Parenting with Purpose

Speaker 1 And this is where we brought our combined almost eighty years of experience as educators to to the system is that, look, there are so many decisions to be made about everything every single day all day long. We've curated some really good content for parents to be able to use, not to have to Google, you know, what's a good what are some good conversation topics for my for my family? I mean, that's great. It's great to be able to do that, but it's just not as intentional and as focused. And so and so our goal is really it it sounds trite, but it's not. Our goal is to make the world a better place one family at a time.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to episode 170 of our podcast here at Human Restoration Project. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Darren Yushinowski, Kimberly Baker, and Corinne Greenblatt. Thank you all so much for your ongoing support. And with the help of teacher powered schools, Learning Inspire Ed, Sokol Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, the lineup for our fourth annual virtual conference to restore humanity is complete, focused this year on the quest for connection from July 21 through the twenty third. If that sounds interesting to you, tickets for the whole conference start at just $50, and you can find the full lineup at humanrestorationproject.orgconference. For as much as schools are a necessary collaboration between communities and families, we haven't spent much time, if any at all, on this podcast focused on parenting itself. Well, that changes today as I'm joined by Steve Shapiro.

Speaker 3 My name is Steven Shapiro. I've been an educator for thirty four years, mostly in high school, and and I've also taught in college and taught in middle school. I've been a school leader, big focus on experiential learning. A lot of my work has been really around creating powerful and enduring learning experiences for young people. And over the course of my career, I watched the deterioration of young people's mental health and felt really called at the later part of my career to focus more intensively on helping young people grow up healthily and deal with the chronic anxiety, depression, and loneliness that we're seeing across the country and across the world, really. And Nancy Shapiro Rapport.

Speaker 1 Hi, Nick. It's good to be with you. My name is Nancy Rapport, and I also had a thirty four year career as an educator. Started as a teacher, English teacher, but moved and spent the majority of my career as a middle school counselor. And so I've been working individually in groups for a long time with students, with adolescents, on managing mental health and anxiety and depression, and I too have seen it skyrocket. But I I frankly spent a lot of my time with parents and helping parents through the struggles of knowing how to stay connected with their kids and to have an impact on them as they started growing into those teen years a little more fully. Retired educators,

Speaker 2 siblings, and cofounders of Our Family Culture. Our Family Culture is a platform dedicated to helping families build strong, intentional cultures rooted in shared values, traditions, and meaningful connections. Through stories, guides, and community support, it empowers families to create lasting legacies centered on purpose and togetherness. I think it's so interesting. Both of your backgrounds, if you think about it, I mean, that's nearly seventy years combined between the two of you. It's just an immense amount of experience in schools, particularly vulnerable ages. Nancy, the experience of middle school is a really precarious one as kids make a transition from elementary schools into their adolescence coming into their own, and then the the handoff to Steve at the high school level is really fascinating. Now you both retired from long careers in schools, but instead of spending that time at the lake or at the pickleball court or anything else like that, you've taken on this new phase of your work life supporting kids, parents, and families in a whole new way. So how did this family collaboration for families come to be, and what led you to create our family culture? That's a great question.

Speaker 1 Honestly, this is something that Steven and I have been talking about mostly around Thanksgiving time each year when we're spending lots of time together, really talking about about families and about culture. We're both culture builders. We have been. It's been a a huge part of what we brought to our experience as educators, that nothing great happens without first establishing a powerful culture with your students. And when we talked about even talking about our own family, talking about what we want for our own children when they have their families, if they choose to have families, We just talked a lot about how the world has gotten so very complex since we raised kids even. Our kids my daughter is 31 years old today, and

Speaker 3 my son is 27. And we didn't have to deal with social media. We didn't have to deal with the influencers that are trying to grab everyone's attention. And and we talked a lot about how how can we have an impact once we're retired? What can our work continue to be in our retirement that could be powerful, impactful, and really focus at the heart of it, which is family? I would add to that that we witnessed during our time as educators some families that were doing great, some kids that were doing great, and we noticed this pattern that the kids who were doing great disproportionately came from families that had really clear and aligned ideas about what they were about and what they were trying to do in terms of raising their kids. And so we realized that if we wanted to help kids be successful and thrive, we had to help parents be more clear about what their family was about. And so we've talked about that for years and with the time that we have in our retirement, we're really contributing all of our efforts to trying to help parents raise emotionally healthy kids by being more purposeful and intentional about how they parent. Yeah. We talk all the time in education about how,

