When Jason and I first got married, and actually the couple of years leading up to that, we had two particular families that we got to spend quite a bit of time with. They both had multiple teenagers at that time, and we weren’t even married yet and in our young twenties. But we absolutely loved spending time with both of these families.
We saw in them something that we wanted for ourselves if one day we got to be parents. We saw that, yes there was mess and there was hard relationship stuff and we spent so much time with them, that we saw it all. It was messy and nothing about any of it was perfect, but underneath, and at the core of who they were as families, we could see this special bond they all shared. T
They liked being around each other. The parents were crazy about the kids and the kids really liked each other and they looked up to their parents and seemed to love spending time with them and we saw the kids would go to their parents for advice. And we would watch as the boys, these teenage boys, would wrestle on the floor with their dad and double over in laughter at something ridiculous and we just couldn’t get enough of it. When we would leave after spending time with them, we would talk in the car on the way home about how we just loved being around those families.
What did they have? What was it? Why did we see something so different in those families than in other families we observed? We were really active in our church, and we knew a lot of families who were Christians and loved Jesus, and because my home life as a teenager and into my twenties was so difficult and I didn’t have a family home, I leaned really heavily on different families in my church. I spent a lot of time having dinner in different homes and I got to watch and spend time with all different kinds of families.
But there was something so particularly magnetic about these two families, and as someone in my young 20’s, who had grown up in a dysfunctional family, I desperately wanted to know what it was.
So what was it? What did they have? What were they doing differently? Why were we, this young dating couple who could be out partying or heading to the movies or having dinner with friends…, why were we so drawn to them?
These were the questions Jason and I asked ourselves a lot when we would leave after spending time with them. I wish I could tell you we asked them, but we were young and complete dodos and we didn’t ask. Actually, at the time, we weren’t even sure that it mattered and we didn’t even know if we would have kids of our own. But it wasn’t until we moved to the Midwest with our one year old son and his little brother on the way and began to build a life and family that we realized these families had left an indelible mark on us.
There is so much I could unpack here. We could be here all day as I share stories about these two families and things we remember, and how all of that impacted the parents that we are today.
But for today, I want to share with you the two most formational things we’ve adopted that we saw in them. These are absolutely foundational in the way we have built our family and implementing these things has resulted in what we’d hoped – a close knit, bonded, for each other kind of family. One of the most common questions I get asked when I’m with the younger moms I mentor in person is: “How are y’all so close? Why do your kids seem to like you and each other so much?” In fact, this is one of the questions I got this past Monday during our Question Box time over on IG. And I love that question because it means others see in us what we’ve worked hard to produce.
It is so important to me that I say this before I share anything else here:
My kids do not always like me. They don’t always like our house and our rules and the way we do things. We are flawed parents who are doing the best we can most days and we make a LOT of mistakes. But, these two things are so important to me and to us and have been SO effective in our family that I want to share them with you right out the gate here on this podcast. And, they aren’t original with us. We learned them by watching others ahead of us.
These two things that I’m about to share with you are the two that we took with us and our baby to Michigan and began to implement immediately when we had a one year old and a newborn. That’s how impactful watching other parents do this was on us.
1. We prioritize dinner together around the table. There isn’t anything in our family life that has been more bonding, more special, grown our love for one another, helped us champion each other and taught us to love people well than our time at our kitchen table. It isn’t really about our specific table that sits in our kitchen, but it actually kind of is.
Let me tell you a little story about our table.
Jason, my husband and I had just gotten married and we didn’t have much money at all and our one year anniversary was coming up. I was working really hard in downtown Baltimore in this amazing office that overlooks the harbor and Jason was working hard from home at his new job and traveling quite a bit for work. So he was in and out of the house week to week and the week or so before our anniversary, he came to me and said “Hey Sarah, I’m going to handle all the laundry this week. I’ll take care of it all so that you can just not even have to worry about any of it.” We shared laundry responsibilities like we still do today, and I remember thinking to myself “Now that is a good husband right there.” We were basically newlyweds and very much in love but “I’ll take care of the laundry?”
I said, “Absolutely 100% go for it.”
