Join host Marina as she explains her personal journey to homeschooling. Discover historical insights into how various figures have influenced education, something once reserved for the working class. The numerous benefits of homeschooling, its efficiency, and the richness of personalized education it offers are understated and Marina shares her candid journey from traditional schooling to choosing to homeschool her son, providing valuable tips on curriculum selection and how to blend academics with real-life experiences. She tackles the emotional aspects of teaching and the critical role of family dynamics, all while underlining the research-backed academic and psychological advantages homeschooled children enjoy. This episode serves as a wealth of encouragement, resource recommendations, and practical strategies for parents interested in homeschooling or searching for alternatives to public education. Tune in to 'Work Like A Mother' to see if homeschooling could be a good fit for your family.

Mentioned in this episode:

Find my shopping list for homeschooling here: Amazon

The Call of the Wild and Free

Oh Childhood, Where Did You Go? (Excerpt from The Call of the Wild and Free)

Teaching from Rest

The Four-Hour School Day

Marina Tolentino

https://www.marinatolentino.com/

IG: @marinattolentino_

YT: @marinatolentino

Newsletter: https://marinatolentino.myflodesk.com/worklikeamother

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Transcript:

You all right? On this episode, we're going to get into the nitty gritty of homeschooling, which might not be a topic you'd think we'd talk about with career and success, but it definitely is a part of 2024 culture and why more entrepreneurs are choosing homeschool than ever before. We've recently decided to go down this journey, and I'm going to share just some fun statistics with you. And then, just like our personal story with school and what it's been like here in Hawaii and the crazy amount of moms that I've met in the last two weeks who are also choosing to homeschool, or at least thinking about it and about to take the plunge. So a lot of good takeaways from today. I hope you guys can take a pen and take some notes if this is something that's already been planted in your mind. So quick recap of who I am. If this is your first time falling into the channel or on the podcast. My name is Marina Tolentino, and I'm a real estate agent by trade.

So I've been doing this. I'm going on year four now, and I help about 22 to 25 families a year either buy or sell a home. I help manage a team of agents here in Hawaii, and then I also have a honey company called Tolentino Honeyco, so I manage that as well with my husband. We have about 75 beehives on the west side of Oahu, and we really just pride ourselves on giving back from the land what is so good, which is our raw honey. And then previous to doing real estate, I've had, what, three companies, bought them, sold them, et cetera, created them, and dissolved one. And so I've had over a decade of experience on this entrepreneurial ride. I've made it through a decade of hustle culture, and I'm now on this new journey of trying to figure out a better way, but I can't do it by myself. And so part of this podcast, the reason behind it, part of the YouTube community, is to find like minded thinkers and link arms together on this journey of motherhood.

So let's kind of dive into homeschooling. So, quick background. I actually have a bachelor's degree in science of human development with an emphasis on early childhood education and a minor in special ed. So technically, I could be a certified preschool teacher, should I choose to. I did this right out of college for about six months in Portland, Oregon. Loved it, but also could instantly see the burnout in every teacher's eyes. And I just knew motherhood was a calling of mine. And I didn't want to waste all of my good mothering years.

Not waste, but use them up essentially, on other people's children. I wanted to use the skills that God had given me, the passion that I had for children on my own children. And so I decided to tap out of that market. Unfortunately, didn't use my degree. Ended up moving up to California, worked in cafes and got into the wedding planning field there. But to say that I have some background in education, so there's a little bit of a confidence booster when it came to make this decision for my family. And then over the last, I don't even know, six months I've been having this tug and pull and this calling to bring my third grader home. So lots quick backtrack on where we've come through.

So preschool age. Starting at age two and a half, we put our son into a public preschool, I guess you could say. And he went there for two years. Loved it. He was very well advanced. By the time he graduated preschool at age four, he was already doing his whole Alphabet. Could write his name, like doing really well above and beyond. The teachers were giving him homework because he just loved to write.

And so we thought, yes, we have this special student going into kindergarten. He's going to be amazing. And sure enough, he is amazing. But he was kind of advanced for entering kindergarten. Then we decided to put him into a private christian school. Did that for K through two or like part of two. And that one was an interesting one. It's a very small school.

So K through two was about eight kids and their teacher was the principal. Like, this is how small it was. But he got a good experience of a traditional school setting, although smaller. So that was really great. We did enjoy it. There was a couple of issues, but we just kind of glazed over it because we understood he was getting good attention for the classroom size and had a great time with his friends. So lots of socialization, but there was tuition associated with that one. That was the only con.

