and maybe what our friends and the world around us were doing. And so we weren't being very intentional. And kind of as the years went on, we just, there were a couple of things that happened. Like one of my husband's coworkers, his 14-year-old son suddenly died.

Like he fell on a hoverboard, broke his neck and he passed away. and that really got us thinking are we doing everything that we can to point our children to Jesus and you know that kind of gives you the big picture like what what are what's our purpose for our life here and so then we were starting to think okay well we need to be more you know proactive about this and just through a few other things that happened we ended up we have a life coach that we talk with and he, he said, you know, we were trying to be more intentional with our parenting in general. And we always like to learn and get tips from people who have gone before us. And so we asked him, you know, what else, what else could we be doing for parenting? And he said, well, let's see your plan. What, what's your plan for your parenting?

And we're like, plan. My husband especially is very like plan oriented, you know, and then he were kind of like, wait, our kids, our precious kids that we're supposed to be raising and being very intentional with, we don't have a plan, like a specifically laid out plan for what we're trying to do as a family and what we're trying to accomplish. So that really got us thinking. And then through our efforts of being more intentional and kind of going through different steps, that's how we ended up becoming more intentional. And now for the last, you know, four to five years, we've been on this path of more intentionality. You know, there's always more you can do, but you know, just a little bit here and there, and it's just been a really great experience. I love that you guys have, you've really put a lot of thought into it. Let's talk a little bit about what is included in your parenting plan. The first thing to do is really to try to look at your family's strengths and weaknesses.

What's your family good at? What are some areas that you could use improvement in? And then also, what's your family culture? What kind of attitude is in your family?

What is rewarded and what is frowned upon in your family? Just kind of look at that, just kind of get a feel for what your family life is like. I don't know that many of us as parents are actually intentionally looking at strengths and weaknesses maybe within our family. So what are some of those that you, you guys discovered in your family? Like I think of a lot of it as like strengths and then maybe even non-negotiables, right? So what different things that we're good at. So we're good at organizing things. We discovered, I mean, and each, each child and each member of the family has their own gifts that they bring, but then also like organization is good for us. I mean, we travel a lot and so that's,

you know, important. We are very intentional about bringing in God's word into our family. So we have it organized into our life. Like these are the times that we have planned to be teaching our kids God's word and reading it daily and in our weekly, yearly plan, you know, so, so organization is one and just, and even like the family culture of just being Christian and making sure that we are like, if we say we're Christian, we are in God's word, we're doing what we say we're going to be doing, you know, not just over for Christian, but we never open a Bible or we never tell our kids about Jesus or point them there. So and then the weaknesses, there's always blind spots that you might have. And then just kind of, you know, to discover those,

you kind of ask other people, like kind of what we did with our coach, like, what, you know, what's something that we can do with our kids? And then we kind of noticed this blind spot of, oh, we're not planning, you know, we don't have a plan for our family and we're not being intentional there. So that's kind of another way that you can go about it. Because sometimes it's hard for you to evaluate what our weaknesses are or our strengths necessarily, but even asking people who know you sometimes helps too. Then we have our seven step process. After that, It's a framework that can be remembered by the acronym STEWARD, S-T-E-W-A-R-D.

Okay, so let's get into that. Maybe you can just do a quick overview of what each of the letters represent, and then maybe we'll tackle one or two of those. Yeah, that sounds great. So the S in STEWARD stands for seek God, and that's just obviously we want to go to God first.

and then T is your target or trajectory, which is what's your vision and values for your family? Where do you want to be going? E is explore your options. There are lots of ways to parent and sometimes maybe you haven't thought of some of those. So maybe kind of do some research and think of different aspects and different options that are out there that are more consistent with what your vision and values are for your family.

The W is for write it down. It's very important to have it in writing. The A is for action. We have some steps that you can take to take action with it.

Because a lot of times you'll, oh, this sounds like a great plan, but then you don't actually do it because it seems too overwhelming or there's a lot of steps or there's a lot of things that are vying for your attention elsewhere. But there's some simple things that you can do to actually do what you want to do and implement the plan. And then R is for reviewing and revising your plans, because that is going to, you know, as your children get older, things change.

You don't want to say this is set in stone. And it's really good to review it, too, because then you remember what is in your plan. What is the plan for your family? And then the final one is D, direct others.

And so once your family is on a good path, it's so rewarding to help others who are along the same, you know, they're also on a parenting journey. And you might learn from them, not just you showing them what you learned, but they might be able to teach you something too or change your perspective on something too. So those are our seven steps. So how does the steward, the family plan, how does that coincide with the family huddle?

The family huddle is just kind of like one step in maybe sticking with your like family values. We also during our family huddle, we also we actually do the family huddle. We also go over our family's vision and values. And that helps like refresh in our mind, like, OK, these are this is what we planned for our family to, you know, like this is what's important to our family.

And that's what, you know, we have to make sure that we're doing that then. Like, for example, like one of ours is being generous givers and is one of our family values. And so when our when our kids are, you know, when they're being generous or kind to one another, they get rewarded for that or, you know, we call them out, you know. And it's kind of cool because we've been doing this long enough that the kids will actually call each other out for their family values.