Speaker 2 you know, the issues of school don't just arrive, you know, they're out of the mist or whatever. Right? They come in through the schoolhouse door from families and communities around there. So you're talking about going upstream a little bit of solutions that aren't school based, but that are actually rooted in communities and families and enriching conversations around those values. One thing that we had talked about, Steve, we had the benefit of being in in Canada together over the last week for the mental health summit. One thing that really struck me in your conversation about this was an emphasis on changing behavior over just changing values. And I would be curious if you'd be willing to share with listeners your impassioned rationale for that, because I found it very compelling.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. So our partner in this work is David Freeman, and David has written the book Culture by Design. He's been a culture builder in a business setting for a long time. And one of the things that David has been really great about in terms of clarifying is that people talk a lot about values, but values can be nebulous or unclear. Like we say respect is important, but like what does respect mean? What does respect look like? Different people define respect differently. And that we can have a lot more impact if we clarify specific behaviors that reflect those values. So for example, if you wanna raise a resilient kid, instead of saying resilience is important, you have a behavior that you identify which we call bounce back. And so you can talk about what does it mean to bounce back. That's what resilience looks like. If you want to raise a kid with integrity, you can have a behavior you call do the right thing, which is a very specific way of describing what that behavior looks like. If you want to raise a kid that perseveres, you have a fundamental called stick with it. And so these fundamentals are really descriptions of behaviors that reflect your values. And if you have language that specifically speaks to behavior, it's a lot easier to build a culture. I mean, in the end, we talk about culture as a reflection of values, but really culture is just the series of behaviors that happen over and over again that demonstrate

Speaker 2 how those values live in a culture, in a group. I think it's so different from our conversation in schools, which in my experience was usually framed around PBIS, you know, positive behavior interventions and supports, which are these big value driven things that you decide on as a school. Right? We had honorable, accountable, willing, and knowledgeable. So it spelled it hawk because that was our mascot. And, you know, on in all of the rooms, we've had signs like, what does it mean to be a hawk in this place and that place and the other one? And and really sort of what it meant, it was an appeal to behaviors and action and culture, but but not really rooting them in those. Right? It was in these big nebulous ideas and kind of almost assuming that by osmosis, you would come to be these things or you'd have to read a sign to figure out what it means to be a hawk in the bathroom and in the media center and in the hallway as opposed to rooting them in these more concrete behaviors. And that's one thing that when I was playing around with the Our Family Culture app, which which is wonderful that you guys have have built and put together here, as you're selecting those family fundamentals then, you're actively choosing those habits and those behaviors that you're going to engage with as a family that come to define your family culture. So could you speak more to those fundamentals and perhaps the steps that people take to create their family culture?