I left for work every day that week and never did any laundry and didn’t go into our laundry room that was off of our family room. It was kind a like a storage room and there was really no reason for me to go in there. I mean, my guy was taking care of all of the laundry.
I came home from work that Friday in December, just two days before our one year anniversary, and there were flowers and a card sitting in the tiny little nook in our kitchen. I read the card and opened it up.
The card said, “There’s something for you out on the back patio.”
I was kind of puzzled and walked through our family room and pulled back the sliding door and on our back patio was sitting the Restoration Hardware farmhouse table that I had been wanting and that we could never ever have afforded.
Only it wasn’t.
It was unfinished and unstained but it had those four chunky legs I loved and this beautiful wood tabletop and there was a white piece of paper taped to it. I walked over to it and read the note and it said:
“I made this for you. We will go out tomorrow together and pick whatever stain you want.”
It turns out, he had been building it and working on it all week long in our laundry room so that I wouldn’t see it. And during the day when I was downtown at work, he would pull out the table onto our back patio and continue building it and working on it and he finished it that Friday when I got home from work.
Why am I telling you this story? Well for one, it’s one of my favorite Jason Short stories. I am so proud of that guy who was 25 years old and didn’t have Pinterest or fancy plans for how to build a table, and didn’t have the money to buy his young wife what she so wanted, so he scoured the Internet, figured it out, and gave his girl a tremendous 1st anniversary gift.
But more than that, I am sharing this with you today, because that table, 21 years later, still sits in my kitchen.
And it has been our table from Baltimore as newlyweds to the Midwest as new young parents, to North Carolina with a house full of teenagers. It has lived in seven different homes, traveled thousands of miles on moving trucks and been with us as we’ve brought every one of our babies home from the hospital. This table that cost a whopping $150 of wood to build in 2002 has been absolutely foundational in our family life.
I would be hard-pressed to find anything else we do as a family that means more, fills us more, changes us or bonds us more than dinner every night around this table.
This is the place where we share our heartaches with each other. Where we talk about hard days at school and triumphs in friendship. This is where we’ve laughed at babies in highchairs and learned that spilled milk is just no big deal. It’s where we celebrate successes and my lip quivers when any of us share our failures. It isn’t about the fanciness of the food we eat here, but it’s totally about the food too. It’s where we eat grandma‘s roast beef and mashed potatoes and tell and retell stories about grandma and grandpa‘s house when we do. We pray for each other here and we make Christmas lists and draft for family fantasy football and we’ve played hundreds and hundreds of games together on this table.
And this is the table where we have taught our kids to love people well. In the 21 years that we’ve owned this table there have been countless faces, countless families gathered around this table with us. We have squeezed in chairs and extra folding chairs and barstools, and we’ve had babies on laps and toddlers and kids and teenagers and we’ve had singles and young couples eat and laugh and cry with us. When we first moved into our current home seven years ago, we invited a family in transition to live with us and we all squeezed around this table together for dinner every night.
Our kids have learned at this table not only to champion one another, but to champion the people that we love by listening to their stories, and learning how to engage with adults.
All five of our children have been eating dinner with other adults and other kids at this table for their entire lives. We have had so many failures as parents, but one of our greatest triumphs is watching our kids talk with and have conversations with adults. They learned to do this around our table because our real, actual life prioritized dinner there and taught them how to do this.
You don’t need a table that has sentimental meaning etched into the wood grain. But a place that is central to your home, where you gather and share and talk, and where your family life revolves around coming to the table together, not your busy life dictating that there is no time for it.
Making time around the dinner table a priority in your life will absolutely bond your family like nothing else. We’ve had takeout here and pizza and more boxes of kraft mac and cheese than we could ever count and it hasn’t been about the actual food but it’s also, as I mentioned before, really been about the actual food sometimes. There is no place else where our kids can get dad’s burgers or mom‘s spicy shredded beef and tomatoes. And for the rest of their lives, when they come home. And they come sit at this table, it will in so many ways, be the table that shaped them.