And we kind of talk about that during our family huddle, too. It was one of our things, you know, where have we seen our, have you seen anybody doing any of our family values or, so that kind of helps. You know, you're doing well when you're not having to do all the parenting yourself, like the kids are just, they're kind of picking up on it and they're doing redirecting each other or calling each other out. It's working.

What you're doing is actually working. That's so great. So let's talk a little bit about the family huddle. My mind is just going there.

I've downloaded it. You have this free download and I'll have a link in the show notes for people to go and grab that. It just kind of gives you an idea of what the family huddle is and some, some ways to, to create the conversations and be really intentional in your parenting. And I know a lot of, a lot of what you've, you've shared is that you guys do your family huddle over dinner and dinner, weekly dinners or nightly dinners are kind of a lost art.

And I think with the kids schedules and events and things that they're involved in, it can be super tricky to stick to having the same time for dinner every night. And that's okay. Like as our son was growing up, family dinners were super tricky with us because of sports, but also my husband and myself, our work schedules. And so we would often do a family breakfast, which required everybody to be up by 630 in the morning, mom or dad up earlier to kind of help prep the breakfast and breakfast wasn't necessarily fancy, but it was just an intentional we're going to sit down for 20 to 30 minutes before we take off for the day because we know that we're all here.

yeah exactly that that's the the point of it it doesn't have to be at a certain time but just that you're taking that time to um gather together as a family and connect with um your kids and hear how their day is going because or how they're what they're excited about for the day if you do it in the morning you can ask what you know what are you looking forward to today or what is something that exciting that happened yesterday or what's something challenging that you had you know We asked like what's something hard for the day that they did that was hard.

And sometimes it's something that they were not excited about. And other times it's something that was challenging and that they had to work through or something. So those are, yeah, those are really good opportunities for you to connect with your children. And you can do it whenever, like you said, you can do it in the morning if that works better for you.

Or like maybe if they go to school, like right after school in the afternoon, maybe if that works out with everybody's schedule. or even do like kind of a powwow at night or something, you know? Well, and what I love about it is it's called the family huddle. So I'm thinking of a huddle, like a football team where you're all kind of getting together and this can be in the living room.

It can be in the dining room. It can be in the family room. It can be wherever, where even if it's just, all right, family huddle time and everybody just groups together, gets in a circle. What was the highlight of your day in a low, low light, a challenge or, you know, a fun thing.

And you also talk about who's going to be responsible for leading the huddle. So tell us about that. Is there a specific person? Does the family decide that together?

Does it change? Change decides that, right? Yeah, because it could be different for every family too. And if, you know, say one of your family members isn't as reliable as remembering to make sure it happens, maybe not pick that person.

But we just kind of decided as a family and this, my husband, Derek, is the one who leads it all the time. But if he's not there, often either I'll step in, you know, if it's just me and some of the kids, if he's gone or gone with one of the kids, then we I'll see if anybody else wants to. And often one of the kids will will want to take over for that. But it's and it's kind of like the idea of the huddle, too, is that you're all on the same team.

And so but if everybody's leading it, that gets a little crazy. But so you want to have one person who just kind of makes sure it happens, too. And then that leads it so that it's not everybody all talking at once too. Right.

You need a quarterback. Yeah. You also talk about establishing some general ground rules for huddle time and creating an agenda, which can make it sound like super structured or something, but it is good to have those guidelines. So you have a little bit of a system to follow and it doesn't have to be a super long time.

Your family can decide how long it's going to go. let's talk a little bit about some examples of the agenda for the family huddle. So for our family, we just do, I guess the agenda, you know, yeah, that's kind of a big fancy term for, you know, especially if you have little kids, that term might be kind of overwhelming for you, like an agenda for like, my kids are all over the place, you know, but if you set some ground rules that they, you know, if they're little, they just have to stay in the room because they're hearing you, even if they're not like at the table or at the couch, if everybody's at the couch, they're still hearing what's going on and they're still part of it.

But maybe your family, you want everybody sitting in a certain area or something, you know, it kind of depends on the ages of your kids too. So then for an agenda, ours is just simply like, we also include like our family worship time at our dinner time. So then we also have that incorporated too. So we, while we're eating, you know, that's our conversation is our favorite thing and hardest thing and then a blessing from the day. So that's kind of our agenda. And then we also do our devotion Bible reading. And then our song or hymn, Christian song or hymn for the day. And then we do a prayer like a family prayer. And so that's like our agenda. But again, it could be different, you know, agenda might be stronger term than we need. But I do like it for the structure of it. And I think kids crave structure, even when it doesn't always seem that they do,

right. Because they're running around or it's hard to sit still or, you know, whatever. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a sit still kind of, kind of thing. But, but I also like that you're, you're starting it out with a prayer. You might have a family hymn song. I mean, that's cool.

