"God gives us our children to heal and transform us." - Kyle Wester

In many ways, being a parent is less about our kids and more about our own formation!  When we lean into the vocation of parenthood, God can use every experience with our children to show us His love and to form us into the person He has created us to be.  In this podcast, we talk to Kyle and Sara Wester, counselors and hosts of the podcast The Art of Raising Humans. During our conversation, they explained four different parenting styles that we move in and out of depending on our life circumstances, how our marriage is actually the most important parenting tool we have, and how our understanding of who we are in the eyes of God affects how we relate to our kids.  This podcast is full of great insights for parents and we know you will gain from the Wester’s wisdom.  

• Children need to be taught relationship skills and correct behavior.  The most powerful way they learn is by watching how you relate to your spouse. 

• God gives us our children to heal and transform us.  To love our children effectively, we need to first receive God’s love for us personally. 

• Every conflict with our spouse or children is about expectations.  

• When our child exhibits behavior that is inappropriate for a situation, we need to ask ourselves, “What is this behavior telling me about this child?”

• Discipline comes from discipleship and the foundation of discipleship is relationship.  We all must work on having a deep and rich relationship with our children to form them.  

• There are 4 different parenting styles that we move through depending on our life circumstances.  We don’t always choose what is best, but we can keep in mind the goal of Loving Guidance and move towards that. 

• Recommended books from the Westers:

• Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids by Dr. Laura Markham

• Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline by by Rebecca Bailey

• Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen

• No Drama Discipline by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

1. Are we happy with how we are modeling conflict resolution for our children? How can we do this better? 

2. What in our children do we see in ourselves?  Write these things down.  Do we love these things in ourselves? Why or why not?  

The Art of Raising Humans Podcast Link 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/artofraisinghumans

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/artofraisinghumans?igsh=MXkyOGRwbzJ2ZDF1MQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@artofraisinghumans?_t=8itlE1tnZSF&_r=1

“Lovemaking puts flesh on the vows that we exchange in marriage” - Byron and Francine Pirola

A few years ago in Australia, we met an amazing couple who we immediately wanted to share with our listeners.  Byron and Francine Piroloa from Smart Loving, are on a mission to make marriages stronger all over the world and they are willing to talk about that subject that few couples will tackle - physical intimacy.  We aired this podcast five years ago and it got such a great response that we decided to put it up again for all of you.  Listen in as we talk to the Pirolas about how and why you should make time for sex, how the arousal pattern for men is different from women and why sex gets better and better the longer you are married!  This is a podcast filled with wisdom, but also laughter and honesty.  We hope you will enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed talking to them! 

• Anything precious and unique needs rules to be protected.  That is why the Church gives us boundaries in this area to teach us how to be appropriately vulnerable in our marital relationships

• A person’s sexual prime is in their 20s, but our erotic prime is reached in our 50s. This is a culmination of our relationship and our intimacy that is built over time. 

• Sexual relations can slip into the “recreational” category in our minds when we are trying to survive.  The antidote is seeing sex as a sacred communication that needs to be prioritized. 

• Desire, arousal, climax, resolution is a typical male pattern.  For most women the pattern is different - arousal, or foreplay, creates desire in the woman.  

• We need to work and train our brains to connect with our spouse emotionally, to be present, so the intimacy that we share emotionally and physically. 

• How are we creating a romantic environment in our relationship?  Where are we making space for marital relations?

• How are we opening our hearts to our spouse in lovemaking?  Can we work on being present to our spouse and retrain our brains to focus on them? 

• Free Conversation Starter on Sexual Intimacy

• Smart Loving Marriage Kit

• Catholiccouplesgetaway.com

• Family Board Meeting April Course

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.  Genesis 2:24

Unity between man and woman was God’s original plan, but the Fall not only broke our relationship with God, it also broke our relationship with each other.  But the good news is that Jesus has given us grace in the sacrament of Matrimony so we can have a oneness in marriage that would be impossible otherwise!  With unity, couples can handle anything life dishes out. Without it, even the easy things will seem hard. Couples need to constantly be striving for unity, because if spouses aren’t intentional, those marriages will drift apart!  In this podcast, we will give you three tools - honoring, forgiveness, and vulnerability - that you can use to start moving towards your spouse.  We need to intentionally use these tools to work towards the greater unity within the gift of marriage that God has for us.  

• All couples must strive for unity - if you float along, you will drift apart

• Unity was what we were made for, but the fall introduced distrust into the male/female relationships

• There are three things you can do to move towards unity:  honoring, forgiveness, and vulnerability

• On the scale of Affirmation/Criticism, choose to honor your spouse, even publicly to build them up

• On the scale of Resentment/Forgiveness, choose to forgive them instead of being resentful of their shortcomings

• On the scale of Detachment/Intimacy we need to choose vulnerability and openness to our spouse. 

• On a scale of 1-10, how are we doing in our unity? In which of the three areas can we do better? 

• Which one of these three areas is the most challenging for me?  Why do I think that is?  

• Free Mini-Marriage Retreat:  https://messyfamilyproject.org/guide/mini-marriage-check-in/

• Register for the Family Board Meeting! 