I really want to say this because I think it is so important. We have five very busy and active kids. We have football players, which means from April until December, they practice every single day, including Saturdays. We have kids who do swim team and serve at church during the week and on the weekends and we’ve had kids play baseball season after season with multiple nights of practice and games. So in some seasons, the frequency each week that we could gather around the table for dinner has been less frequent than in other seasons. But this is when we adopted Saturday family breakfast and when we protect what we call “Sunday dinner”, a mid afternoon lunch, has become the place where we gather, and when our door has flung open to others.
I would never heap guilt on you for being in a season where having dinner together as a family is really difficult or is barely possible at all.
Because we have been there and I get it.
But I will forever stand on this: gathering around the table as a family for dinner will absolutely knit you together, transform your relationships with each other, give you a place to love and serve other people well, make your kids more compassionate listeners, and bond your family.
We saw it in the couples we looked up to. And we wanted it for our family and we now see exactly why it was so crucial to the families we watched do this well and why they prioritized it and we wanted our family to be like this.
Our dinnertime table? It holds so many things we love and value:
It’s prayer and seeing each other place our trust in God when life throws us curveballs.
It’s wide open windows into our kids hearts and souls. “Alex didn’t invite me to his birthday party. All of my other friends went. Why doesn’t he like me?”
It’s learning to listen, learning to open up, learning that you’re loved, and to give love freely. It’s encouragement and faithfulness. It’s I’ve got your back and I know you have mine and like we talked about in last week’s episode, it’s “I’m so glad you are for me.”
Why is this so important for young moms and young parents? Because you can begin building this foundation now. While your kids are little and while their favorite food is fruit snacks and not chicken and vegetables. From the time our kids were in high chairs, we have gathered around this table in this way. We didn’t eat in front of the TV, and we still don’t now. We didn’t make a separate meal for our kids and us eat later. This might all seem so traditional, and maybe even sound old-fashioned, and while I can tend to buck up against some of those things, especially traditions that are NOT helpful, this concept is so powerful in creating a family life where you are bonded together. Where you learn so many essential and important life lessons, and where you instill in your kids something that they will carry with them throughout their lives, and that is this:
For the rest of your life, gathering around the table, sharing a meal and sharing your lives with others is one of the best ways to develop rich, meaningful and bonding relationships.
2. We intentionally celebrate our kids as unique individuals.
When we were newly married, and spending a lot of time with the two couples I’ve been talking about, we watched them do this extraordinarily well with their kids. These two couples were masterful in the way they celebrated each of their kids individually. This might seem counterintuitive to creating a bonding family culture because aren’t we all just supposed to be one big happy family? I mean, isn’t the idea of all of us being bonded together that we just rally around a common interest and like the same things and like to go to the same places and if we can do that, won’t that be what bonds us? Isn’t it really just about time together?
Occasionally it is. But I have yet to meet a family where everybody all likes the same things, likes to do the same activities, and wants to do the same stuff.
This is true from the time they are born, right? Babies and toddlers and little kids and teenagers are all so unique and it’s one of those things as a mom that absolutely blows my mind about my kids. It’s incredible to me that all of my kids in our particular family actually share such similar DNA and come from the same biological parents and they could not possibly be more different from one another. But one of the things that we’ve learned and one of the things that has contributed to us having a culture around here where our kids love and celebrate each other is that WE, as parents, intentionally celebrate the differences in our kids. We model for them what it looks like to cheer for and love someone who is so different than you are and likes completely different things than you like. And what this does is that it then helps our kids learn to cheer for and support their siblings and learn this incredible life skill of cheering for and supporting people that are completely different than they are.
Let me help illustrate some of how this has works and what it looks like for us.
We take our kids to New York City just about every Christmas. Jason and I both love New York City and it’s been so fun to share it with our kids for the last 10 years or so. Every year when we sit down to plan the trip, we go through all the different places we could potentially go, and we think about each of our kids, individually, and how they may see or enjoy that activity. For example, we love to go to Central Park. If Jason and I were in New York City together, just the two of us, we would walk hand-in-hand through the park and take in the beauty and stroll around and people watch and just enjoy the beauty of the park there.