Then fast forward this last two years. We put them into public school a little bit farther from home, and it's been a wild ride is all I can say. So transitioning into second grade out of the smaller school, we instantly went from eight kids in a classroom up to almost 25 kids in a classroom. In the second grade. There was like 280 students, so hundreds and hundreds of students per grade level. And now he's just the number, is what we felt instantly. So there's one teacher assigned to 25 kids with all ranges of behaviors and backgrounds. And I think in second grade, we had a better experience.

Like, I really enjoyed his teacher. I felt a lot of heart and compassion, and there wasn't very many behavioral issues. But then fast forward to third grade, which is where we're at today. There's been a number of things going on at school, so more exposure to, I guess, negative behavioral issues, where it's excused because the kid is labeled with behavioral issues. There's no discipline associated with it, like punching and hitting and kicking and slapping, like, very violent actions, and people just say, oh, boys will be boys, or that kind of thing. There's also been a number of other things that I'll get into, but now we just kind of had this issue two weeks ago where something else happened at school, and it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back on my heart, and I just couldn't even fathom putting him into public again for another day. And so within 24 hours, I had turned in my paperwork to the public school and just said, hey, here we go. Here's our notice to home school.

And, you guys, I had no plan, and I wouldn't advise that this is the way to do it, necessarily. But I will say it was such a strong pull and tug on my mama heart, that gut intuition that I just knew this is the right thing for this season. And I'm not saying that everyone should do it this way or that it's right for every family, but for us in this season, this is what we've chosen to do. So then I went into, I mean, gosh, six to seven nights of almost all nighters, trying to learn everything I could about homeschooling today. What are all the options? What are all the curriculum? Got totally overwhelmed and super emotional. And it wasn't until I talked to a friend that next day, who has five girls at home and is homeschooling them all and does a successful business, that I was like, wait a minute. It's actually not that hard. I totally made this up in my mind and this be this impossible situation.

But the real truth is, there are families doing this and have been doing this for generations and decades and with more than one kid for years and years and years. And so all I had to do was connect with a couple of women who gave me really good encouragement and permission and grace to just do it slowly and do it our way. There's no one right way to homeschool, or I guess I will just jump into this now some of the issues that we decided to home school was in my frustration with the school was, number one, that time revolved around the school schedule. So that meant planning our vacations, our morning drop offs, our pickups. All of that revolved around the school. We didn't have any say about when school was or how long school was going to be. Like it was a set schedule, and we had to live around that schedule. So if we just take that analogy with entrepreneurship, I am never going to be an employee again, to be honest.

I love my freedom, I love my flexibility, and this was one area of our life that I just felt like I didn't have control. The school had control over his day, and I had to abide around that, and it just was this friction point in our family. Number two was that I missed him, to be honest. Missed. So he would take the bus, he would wake up at 530, we'd walk outside by 615, and he's on the bus by 06:25 a.m. Then he goes to school, he gets out of school. We had him in an after school care program, and I'd pick him up by five. So he's gone from 630 to five every day.

By the time we get home, it's 530. We had dinner on the table, an hour of free time or whatever. Then it's bedtime routine, and he's out. So maybe I'm seeing him a total of two to 3 hours a day on Monday through Friday, and it just wasn't enough to feel like I had a grasp on him, to be honest. Like, he was at school majority of the time. And this is another reason that there's just more influence on him significantly outside of the home than what mine and Ryan's influence was. And I was starting to see this through some of the conversations we were having, some of his attitude. He's just being shaped by other people, and it was just something that my heart was wrestling with that, hey, I don't know if I align with that anymore.

And in this season of life, I'm not in a mentality where I need to basically put him in a box so that I can take care of business. But now I'm in a season of mothering is more the bigger priority, I guess, and really just reconnecting with him and slowing down to savor childhood, which is something I'll talk about in a little bit. But it just felt so rushed, so hurried. It's like every day you got to rush out the door, and then we got to rush home and there's never a moment to pause and just be present with your child is what I felt like. Another issue was that the exposure to technology, violence, language and sexual topics above his appropriate developmental age was recurring. Out of his third grade class, I think there was two kids that didn't have a cell phone and he was one of the two. And they have unrestricted access on the Internet to phones. So this was a huge issue and something we had to talk about multiple times.