Speaker 1 It's funny that you talk about PBIS because when you're in a school and you're trying to support students in living these values, it's very hard because you've got kids coming from all over the place experiencing different things in their in their home environments. And so we want them to embody these different values that we honor, the integrity, whatever it is that we've chosen for PBIS. And then teachers get discouraged pretty frequently because there's not, like, a complete system for figuring out how to teach those behaviors systemically to kids and to have those fall you know, to have the follow through at home as well. And so what we decided is by going upstream, like you said, with families, we have worked together to build a system in conjunction with David Friedman, whose system that he uses business to business has been so successful. We thought that this system would make a lot of sense in families. And so for families to identify what their fundamentals are and when I say families, I really mean parents. So our the Our Family Culture app is designed for parents to identify what their fundamentals for their family, what they want them to be. And so we have written and built a library of 44 fundamentals. And, you know, Steven talked a little bit about how they're not values, they're behaviors, but in each behavior are values embedded. And so instead of trying to pick something a little more nebulous like the value of persistence, we have the behavior stick with it and a description of that. So the way that our system works is that when parents sign up for the system for our family culture, they, first of all, are greeted by by me and Steven because for us, building culture and having the Our Family Culture community is incredibly important to us. We want people to know that we're walking the walk right along with you. And then the first step when you download the app is that you get to select the fundamentals that you want for your family. And it's hard. It's a it's a great exercise. We had a lot of people beta test this program for us, and we got very good feedback, about things that worked and things that we have made changes to to make it more family friendly. But what we ultimately found is that when parents are selecting their fundamentals, and we recommend between thirteen and twenty, which sounds like a lot, we recommend between thirteen and twenty, they have a really hard time narrowing them down because there are so many that they want to work on. And so we talked through a little bit about what that means and how you identify your family fundamentals. And some people are like, just because I didn't pick it doesn't mean I don't value having an open mind. I just don't have enough room in in my list of fundamentals. But we do ask that people pick between thirteen and twenty, and that goes back to the marathon, not a sprint. Because what happens with the system is that we have we provide the content for people to practice one fundamental a week as a family. And when I say practice, this is really important. We're not talking about people having to add an extra thirty minutes to their day to do our family culture. Like, you know, how many more thirty minute chunks of time can we add into our day when you know, do this for third exercise, meditate, you know, cook healthy meals, the right? All the things that we're asked to do. What we do here is we provide content for people to have conversations and work the fundamentals with their families during times that they're normally spending together. So it could be when you're in the car. It could be when you're putting your kids to bed. It could be when you're having dinner together as a family if you're doing that. If you're not, it might encourage you to start doing that so you've got time to be together as a family because that is the elusive for everybody right now is time. We don't have time. We don't have time. We don't have time. What could be more important than building your family culture and and having your kids really get what it means to be a part of your family?

Speaker 3 It's an interesting question to ask. I I think if you're if you're a parent yourself listening to this or even if you're just watching your friend's parent, what are the core things that you really are trying to raise in your kids? What are the most important things you're trying to teach your kids? And we asked a lot of parents this question, and one of the unsettling realities is most people have a difficult time answering the question. I mean, are a couple easy things, so we want our kids to be kind or honest. But very quickly, it's like, well, let me think about it. Maybe and then if you have two parenting partners, write down what do you think are the eight most important things you want your kid to learn, and then your parenting partner. It's almost certain that you're not gonna have the same list. Parents have really not intentionally created this clarity about what they're trying to raise their kids with, and what's obvious to everyone is you're very unlikely to hit a target if you haven't defined the target. So part of the beauty of our family culture is it's helping families say this is what we're about. These are the 15 things that we really want to focus on. And before you do anything with the system, that in itself is a very powerful thing to clarify with your parenting partner, if you're parenting with a partner, what you're really trying to do in terms of your child rearing, what you're trying to really accomplish in terms of the kinds of kids you're trying to raise.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And I want to add in there too, we talk about parenting partners, and it's really important because families come in all shapes and sizes. And we respect that completely. And so I personally was a single mom. And so I didn't have a parenting partner. I mean, I had I had my kid's father that I would talk to occasionally, but but most of the load was on me. And so I think it's it's important when we talk about parenting partners, this is a system that is a that anyone can do, whether you're parenting on your own or with others. And parenting partner can mean a lot of things. It could be a grandparent, someone who is your main confidant, you talk about your parenting with. It could be a very close friend. It could be a neighbor. It could be just anyone who is in the conversation with you about parenting. And I think it's really important to recognize that we talk about parenting partners, but we also recognize that families come in all different forms, and our family culture is for everybody.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Certainly. An emphasis just on caregivers being intentional about values. And I think that's what I appreciate so much about this is providing a really safe structure and support for people to not just have to brainstorm again out of the ether. What are my fundamentals? Right? Like, good luck coming up with that list. But it was really helpful in my experience with it just to be able to have that big long list and knowing that I was gonna have to pick at least 13 to get in the door really was just like, oh, you know, I did wrestle with which ones oh, I really like this one with this one, and I don't wanna leave this one out. So for example, like one of the first ones I selected was appreciate differences. You know? And in the language that you both have shared here, now that would maybe allow me to just talk to my family about, hey. How can we as Covington's appreciate differences? And you provided this definition to say, like, yeah. People come from different backgrounds, different races, religions, cultures, abilities, lived experiences. How amazing. Engage with and appreciate the special gifts of people's differences. So even if, you know, you had younger kids who said, well, what does it mean to appreciate difference? You know, how can we be more inclusive of all of these things? Or a lot of mine are the appreciation ones, realize now, but appreciating nature. The world is filled with beauty. Spend time noticing, appreciating, and connecting with the natural world. Listen to nature's teaching. So again, when you ask what does it mean to be a Shapiro or a Covington, that language is there. But it goes further than just deciding what your family fundamentals are as not as difficult, right, but as as difficult of a choice as it is to sort of narrow those things down and and really pick and choose. That's not the end because then you have to build that intentional time and you all provide those little micro supports and those nudges to help find that intentional time. Can you give some examples of what those other nudges look like as you go through the week? I know I was prompted for my next Sunday check-in. I think I missed the wisdom Wednesday because we're reporting on a Thursday. Could you both provide examples of what those things look like?