• https://messyfamilyproject.org/course/family-board-meeting/

• Easter Webinar

• Register here….

• www.Catholiccouplesgetaway.com

Vices are our disordered way of fulfilling our God-given good desires. 

So many of us thought we were good people till we had kids, right?  This is because kids expose our weaknesses and we need to be aware of them in order to overcome them.  Listen in as we reveal Satan’s plan for you and lay out God’s great plan of using our rightly ordered desires to develop virtues and live according to His plan.  

The desires that God has put in our hearts for dignity, communion, justice, and peace are all good, but when we try to fulfill them on our own, they can lead to vice, or repeated bad habits.  We do this because we are all fallen, wounded people!  But the good news is that we just need to tap into learning how to satisfy those desires in the best way, which is what God intended for us.  This is a snapshot from our video series we are doing for our Cana90 Fellowship this year.  In that series, each vice gets its own video where we break it down and show how we as parents are particularly susceptible to falling into it.  Join the Fellowship here for the rest of the series! 

• Vices are our disordered desires.  Every vice has a longing or desire behind it and a corresponding virtue to help overcome it. 

• Parents struggle with vices in particular ways that may not have been evident before they had kids.  

• Envy is the longing for Dignity and it comes from the fear that we will not be seen, known, and acknowledged.  We get this from our Heavenly Father! 

• Sloth is the longing for Peace and it causes us to choose a “fake peace” that comes from ignoring problems instead of working through them. 

• Where do I struggle to act?  What situations would I rather ignore than deal with? Write down some ideas.  Try them each day one at a time. 

• What is one thing I can do to make this room/situation/gathering better? How can I be proactive? 

• Think of when someone else was kind to you.  How did it make you feel? 

• List 25 things you can do to make the lives of others around you more pleasant

• Bishop Barron’s series on the Seven Deadly Sins

• https://www.wofdigital.org/seven-deadly-sins-seven-lively-virtues

• Broken Gods by Dr. Gregory Popcak

• https://amazon.com/dp/B00N6PETQ2?ref=KC_GS_GB_US

• Cana90 Fellowship 

• https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

A problem with disrespect from a child always goes back to a dysfunction in the parent-child relationship.

When our sweet children enter the teen years and adolescence is upon them, something happens that tends to cause parents stress and dismay - back talk and disrespect.  Some of this is immaturity on the part of the child and some is simply lack of training in relationships.  It is our job as parents to teach our children how to express their feelings, disagree, and even debate while maintaining an attitude of respect towards us and therefore, other people in their lives.  The family is the training ground for life!  In this podcast we will give you some perspective on the struggles teens have, tell you what NOT to do and explain the Three C’s of responding to a mouthy teen.  Listen in!  

• A disrespectful child is, simply put, someone no one wants to be around. But the good news is that parents can change this!  We can help our child become someone we not just love, but like.  

• Yelling, punishing, taking things personally, and debating with your teen does not work.  Avoid these reactions. 

• Tweens and teens need us to guide them on acceptable ways of speaking to others.  This will help them be successful in many areas of life. 

• CONTROL YOURSELF - If you are triggered by your teen and fly off the handle, ask yourself why and get your emotional life in order. 

• CONSEQUENCES - It is our responsibility to help them see what happens when they don’t control their tongue.  The world’s consequences will be much harder than ours! 

• COACH - We need to point our teens towards adulthood so they can see we are not treating them as a child, we are teaching them how to be an adult. 

• Are we happy with the way that our children speak to us?  Can we identify areas of difficulty with them? 

• What would be a quick, acceptable consequence for our child’s disrespect?  Which one of us would be best to talk to them about this? 

• How can we coach our child to do better? 

Links:

• Link to Cana90 https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

• Link to Beloved Event https://arrayofhope.regfox.com/beloved

A husband and wife may disagree on many things, but they must absolutely agree on this: to never, ever give up.

When we did our listener survey, you asked for interviews of regular families who have raised children through to adulthood with grace and courage.  Well, we have a treat for you!  A few years ago we met Brian and Joanna Simpson of London ONT who have run the Family Foundations Institute for the past 25  years.  They also have 9 children and over 35 grandchildren and they are a witness to the goodness of God despite difficulty and heartache.  In this episode, they tell some of their story, but also give wisdom to young families on what should be the most important things in your home and how to create a home focused on God and loving each other.  We really enjoyed our time with them and we know you will too!  

• Forgiveness in the family is key - modeling it for the children with them and with your spouse. 

• The husband as the head of the household is the one who carries the responsibility in the family, not only authority. 

• Wise spouses realize that the best decisions are done together in unity. 

• When tragedy and suffering happens in the family, as it inevitably will, God can still be present and make something truly beautiful out of it when we trust Him. 

• Personal prayer and trust in God’s love for you is key to building a family of faith and prayer.  

• When our conflict stays in the dark, the Evil One has more power. It is best to be honest and vulnerable, even if you don’t do it perfectly, because then you can work to actively build unity.  

• What things are important to us in our household and how are we communicating that?  

• How do we support each other in our roles as husband and wife/mom and dad in the family? 