Internet safety. Right. What do you do when a kid shows you something that's not appropriate? These kids are eight at this old being exposed to many, many things that developmentally they don't even know how to process. And my mama heart just wanted to protect him a little bit. Not to keep him young or to keep him a baby, but just to keep him eight. Just to realize like, hey, you're eight. Let's just keep you at this age and not be talking about twelve and 13 year old things, but let's keep it at the eight year old level. And then again, just the violence and the language stuff.

I mean, public school is public school, and we all know what that means, but there is a time and a place and just realizing what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. And if I could kind of protect him a little bit, not shelter him, but protect him from some of that, it was something we wanted to do. The last thing on here, one of the reasons was just disagreeing with the way that the school was disciplining children. So the straw that broke the camel's back was that they started to take away recess. And to me that's like a non negotiable, like, eight year old boys need to run, they need to get outside, they need to get that burst of energy out. They need to go, go. And what was being implemented was this hour by hour scoring system where they had to rate themselves of a one to three, how their behavior was if they didn't get all threes and their recess was taken away, and they just sit at their desk with their head down and that was it. I was like, nope, we're done.

I got super emotional about it. And like I said, without a plan, we just decided we're going to figure this out as we go and go from there. So let me just share some Instagram real statistics that I found. I found this real that went through it. And then I did fact check it last night of, like, what are the real numbers? So in 1970s, there was 13,000 homeschoolers, which is, like, not that many. That's a very, very minute part of the population. Right. And we have to remember the big push on public schooling really happened the 30s through the 50s.

So these are kids of the 70s, right? 1980s, there's now 200,000 homeschoolers. 1990s, there was 850,000 homeschoolers. By the 2000s, there's 1.5 million homeschoolers. By the 2010s, there's 1.7. And by 2020s, there's 5 million homeschoolers, or about six to 7% of american children. So in the last six years, we've pretty much more than 50. I don't even know how many times x that is 1.7 million. Up to 5 million.

Like a huge jump. I think two to three times growth. And what I'm noticing, and I don't know if this is God orchestrating it in my life, but once a day almost, or every other day, I'm meeting another homeschooling parent just through the woodwork or through a DM, and they just happen to drop that. They homeschool. And I'm like, wait, what? You too? And I never would have guessed. They have this super successful business. They're very well known, and lo and behold, they're doing the same program in their family. Or I just guessed out of the blue to do this curriculum because I watched a YouTube video and then my friend is doing the same curriculum, and it just is so many things aligning and puzzle pieces that it's really inspiring and encouraging to keep going.

And like I said, we're only on week two of this, so this is very new for our family, but already I'm so encouraged to keep going, and then I just want to roll through some fun statistics. So Business Insider had this article titled Homeschooling could be the smartest way to teach kids in the 21st century. And the reason why is this research suggests homeschooled children tend to do better on standardized test. They stick around longer in college, and they do better once they're enrolled. So if one of the things holding you back or the stereotype is that homeschooled kids aren't as smart or they aren't going to do well in college, they aren't going to get into admissions, that's completely false. There's actually another article that I found last night that said admissions is actually targeting homeschooled children. They want more homeschooling children in their colleges for those reasons. And so I think that's an interesting fun fact.

Another one I found was this article titled the opinion on how homeschooling became the biggest trend in american education. And again, this goes back to those figures that students increased 51% in homeschooling between 2017 and 2023. So a 51 increase in that and part of that is the pandemic. But it stayed on. It's not like it dropped back off after 2021, 2022. This is the fastest growing rate of homeschoolers we've ever seen in history in the last hundred years. And you have to question why that is right. What is happening in public schools and private schools that's making more and more families choose this way to educate? Another statistic was that psychology Today published a piece in 2021 that said most studies find that homeschooled children tend to have a higher college GPA than children from conventional schools.

And in addition, most studies have found no difference between homeschooled and conventional students and college grad rates. So again, that myth that they're not going to be educated well, they're not going to have good success rates in college is completely false. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, homeschoolers typically score 15% to 30% higher than public school students on standardized test. And the average score for homeschoolers ranges between 85% to 87%, while public schoolers only score around 50%. So even though these kids are at home, they are testing way better than public schools. Another fun fact was that 98% of homeschoolers tend to participate in an average of five extracurriculars a week. That's a lot of activities. So studies have shown that homeschooled students are more likely to participate in these extracurriculars than traditional schools.