Speaker 3 These are really simple things. So basically, we're giving you one small thing you can do each day to practice that fundamental during the week. So you're practicing one fundamental per week. So as an example, let's say practice kindness as your fundamental. You know, on Monday you might get we might send you a discussion question, something simple. So instead of saying how was school today or what'd you do in school today, you might have a question that says something like, what was the kindest thing you saw someone do today? Or a question like, would you rather do an act of kindness for someone else or have someone else do an act of kindness for you? And these are just little questions to get you talking to your kids about kindness and why it matters. Or we might send you on Tuesday like a two minute YouTube video of someone doing this beautiful act of kindness that you can watch with your kids. It's just like, oh, here's two minutes. And you might have a conversation with your kids about it, or you might just watch it and just let it let it resonate with your kids. We have some other examples of things that we send that are like scenarios, what would you do in this situation, would you rather questions. We have one of our favorite things we offer is what we call sort of storytelling or vulnerability questions, And this might be a question where we invite parents to to show some vulnerability in discussing the fundamental with their kids. So an example with kindness might be, parents, tell your kids a story about a time in your life when you were less kind than you wish you had been. Ask your kids for some advice about what they think you should have done differently. And so this is a really lovely time to you're talking about practicing kindness by acknowledging a place where you fell short on that fundamental earlier in your life and engaging your kids in advice giving to you. So over the course of a week, you're gonna have a series of short conversations with your kids about practicing kindness, and that will all culminate at the end of the week with this reflection. We have a journal feature in our app if you wanna capture some of the great conversations you had. You can record videos. You can record audio. You can just you can record written reflections. And then on Sunday, you'll start the next fundamental and start over again. And if you have 18 fundamentals, you'll do that for eighteen weeks. And then in week 19, you're back to practice kindness with all different questions and different content. And you do that for eighteen more weeks, and then you're back to practice kindness again. And the end outcome is that when you practice something over and over and over again in very small ways, the slow drip, that's how culture is built. Culture is not built by a big one night event or a weekend retreat. Culture is built in the slow, small, steady experiences that reflect

Speaker 1 a clear idea of what you're trying to build. And this is how it works. This is how the system works. And they're repeated over and over and over again. So it goes back to how can you choose that many fundamentals and practice that many fundamentals? Because you're not seeing it once. You're seeing it over and over and over again because ideally, this is a system that you don't use one round through. You use it for hopefully years until this stuff is just so completely embedded into who your family is and how you speak that when you're out and about going for a walk and you see litter in the street and one of your fundamentals is leave it better than you found it, then nobody says, oh, pick that up, or we should pick that up. Or or if you go to pick something up, say, why are you picking that up? It's not yours. None of that happens because we're leaving it better than we found it. We happen to pawn some litter, and we're gonna pick it up because that's one of our family fundamentals.