And then everybody's sharing their biggest win or their greatest challenge, sharing a blessing or a Thanksgiving, something to do with gratitude. Love that. I think that's a great thing to be instilling in our kids. And this is all stuff that can be done on a daily basis. And if daily is too much for you, just make it work. I know you kind of talked about on Sundays, you have sort of maybe the bigger family huddle. Just like a weekly family meeting or weekly huddle. And then that might be where you're talking more about upcoming activities, the schedule for the week, a little bit more. Yeah, we do that. And then, yeah. And then that's also where we do our character family values calling out when like during the week have we seen each family member with our different family values like if they're you know Christian we went to church this week or we did our family worship time we add those in there and then we also we added a like a kind of a little financial review to to that and as they're getting a little bit older they have like bigger items on the horizon like my one daughter is now saving for a car she is 11 and she has decided that she needs to start saving for a car now. She only has a few dollars in there, but she has an envelope. And so she reports on things that she's saving for. So I love that forward thinking that like one day I don't want to be in debt when I get the car,

I want to have money to pay for it. So that is super great. Yeah. There's families that I, I oftentimes will suggest, you know, when kids want an allowance or they want money for this, that or the other. And I just think it's so smart to, for each kiddo to have, even if it's just a little jar or a little, you know, bag or some kind of a container where, you know, they're, they're putting aside, you know, 10% for tithing and 10% for taxes and 10% for, you know, or it can be 20% and 30%. But I think it's really important to teach kids that even if it's just $1 a week per kid, and where does that 10 or 20% go, you know, maybe the 50% is what you get to keep, you know, but I love that you're incorporating that into the family huddle as well. So you also have a book that just came out. So let's talk a little bit about the book.

Yeah. So it's called a chance to change. And rather than be like a typical parenting book, we thought maybe we're presenting our framework of steward in it. And so we, um, we wrote it as a Christian fiction book. And so it's more about a family who maybe a lot of people that have read it say that they can put their own family in this position. And they're like, it felt like you were writing about us and where things are a little crazy and chaotic, but they feel like, well, we're doing what everyone else is doing. We, we shouldn't be fine. Right. But then the mom kind of feels that there's a little bit, something missing. And so then there's another family that comes alongside them. They kind of have some tragedy that happens. And then it really kind of puts it to the forefront. Like we need to do something different. And so then this other family comes alongside them and kind of mentors them through the framework that we have of steward.

And so it kind of goes more in depth with that so that you can apply those lessons to your family. And you can just, you know, even if there's just one or two things, it's not too overwhelming, but you can kind of go alongside this family and learn about maybe ways that you haven't thought of being more intentional. And a lot of them are, you know, like little easy things, but those little things over a long period of time make a big difference in your children's lives and just being more connected with them to just a little bit each day or, you know, connecting them to God a little bit each day.

So I love it. So the book is called A Chance to Change. It's available on Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. And again, I'll have a link in the show notes for that. Maybe what are some of the top things that families could start doing today to be more intentional? I would just say even just finding, you know, five minutes to just connect with your kids. And just think, because one of the things is that I think of is like the generational impact that you can have on your family. Like, so if you're taking time to connect with your kids, even if it's just five minutes every day, or you have a little bit longer time, maybe 10 minutes and build it into your routine.

Let's say you put them to bed every night. Okay. We're just going to set aside these five minutes, or maybe it's in the morning when they get up and you have a little chat with them. It doesn't have to be a long time, but it means the world to them.

And it also just helps you to start being a little bit more intentional with your time with them and with your time with your family. And you can even use like the family huddle guide to be. I mean, it doesn't have to be really very long. It could be five minutes.

Just start start implementing something that will just make that difference over time. I love it. Being very intentional by investing in our kiddos. Episode 172 with Glenn Lundy, he talked about let's stop spending time with our family and instead invest time. And that could be one child needs 15 seconds for you to just turn, you know, and answer their question and just really be intentional about that for that 15 seconds. And another child might need an afternoon, you know, day of fishing or something. And once a month with dad or mom and they're good, They're feeling like their cup is filled up.

I just really appreciate the family huddle and the steward framework because you're really incorporating and you're teaching parents some really simple kind of ways, intentional kind of ways to be more involved and invest more time with their kiddos and their family, which is going to pay off so much in the long run, just in your connection and your accountability and just overall family involvement. So I just really appreciate your guys' resource.

Again, that generational impact that you can have, if you are being more intentional with your children, they're going to be more intentional with their children and so on. And the ripple effect you can have across the generations and just being intentional, it's not going to happen by chance. You have to really plan it and build it into your day because the world around us is always so busy and crazy and they're going to lead you astray if you aren't firm in your, I want to do this. I want to be intentional. And this is, this is what we're going to do because this is what our family is about. And this is our vision for our family. Oh, great. I love it. And I think kids feel seen and heard when you're intentionally connecting with them and, and working together as a family. And then of course, if you're a spiritual family, a Christian family, making sure that it is more than just going to church on Sundays, but actually incorporating God into each and every day. So absolutely think it's wonderful. Thank you so much, Amy,

for being here with me today. Thank you so much for having me. All right, there you have it, parents, another resource that's accessible to you right from the comfort of your home. Hey guys, if you're enjoying this podcast, do me a quick favor and leave us a review of the show. And if you're feeling super generous, take a screenshot of this episode and share it on your social media with your friends and family. And be sure to tag and follow us at No Problem Parents. Doing so helps us help more families.