How She Moms

More About How She Moms

The show description is, Whitney Archibald, a mother of five, is on a quest to find out how different moms solve the same problems. She picks a new topic each episode, and collects ideas from other moms so you can pick and choose what works for you and your family. The length of each episode is about 30 to 45 minutes. It is completely kid ear friendly. It is an ongoing show that drops every Tuesday. 

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Introduction to Whitney & Her Show How She Moms

I’ve always loved writing and editing, and I’ve always loved. Being a mom, and I felt like, so I, I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for a while and I, before that I had a career in magazines and I decided that this really was the perfect intersection of my two careers to make and produce a podcast about motherhood.

And they’re just both two things that I’m passionate about. I always kind of knew I would do something like that, but I always loved listening to podcasts, and so it all just kind of came together. 

Why Whitney Continues to Make How She Moms

I think it’s mostly curiosity, honestly. So I, I used to stand, sit there like, I don’t know, doing the dishes or doing things with my kids, just doing the everyday household things and I would. Think about like, what if I could rise above this neighborhood and.

Lift off all the roofs and see what everybody else was doing in all their houses. We were, we’re all kind of doing a lot of these same processes. We’re, we’re carrying out these systems,  creating these relationships and doing all these things, but. It’s really that whole concept of invisible work.

It’s inside our homes. It’s not a communal thing. This, this raising and managing a family. So I started thinking of the concept of invisible ingenuity because yeah, we’re doing these. All this similar work, but we’re coming at it in different ways. And, my tagline is, different moms solving the same problems.

And, you know, we don’t see all these inventions that people are coming up with all these ideas,  on a regular basis. And so my driving forces, I wanna, I wanna find those, I wanna bring those to light. So that we all can benefit and then try ’em out in our own homes. 

The Vibe of How She Moms

I think it’s, I hope that it’s real first and foremost, that it’s, it’s not this ideal picture of what you would like your home to look like someday. That it’s based in, grounded in, reality where we, sometimes we mess up, sometimes we succeed, we learn from our failures.

So I hope that it is warm and has some humor, but I hope that mostly it shows that I’m real. All the moms I interview are real.  We all have things that we excel at and we all have things that we don’t even prioritize and put on the back burner. And I, I think about,  you know, we talk about this social media world that’s allity fake, but I wanna get to a point where we can all celebrate what everybody else is really good at.

Because there are so many things that we could excel at and so many things on that list of what maybe people would think of as the good mom, that we can use that to liberate us and be like, Oh, well I can’t possibly be good at all those things. I’m gonna pick the things I care about and just be happy that other people are covering the other things.

Why Podcasts Are Great For Moms

Oh my goodness. I think podcasts saved my life. When I was in the young children’s stage, I needed some adult conversation and some mental stimulation. I actually wasn’t even listening to, well, to be honest, there weren’t a lot of mom podcasts back 16 years ago when I started.

But I was listening to this American Life and, you know, some of those early, early podcasts and they were my adult relationships for a while. Those parasocial relationships where I’m their friend, but they don’t know who I am, but they’re a big part of my life.  But I liked, I love learning and I was sad when I graduated from college because I had to stop, you know, taking all these classes.

But then I realized there was this whole world where I could keep learning endlessly from experts and non, you know, like there are so many, so many great resources in the podcast world and endless mental stimulation. 

Whitney’s Favorite Podcast Episodes

Yeah, so I love the episodes where I interview a bunch of different moms on one topic.

And those are always, those always start with how she does something. And then I also, you know, will take,  some of those interviews and, and then make full episodes out of those, so that people can hear more about that person and then that will have their name and the title, How so and so, how Emily does this or How Whitney does that.

But I love the crowdsourcing ones the most because they’re the most fun to write and mostly I just, I love when I get completely opposite responses about how people do things or what they, what they believe about things, because that’s when true discourse and true learning happens. Where and, and when somebody blows my mind, like I have never even thought of approaching it that way.

That’s what I love. And so, when I can bring a bunch of those together and say, Here are these options, but you know what? You can totally do the opposite and this is how it works in this family.  I love that. So those are my favorite type.  I asked my husband because it’s really hard. It’s like picking a favorite child or something, you know?

I like different episodes for different reasons and I was surprised we both picked the same favorite episode, personally and that is the very second episode, which has terrible production quality because it was early.  But it was, it was still probably the only time when I sat down and the ideas came from start to finish and it just flowed.

And I, I actually was crying through tears as I was writing that because it was a very relevant problem at the time. So it’s episode two called Raising Sea Biscuit and I was, I was comparing raising one of my extra spirited children to, the books Seabiscuit and, like the very spirited horse that they were training, and how that’s like one of the best parenting books I’ve ever read about how they trained this spirited horse. And so it may not be like the best sounding podcast, but he liked that one and said that felt the most Inspirational to him, and I definitely felt the most inspired as I was writing it. So that was kind of interesting, we had never talked about that before.