Speaker 3 We're gonna leave places better than we found them. Yeah. And I think that that shorthand I think the beauty of the behavior description in the fundamentals is that it becomes a shorthand that is automatic to your family. So for example, if you want your kids to be resourceful and you may have find a way as one of your fundamentals, the minute your kid's like, hey, can't figure out how to do this thing, it's like, nope, find a way. And this is how it translates into schools. If you have kids that are practicing find a way at home, you know that kid where you pass out a paper, it's like, how do you do this? I don't know how to do this. It's like, find a way. Try to figure it out on your own before you start asking me for help. This is what we do. We're resourceful. We don't immediately fall to I need help. We figure it out. We find a way. And so the beauty of these fundamentals is when kids practice that at home, they show up in school in really positive ways, and some of them are very specific like include others. Well, if you practice include others at home, when a new kid moves into the school or when there's a kid that feels left out when kids are choosing groups, there's gonna be some kid in your class who's been practicing to include others at home who will automatically just go like, Oh, I noticed that kid just moved in. We should probably see if she wants to eat lunch at our table. And that's because they've been practicing to include others. They have the language in their head and it comes right to them.

Speaker 1 And so as we think about people practicing fundamentals and working with our family culture, we imagine cultural shifts in families, not only families, but parenting is a hard thing to discuss with with other parents because sometimes it feels very, very judgy or or a little bit too comparative. And so if you are working with our family culture and your friends also decide to do that as well, think about what your conversations could be like. What fundamental are you guys on this week? Has anything shown up for you that surprised you? You're having these more fulfilling conversations. But, ultimately, I think for for Steven and I, our big hope is that it has the power to change communities. So as school leaders are thinking about how do we engage parents in the work that we're doing? You can't do PBIS in isolation. It doesn't work. You have to be able to practice it back and forth. And it is not important that families have the same fundamentals. It doesn't matter. Everyone has their own unique combination, will have their own unique combination of fundamentals. It just matters that you're being intentional and you're focused on those. At one point, I heard you mention Wisdom Wednesday, and that is part of how we are trying to keep our family culture a community is that we've decided on Wednesdays, no matter what fundamental you you're on, no matter where you are in your rounds, everyone will receive a two minute video that is just a little bit of parenting wisdom, a little gold there for you to think about. Maybe it's something that in our Family Culture family decided, like, we had this great luck doing this one ritual that was so simple. We wanna share it with all of you. So it could be something like that. It could be a parenting expert who is giving just a little bit of wisdom on how to approach something specific. So Wisdom Wednesday is is the same for everyone every week, and it's designed for us all to take a breath in the middle of the week and just

Speaker 3 get some gold. Yeah. I would also just going back to Nancy's point about schools and school leaders, I think if you're a school leader listening to this podcast, one of the things that we have had really great experiences doing is where schools have invited us either in person or through a webinar to just do a short overview of how to build family culture at home. And whether parents choose to join the Our Family Culture system or not, I think it's very valuable for schools to give parents tools to help them think about how to do better at home. Teachers often complain about how parents need to do this and parents need to do that, but what we have to realize is parents are all doing the best they can with what they have. If you want parents to do better at home, you have to provide them with tools. You have to give them some support in doing that. And so schools have said, why don't you do a webinar with our parents just to talk about how you could be more intentional about your family culture building? Not so much to say you need to join our family culture to do it even if you'd wanna try to do it on your own, but if you want kids to show up better at school, we have to think about as leaders, how do we help parents provide better support at home so those kids are more likely to show up better for us when they get to the school doors.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The intersection with school just to me couldn't be more obvious. I mean, none of the fundamentals are in conflict with each other. Right? They're all complementary. It's wonderful that families can choose different complementing values and have a focus and make that the focus of a conversation. But also, to both of your points here about school, the intersection there could be, you know, a PTO has a book study. And instead of a, you know, a book study, it's let's just be intentional and come to the table and each one of us can talk about fundamentals. Or you can do it at home and bring that, you know, to a biweekly sort of get together, you know, just like I've seen my local school district do with, you know, kids and anxiety and parent groups about cell phone use and all these other kinds of issues. This just allows, again, a more intentional conversation to be had about those fundamentals. And then kids and parents, well, I guess kids are bringing that language into school with them. Hey, the next step might be to work on that with teachers a little bit. Right? What does it mean to I'm looking at my values here. What does it mean to wonder wonder wonder or to stick with it or roll with it or to make a difference? Then you're equipping everybody, right, with this common community based language about, again, habits and behaviors. We don't have to say values. Our habits and behaviors will speak to values and culture that we create. And I I have a question, Nancy, for you in particular because almost four decades as a school counselor, I wonder how would this have changed the conversations, you know, that that you had? I imagine my relationship with counselors when I was in the classroom and sort of the role they had. How would something like this have changed those conversations for you when you were working as a school counselor? Oh, I think it would have changed