But when we go to Central Park as a family, we take a football.
Because we have boys who absolutely love to play football. In all of the years we’ve been going to Central Park, I don’t think we have ever seen anyone else there with a football. But seeing Central Park through our sons’ eyes and bringing that football, it has made them absolutely fall in love with it. Could they have just enjoyed Central park for the beauty of the park? Probably. I suppose that would be a reasonable expectation of them.
But when we are planning with them as individuals in mind and thinking about them and what they might love to do there, it’s such an easy thing to throw a football in our backpack for the day. Our kids have watched us model for them what it looks like to think of them as individuals. And it’s teaching them to see their siblings the same way. When we went to the Harry Potter store in NYC for the first time, our two kids who love Harry Potter had the time of their lives and our other kids? What they LOVED about being there was watching their siblings love it. We watched those two amazing couples in our younger dating days absolutely nail this. They had multiple kids and we got to watch them love their kids individually so well and so differently that they all ended up rallying around each other more than they rallied around any specific THING.
If everybody in our family is gonna collectively love something, like NYC, it is so powerful for them to know and experience being seen and loved individually within that thing.
As parents, this takes intention. It isn’t, “We’re going to New York City and we hope you like it because we’re spending a lot of money here.” We spend a lot of time thinking and planning for each individual kid and trying to see the trip through their eyes. And in that, the kids get to celebrate each other, they get to cheer for each other, and they learn yet another really important skill: That life is not all about them.
You can start this so early with your kids. Even at a really young age, they are so observant and malleable and what a beautiful gift to give your kids: a training ground for seeing and loving other people well.
This really does take a whole lot of intention on our part as parents because it won’t just naturally happen. The families that we have watched go ahead of us, even the really big families that have incredible relationships with each other, the parents have been really intentional about creating a family culture where everyone could thrive, each person, each unique child, was celebrated for who they were as individuals.
And what’s really awesome about that is that they are being trained to be people who see and love well the people God’s given them to love. Their family becomes their training ground. If they can do these things well with their siblings who annoy the crap out of them every day, they can learn to love anyone.
We were so inspired from very early on in our marriage as we watched these couples celebrate their kids. We watched them very practically invest in their kids individually and encourage them in the things that they really loved.
I remember having this conversation at Denny’s (Do you remember Denny’s?!) Anyway, I remember having this conversation with the dad in one of these families. He was talking to us about how he was about to invest in golf lessons for his son because his son just loved golf so much. He was telling us about how crazy expensive golf lessons were but that he was going to do this with and for his son.
Everyone in their family was incredibly artistic. They were musicians and artists and so talented in so many artistic ways. These golf lessons? He wanted to invest in them because he wanted his son to know that he saw him and understood him, and wanted to love him in a practical and real and tangible way. They had four children and they were in Christian ministry and finances were tight. And it impacted me so much that I distinctly remember this conversation today because we had been living life with them and we saw and knew that these lessons would be a sacrifice.
But what we talked about in the car on the way home with upset stomachs from eating at Denny’s was that if God ever gave us kids, we wanted to love our kids this way.
Letting them choose something that they love and supporting them in it and spending our money on it even if it was inconvenient, and even if it didn’t seem to fit in with what we wanted to do ourselves? These were the kind of parents that we wanted to be.
I want to say this here because it’s so, so important:
We have said no to things over the years. Our kids have wanted to do certain activities, whether on a trip or more frequently in the rhythm of our family life, and we have said no but every time we have said no, we have evaluated it based on this question.
Are we saying no because it’s inconvenient for us or are we saying no because that no is a yes for our family which is ultimately a yes for this child in a much bigger way?
Because you can “activity individualize” your kids right out the door with everyone going in different directions and nobody ever being home for dinner and everyone running around town like crazy all the time at the expense of them knowing what it means to be part of a family, and all the benefits that come from learning to live with different people. And love them and cheer for them and just the powerful collective good that comes from being part of something bigger than you are.
But we do everything we can to say yes. Not only because we want to celebrate and love our kids as individuals within our bigger family, but because of what it does in our other kids.
When someone has a game in our family, we all go.