Resources: 

• Family Foundations Institute https://famfi.ca/

• Link to Cana90 https://messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

• Link to Beloved Event https://arrayofhope.regfox.com/beloved

Have you ever wanted to stop yelling at your kids?  Be more courteous to your spouse?  Or be more orderly at home?  Enter Super Habits!  These are not just new things for you to learn to do, these are life-changing actions that will make you happier, healthier and more successful in many areas.  In this interview, we spoke to Dr. Andrew Abela, author of the book Super Habits and his wife Kathleen who explained to us how to apply this book to family life.  They gave us some great insights and showed us how Super Habits can be the answer to what we all need in our parenting and marriages.  And the best part is that these habits are already present in us, we just need to activate them.  Listen in! 

• Every virtue is a habit anyone can cultivate, not just a characteristic or personality trait.  We can all grow and change. 

• All new habits create new neurological pathways in our brains, but the advantage of Super Habits is that these are pathways that are native to us already, we already have the “muscles”; we just need to use them. 

• Super habits do three things - they make us happier, healthier, and they have a positive effect on multiple areas of our lives.   

• St. Thomas Aquinas has the best system of organizing the virtues! We all need fluency in the language of virtues. 

• All growth in Super Habits is slow and steady so keep going! 

• Virtue happens when we channel our desires correctly - not squash them. 

• Growth in Super Habits is the answer to “helicopter” or “bulldozer” parenting 

• We need to be aware of the full range of virtues for the full flourishing of the human person. 

• In what ways have we already developed some Super Habits?  How did we do that? 

• What Super Habit will help us in our parenting?  How can we support each other in cultivating it?  

• Superhabits Book, Sophia Press: sophiainstitute.com/product/super-habits/

• Andrew Abela on Linked In: www.linkedin.com/in/deanabela

• Superhabits on Substack: superhabit.substack.com/

• Cana90 - messyfamilyproject.org/programs/cana90/

Beloved Event - arrayofhope.regfox.com/beloved

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. Eph 6:4

In this episode of the Messy Family Podcast, hosts Mike and Alicia Hernon celebrate their 10th year of the podcast and introduce the new studio, setting the stage for a discussion on fatherhood and leadership in the home. They emphasize that while fathers are called by God to lead, many struggle to understand what that truly means in a world that often undermines their role.

True leadership is not about domination but about serving, sacrificing, and guiding with love, following Christ’s example. A father’s success is measured by the unity in his marriage and family, and when discord arises, it signals a need to recalibrate leadership. Mike and Alicia challenge men to overcome passivity, a struggle rooted in Adam’s sin, and to step up, protect, and guide their families with intentional love. Practical steps for dads include pursuing their wives first, taking initiative in family life, loving sacrificially, and leading with unity in mind.

They highlight research showing that a father’s presence has a profound impact on his children’s faith, success, and well-being. While many men feel incompetent in the home, undervalue their influence, or struggle with passivity, Mike and Alicia encourage them to embrace the God-given mission of fatherhood with confidence, knowing that great men and strong fathers are desperately needed today.

Key Takeaways

Husbands are called to lead in the home because this is how God is going to make them holy and you were created to give first to be able to receive.

You know you are leading when there is unity, when you are challenged, and when your wife feels safe.

Men need to go in to battle and fight against the tendency to be passive or to avoid what they do not feel competent at.

Never doubt how important you are in the life of your wife and children - they need you!

Couple Discussion Questions

Are we happy with our roles of leading our family right now? How are we doing?

How can I (wife) support you (husband) in leading our family?

For more information on this and other topics visit: https://www.messyfamilyproject.org/

Families don’t just have a mission, they ARE a mission! 

When we hear “missionary” many of us automatically think of a single person serving in a third world country.  Then we think, “not me!”  But the reality is that all Catholics are called by their baptism to spread the good news of Jesus throughout the world.  We do that first and foremost in our homes, through the pastoral care of our spouse and children, but there are other ways we can spread the Good News to the world. In this podcast, we interview Tim and Maggie Glemkowski, parents with a heart for mission.  Tim most recently led the National Eucharistic Congress and continues to serve as the executive director of Amazing Parish.  He and Maggie share their story of the struggles they have gone through with their calling and the faithfulness of God through it all.  Their understanding of how to be a family on mission for others is inspiring and encouraging.  Listen in! 

Interested in taking your family on a mission trip?  Contact the Family Mission Experience at www.soltfme.org

Since 2018 we have been doing surveys of our listeners to find out who you are, how we can serve you more, and what your needs are.  We have never shared this information with our listeners until now!  Over the years we have had thousands of listeners take this survey and it's interesting to see what has remained the same and what has changed.  We thought it would be encouraging to you to hear that you are not alone!  The struggles that you have told us about are shared by other moms and dads too.  Listen in as we talk about the make-up of most of our listeners, what they told us, and what plans are for the future.  There were also some questions that came up in the survey that we responded to as well.   

Last call for the survey!  Closing Jan 31, 2025  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/T59LDRY

UK Tour - if you are interested in joining us for any events check out our page here!  

www.messyfamilyproject.org/uk-tour-2025