Speaker 1 things tremendously just to able to have the language with a parent and say, tell me a little bit about what fundamentals you're practicing at home. Tell what is most important to your family. And then you can take whatever issue surfaces for the parent and talk through it as it relates to their different fundamentals and try and attach it. And frankly, we are spoiled as educators in that we have learned how to build culture. We don't have a choice. You have a group of kids come in each year. You've got to build culture so that you that determines in the beginning of the year what your school year is gonna be like. And so that is natural for people who are educators. Parents don't have that same kind of training. And so just the gift of giving parents the language to be able to talk with their kids such that when they would come in, my guess is they might not come in as much, to be perfectly honest, because they know how to work through some of the things with their kids at home. Whatever the case was, it's like if we had the fundamental language to speak with, then we could talk about, well, what's important to you? Do you want that fixed for your child? Or your kids to bounce back or to keep their cool when something happens? Do you want to teach them how to keep their cool? Because there are mean people. There are people who say things that aren't kind. And so how do we respond to that in the world when that happens? How do we not be reactionary? How do we figure out how to keep our cool when things don't feel great?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Common language leads to common conversations. So I see that as that as the way forward. And, Steve, I'm just curious as well, again, from the experience of as a classroom teacher, how would you have seen this differently had parents had access to this?

Speaker 3 There are things that teachers complain about that they wish their students were better at. Like, teachers get frustrated when a kid doesn't try to use their resources and just immediately starts asking for for help. It's like, you know, let's figure it out as opposed to just ask immediately or practice self reliance is another fundamental. It's like, I can do this on my own. I can figure it out. We have fundamentals that have to do with collaboration, So do your part. So if you want to be the kind of person who you you want to have kids who are like if you're in a group, that's one of the great complaints about groups. It's like, oh, those people don't do their part. So there's all these fundamentals that would actually show up in terms of how kids interact in the classroom in really positive ways. I think also as a if you're a teacher who's also raising kids, I think something very clear will happen if you do this with your family. If you use our family culture with your family, what you'll realize is, oh, I see how this system works, and you will start to apply the same system, the same process to your classroom. So I think actually this will be a the the teachers who choose to use Our Family Culture as a family tool will end up finding it to be very useful as a classroom tool as well to be more intentional about the culture they build in their classroom and a process for making that culture live.

Speaker 2 I so agree. They're just such natural collaborators. It's a good tool for that. I'm curious then too, just from your own personal perspectives then, how has our family culture helped you be more intentional parents of adult kids now? A little bit of a different angle there. And what stories have you heard from other families about how this process has helped them?