And one of these reasons is because they have the time to. So one of the things I'll go into later is the two hour school day, which leaves a whole rest of the day to do fun stuff or things that are interested by the child. So if we're doing five extracurriculars, that's a lot of things that this child can be learning outside of the books, right? It's extra exposure. Another one said 87% of peer reviewed studies on social, emotional and psychological development show that homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in conventional schools. So their mental health is better, 87%. And then if we think about history of schooling, and this is something I've kind of dove into with the books on the binging at night of, like, what is the history of school? What did it look like 100 years ago? We have to remember that in 1905, J. D. Rockefeller started the general education board.

Shortly thereafter, Carnegie, Guggenheim, Mellon, Morgan, and Vanderbilt joined his efforts. And their strategy was to keep the working class from controlling public education. Before public school was created and made mandatory, everyone was homeschooled. So let's just perspective shift. 115 years ago, everyone is homeschooled. And it wasn't until Rockefeller and all of these billionaires, these entrepreneurs, decided to put this education board together to create workers. I went deeper, dive into this. But then we go into Bill Clinton in the 2000s, passed another bill that talked about creating the working class and keeping them poor.

It's not to keep them poor, but literally to keep them in middle class. Like public education is for middle class workers. And so when we think about that, you have to question, if I could choose anyway, how would I choose it? If I could do school anyway, how could I choose it? It just gets more and more fascinating the more I dove into this so fun, famous people who are homeschooled, if we want to know people like Tim Tebow, Justin Bieber, Thomas Edison, Venus and Serena Williams, Theodore Roosevelt, the Jonas Brothers, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the list goes on. And even Elon Musk is homeschooling his children. He sees it as a way to encourage his children to think critically outside the box and pursue unconventional paths. So all those people, I mean, those are obviously historically famous people for good reason, but they enabled them to pursue their interests. When I think about these people, these are people who have specialized crafts, like music or like sports, and enabled them to do school in their way. When I was deep diving into this, I'm sure you're thinking, well, how do I even figure out if this is right for me and my family? Right? Like, how do I make this choice? You got to do your own research, number one.

So I went deep dive into a couple of books. One that was highly recommended is called the Call of the wild and free, which is right here, actually. So this one, super good. And I wanted to read a little excerpt out of it at the end of this episode, just so you can kind of get a mindset shift of this one. Super good. She talks about the history of schooling. She talks about their own experience, a lot of the myths and common disbeliefs about homeschooling and what it's actually like. And again, just taking it out of the mindset frame of a minivan of six kids with jean skirts into 2024, with technology today and with social media, there is a whole different world out there of ways to homeschool.

And that's what's really exciting. Another one was teaching from rest, which is a really peaceful book to read. I'm halfway through it right now, but it's so much grace and so much permission to just slow the heck down and to be like, hey, we can do it in an hour, or we can do it in 2 hours, and we can do it on a Monday, or we can do it on a Wednesday. And you really have to unschool your brain a little bit to wrap around this. But it's a great inspirational read to say, this is how one family is doing it. And you can do it another way, too. There's no right one way. The third book is called the four hour school day.

Again, super, super good. It's a quick read, just talking about all these activities you can do in just a short amount of time. Like, it really doesn't take 8 hours of schooling a day. So if that's you, and you're like, okay, marina, you've convinced me, like, public school is the enemy. And it's not the enemy, but it's to say, there are a plethora of ways to do this. And I just want to say, I understand. Not everyone can afford to home school, not financially, but with time or with their career at this time. Like I say, with everything.

There are seasons for everything. There is a time for everything. But if this is a call in your heart, I really encourage you to dive deeper and really seek internally what is best for me and my family. It's one of those mama gut things. And if you think about when your kids were little, right when they were in diapers, you knew them inside and out. You knew what an expression on their face meant, what kind of poop they were having. You knew when they were going to sleep and when they were going to be awake. You knew everything about your child.

And I bet you today, if they're going to public school, you've gotten pretty disconnected from your children because we're just not with them very much. We got them in the morning when they're sleepy, groggy, cranky, and we got them at night when they're tired, exhausted, and mentally fatigued. It's not the best of your child either. So just realizing there is hope and there is a better way to do it if you have the capacity to do it, and it's right for you and your family. So if you're ready to get started, I just made a quick list of things I would do for you. Number one, understand the two hour learning principle. Literally, you can get most of your academics done within 2 hours or less a day. And there's been days just in the last week where we did math and language arts doubles and we got it done early so that the rest of the week we could do nothing.