If one of our kids is on the swim team, we all go. And we stand poolside and we cheer like crazy even though swim meets are the longest, wildest things you’ve ever been to in your whole life.
One of the most essential pieces of all of this is that when our kids are living out their dreams, our family rallies around them. We do not go in all different directions so that this kid can be in this activity and this other kid can be in that activity and we’re basically all broken apart as a family going in one million different directions because we said yes to everything for everybody. We intentionally make time to be there for one another, to cheer for each other in the stands, to go to music performances and art shows and football games and if someone in the Short family is doing anything at all, the rest of us are almost ALWAYS there to cheer.
I want my kids to grow into adults that love each other well and have spent a lifetime cheering for one another in all of their uniqueness and differences.
And that as they step out into a world with so many different and colorful people, that their hearts have been trained to see ‘different’ … as good.
And to know how to celebrate someone who is different than they are because they’ve been practicing for it their whole lives.
And if motherhood has taught me anything about the human spirit, it’s to cheer as loudly for the quiet one in the corner with the paintbrush and easel as I do for the rowdy ballers under the hoop. And to teach my kids to do the same.
I want to circle back around here to New York City.
Two years ago, one of our sons was scheduled to have major knee and ankle surgery and spend six weeks in a long leg cast. His surgery was scheduled for early November and sadly, I mean really sadly. like mom melted down sadly, the night before, the hospital called and his surgery had to be rescheduled for late November. We had planned a surprise trip for our kids to NYC for the few days before Christmas and we thought he’d be out of his cast for that trip.
We might be nuts, but we decided after talking to his doctor and getting his approval that we’d go on our trip with our son in a wheelchair. Now if you know anything about New York City, it requires a lot of walking and a lot of maneuvering through the subway and crowded streets and crowded EVERYTHING, and it isn’t really conducive for anyone in a wheelchair. It makes me sad that it’s this way because we really should be doing better in our bigger cities to make them better for our communities of people who need assistance. But that is a discussion for another day.
That trip, the one we took with our son in a wheelchair, will forever be seared on my heart as one of my favorites with my family.
Because I watched my two football playing teenage sons carry their little brother in his wheelchair all over New York City. Up and down dozens of subway stairs. They maneuvered him through crowds and moved people out of the way so that he could get his favorite cookies at his favorite stand in Bryant Park and they carried him up and down unexpected obstacles for three straight days in the freezing cold and I watched them absolutely love and serve their brother so that he could enjoy that trip as well.
People would stop us and kindly remark to us what they saw the boys doing, carrying their brother all over in his wheelchair. But I want to tell you that this scene didn’t happen on accident and it wasn’t born in our two oldest boys when we landed in NYC.
This happened because we watched other families do this well, and we wanted to be like them and now we watch our kids rally around each other no matter what they’re doing.
On the football field, in the pool on Tuesday nights during a swim meet, on a stage, or walking down the stairs with a new Lego masterpiece, our kids have learned that each individual in this family matters. Their individual lives and likes and circumstances matter. And this has knit us together as a family, not because we all like the same things and like to do the same things, because we absolutely don’t. We are all so different.
But because celebrating the individuality of the different people in our family is actually this critical piece that bonds us together like nothing else. It’s upside down and it seems counterintuitive, but THAT is what’s so awesome about it.
You have, as young parents, as young moms, the ability to create this kind of culture in your family by developing this skill in your kids from a very young age. We didn’t do this because we were really smart young parents and had figured it all out and knew exactly how our kids were going to turn out. We did this because we watched other families do it and do it well and they taught us and these are the kind of parents we wanted to be and it’s the kind of culture we wanted to foster in our family.
Those are two foundational things that have helped us create a close family where we’re all bonded together and are for each other.
- We prioritize dinner around the table together.
- We celebrate our kids as unique individuals.
I want to encourage you today as you think about building your family and creating patterns and schedules and making hard choices on how to spend your time and what you say “Yes” and “No” to – to think about how you can prioritize dinner for your family as often as possible, and how you can proactively, and with intention, celebrate and love your kids individually and teach them how to do that with others too!