Speaker 1 Well, Steven has been using this with his family. He he's got the gift of three adult kids who are who are all very healthy and in good places. For me, personally, I have a son who who is autistic. And so it's a little bit harder for me. However, we still talk in fundamentals. We still my daughter and son and I went through and looked at fundamentals together and talked about them. And it's not as easy, I'll admit, for me to do with my adult children as it has been for Steven, but it's still something that's important to me because this is this is my work now. This is what I'm living. And so my family in particular has worked very hard in the past year just to bounce back. We're we're we're working the bounce back fundamental pretty hard, and sticking together, being being taking care of each other and and being a family.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I would say two things that we observed. One is a lot of parents who started using this immediately reported to us that they're having better conversations with their parenting partner. So like people are saying, first of all have more clarity about what my partner and I share or differ in terms of what's important to us. And this is so so important because sometimes we have slightly different fundamentals that we approach parenting with. So I'll give you an example. I really believe in fight for what's right. I'm a big social justice guy, so I I wanna raise my kids with fight for what's right. My wife is really a big show respect person. Okay? So let's say our kid goes to school and the teacher does something that they think is not fair and our kid challenges the teacher. And then we hear the story and I'm like, oh, good for you. Like, that was awesome. You fought for what's right. And my wife's like, bad for you. You didn't show respect. Right? So what now happens is instead of my wife and I fighting it out, we can both recognize she can say, Steven, I understand. Like, that's cool that we want our kids to fight for what's right. And I can say, Susan, I get it. We want them to show respect too. And now we can say we're having a conversation about how we can tell our kid that's cool that you fought for what's right, but let's talk about how you can do it while showing respect at the same time. How can you do that in a respectful way? So instead of parents fighting out their fundamentals, they can actually have language to talk about them in a healthy way. So we've seen actually real improvement in couples relationships with each other because they have a new way to talk about the things that they're doing with their children. So I think that's one important outcome. I think another really important outcome is that we hear from families that they're having better conversations with their kids. So there's that awkward thing where everyone's on their phone and you see people at a family at a restaurant and everyone's on their phone, they're not talking to each other. What we're finding is that families that are using our family culture are just able to have better conversations with each other because they have more purposeful and directional conversations. I spent my entire career leading great discussions with kids. That's all I did. I was a really discussion based teacher. So now instead of you having to figure out how to have a great discussion with your kids, I'm feeding you. Nancy's feeding you the questions you can ask. We're feeding you this stuff. It's like we're giving you the expert support to have a great conversation with your kids in a way that you might not have known how to do it on your own. So it's a lot of improvement in connectedness and families feeling like we talk to each other, we talk about more interesting things, we talk about more important things, we're more connected to each other. One of the great challenges right now is the challenge of loneliness. A lot of kids feel alone and lonely. A lot of adults do too. And part of the promise of our family culture is you will be closer with your family as a tribe. So no matter how lonely you feel in the world, you always know, like, I've got the Shapiro's. I'm a part of the Covington tribe. I'm a part of the Rapport tribe. We have each other, and we're never totally alone in the world because we are a team together.

Speaker 1 Another piece of feedback we've gotten from from people who've used the system is that they are learning things in Steven mentioned the vulnerability questions that we have where we ask parents to tell a story about a time when they the example he used, is maybe weren't as kind as they as they would have liked to have been. And so what we're hearing from families is that they're learning things about their partner. They're hearing stories that their partner is telling that they never would have heard. But we're sort of getting into those in a way that that makes family members hear things and learn about each other in ways that they never would.

Speaker 2 Couple things have bubbled up for me as you both been been talking, coming back to this idea of, you know, the conversations that exist over those fundamentals. It's not even so much that they're conflicting, but we have to then find the intersection of all of those things. Right? Like, how do each of these values then coexist, or is there, you know, any tension between, say, fighting for what's right or showing respect? When can fighting for what's right actually be a sign of respect or self respect? Or how do we do some of those things together? Coming back to something, Nancy, you had said earlier, right, about the app as a sort of as part of the process, right, as the delivery vehicle for the process. I even think that might sell itself short a little bit, right, if we think about how apps almost become habits. You know, I have a muscle memory with my fingers about where all the apps on my home screen are. If it's on the wrong page or something, I'll I'll hit the wrong one and end up opening something I haven't opened in, you know, a year. But I think, you know, the success of a lot of tools that people use every single day that might be more gamified and things like Duolingo and all these other kinds of things, again, they're just there to help create habits about language learning or about social media use. A big way to break that habit might be just to move that app. So you have to be intentional about finding it in your thing and in that moment you can, oh, I didn't wanna be on Facebook right now. Okay. You could, you know, conceivably replace that that Facebook icon with the our family culture acorn, and that could be a new way to help prompt, you know, some muscle memory around those conversations. So I think don't sell that short of, you know, having that the convenience for the apps that I think maybe a lot of people believe are harmful and replacing that with a positive habit instead. I think there's a lot of value, you know, in that. I think there's a lot of value in making the good things as easy and convenient as, you know, the time consumers, the attention stealing things to have a moment to be intentional with your family.

