Thank you so much for that! I really hope to bring the Finnish-style communication into the American parenting space, where we tell it like it actually is! Nordic-inspired parenting won't make challenges disappear, but it does make parenting a lot lighter.

And, heh, you are 100% right - that's why I left my husband out of this piece;-) I'm not sure if this is the right way to do this, but I simply changed how I do things. I sort of just let my behavior speak for itself. I announced it in bits with a one-sentence explanation of why it was important.

Perhaps one of the hardest things has been convincing my husband that the kids are capable (and to push them to do things by themselves instead of just doing it for them, when he can... because when he can't which is often, then they keep asking me to do it all, which I can't), and that it's not the kids that need help so much as I in sharing the mental load. That's where boundaries come into play.

And now, we save "family meals" for the weekend. Otherwise, these meals are just too chaotic. I'll talk about how I overhauled our kitchen and eating in my next post!