Speaker 1 No. You're absolutely right. We we lean a lot on on James Clear's atomic habits and and recognizing the power of those small habits that you do. If you do them a little bit each day, that just becomes part of your routine. And we're hoping that our family culture will become an atomic habit for

Speaker 3 many people. The other thing I think is sometimes people think it's ironic that we're delivering this content via the cell phone, which is part of the problem. But the beauty of our app is that the idea of the app is that not that we want you to stay on it for a long time. I mean, idea of Facebook is they're they're gamifying it to try to keep you there all the time because they're selling advertisements there. We're doing the exact opposite. We want you to get on the app, see the question, and then put down your phone and go talk to your kids. So really, ideally, it's a kind of app that you might literally spend thirty seconds or a minute on each day just to get the the nugget and then go have the conversation with your family or do the activity with your family or watch the video with your family. So this is the opposite of most apps which are the longer you stay on it, the more successful they are. We for us, it's the less time you spend on it. Get on it, get the thing, and then sit down with your family and have a great conversation.

Speaker 1 And this is where we brought our combined almost eighty years of experience as educators to to the system is that, look, there are so many decisions to be made about everything every single day all day long. We've curated some really good content for parents to be able to use, not to have to Google, you know, what's a good what are some good conversation topics for my for my family? I mean, that's great. It's great to be able to do that, but it's just not as intentional and as focused. And so and so our goal is really it it sounds trite, but it's not. Our goal is to make the world a better place one family at a time. A couple other things I want to mention about the system is that really, obviously, the best time to teach your kids these things are when they're young, and you just practice it over and over and over again so that because it's harder to to teach new things, especially in the in the teen years. But we are really appealing to all ages. For kids that are very young, we have children's books that are aligned with every single fundamental. And so if what you do for the first couple rounds is you're reading various children's books that go along with the fundamental with your kids, then they're getting it. They're hearing it. They're hearing the way parents are talking with one another. We say, in our introduction, when you start with the app, it's like, parents, the one warning we wanna give you is that make sure that the fundamentals you pick, you're prepared to live. Because if you don't, your kids are gonna call you out on it. And that's a that's a beautiful thing. We want to be able to hold one another accountable for the things that are important to us.

Speaker 2 We've been talking about all of these wonderful, ways that parents, families, kids, schools can connect to their fundamentals. How can people connect with both of you and learn more about our family culture?

Speaker 3 One of the important things is people think I don't know how this is gonna work or if it's gonna work. We are offering a free thirty day trial for anyone who wants. So if you're like, I don't know if this is the right thing for me, jump on and just try thirty days for free. It'll give you time to choose your fundamentals and run through a few weeks of it and see if it's right for you. So there's no risk to do that. The other thing is, depending upon when you're listening to this podcast, we are offering because we're a new company, we're offering a founder's discount to make it really affordable. So it's like less than $10 a month if you use the code founder. So when you go to the app and you register, when you go to the there's a coupon code section, put the word founder in there and it will discount the price for you. So you can go to our website, which is ourfamilyculture.org, and so that will be one thing we'd encourage you to reach out to do that if you wanna talk with us. And that could be to learn more about our family culture or to talk about how we can help support your school if you think that that's an important thing we can do to help work with parents in your school or with your PTO or with groups or organizations in your community. We think that that's one of the really important opportunities is for schools to help support parents, and we would love to be able to to be resources for your parents in your community. Feel free to reach out to us directly. Our emails are nancyourfamilyculture dot org or stevenourfamilyculture

Speaker 1 dot org. We love to hear from people, and we will respond to you. Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Speaker 3 Nick, thank you so much. This was great. It's a pleasure, Nick. Thanks for having

Speaker 4 at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.