And there's been times where we got all the spelling done on a Monday so we didn't have to do it the rest of the week. So again, you can do this however you need to do it. But because you have less distractions at home than you do in a classroom, you can literally focus on understanding each subject super thoroughly instead of just memorizing and binging information. So my son told me yesterday when we were doing math, we got through it in 20 minutes. And he's like, that was so fast. We got through four pages. And I was like, yeah, what do you expect? And he's like, well, at school, it takes us an hour to go through one sheet because the teacher literally goes problem by problem, and she asks the students for the answer, then gives the answer. So for the students who are not raising their hand volunteering for the answer, the ones who are just listening, just write down the answer and they're not learning anything.

But they do the entire worksheet, problem by problem, with the entire 25 kids, and it takes them an hour to do one sheet. Versus with him, if he knows the answer, he can just go as fast as he can. I mean, as long as he's getting it right, and we just rock and roll right through. So it's a totally different way of doing this. Another thing with the two hour learning, one of my objections was like, hold on, wait. Okay, so we're going to do school in 2 hours, but what the heck do I do with him the rest of the day? Right? That's your biggest question. How the heck am I supposed to wash him? I have businesses to run. I have things to do.

I have errands to run. I want adult time, too. It's playtime, actually. So there's a huge emphasis on play. Unstructured playtime is critical. And really teaching our kids how to be bored again and get creative is a huge, huge part of this process. And so they should be outside, they should be in nature, they should be outdoors. They can be doing playdates and group things if you want.

Big thing with our household is I'm getting him back into taking care of the house. So he's doing chores with me, he's learning how to cook, he's learning responsibility. Whereas before, he was gone all day. And so I just did it all because I didn't want to put chores on him. Once he got home and had an hour at home at night, I just did everything. Now he has an opportunity to do life with me, which is a totally different experience. And we've been busy. I got to say, there isn't much downtime with homeschooling.

He is doing life with me. He's going around. Yesterday he came to a showing with me. He stayed in the car for like ten minutes, but the windows were down, like, it's fine. He's eight. He's gone. What did we do? We got plumber quotes and fencing quotes yesterday. So he was with me for those.

We talked about it. We talked about cost, we talked about supply. He's learning life out and about with me, which is super fun. You got to have backup plans for childcare, obviously, for when you need to be child free. So I would even instill this today. If you don't have this, your backup plans, you need a level two and a level three in case crap hits the fan, because it does, inevitably. So luckily for me, I have in laws here that are very helpful. And I also have two or three babysitters on emergency dial when crap hits the fan.

And sometimes you can't do anything and your kid comes with you anyways. People understand, but that's just a big part of it. Third thing is to have a supporting spouse. So not everyone's going to be on board in the beginning because it seems like such a far outlandish thought to think when you're public schooling today, you're going to home school. Like, that's extreme. What does that mean? And I'm sure your spouse is going to have all the questions and stereotypical things to work through. So it's dual education. It's like, hey, I learned this in this book.

Did you know these facts about homeschooling? And then he's going to say his thing and then we got to come to the same page. But if you're the mom taking this on or the dad taking this on and your spouse is not on board, it might be pretty challenging to homeschool without your supporting spouse. So I would say that's the critical one. Fourth thing if you're going to start is the mental shift. So again, how will I stand my kids all day? How the heck will I survive all day? It's a shift to think I get to be with my kids each day. I get to experience learning with them. I get to be the main influence in their life. And getting excited for your children, getting to experience real life with you every single day.

So it's a totally not, I have to, it's I get to and it's a grateful thing. Another thing is you get to take control of your schedule. So imagine, let's just reverse right before this, my alarm would go off at 530. I'd groggily make coffee and get presentable to go to the bus stop, and he'd be at school by 615 620. Right now we don't have to do that anymore. We can actually sleep in an extra hour. My daughter doesn't go to preschool until 08:00 a.m. So we could have a slow morning.

And even if she didn't go to school, imagine if I had both kids home. We could do morning whenever we want. We can have a 09:00 a.m.. Breakfast. We can sleep in. Obviously, there's still things to do when you have a schedule to stick to for certain business activities. But what would it look like for you and your family if you could actually make pancakes on a Tuesday instead of just every Sunday? What would it look like to have a slow and relaxed conversation around the table in the morning about what you're going to do that day? And instead of having every hour time block to say, hey, we have the afternoon open, what do you want to do today, buddy? What sounds fun to you? Let's do it together. It's just a totally different way of life that's been really fun to reconnect with him and be like, what are your interests? Oh, I like this too.

Let's hit the museum. Just totally different. Another thing is you've obviously got to learn your state rules and regulations. Every state's completely different. So in Hawaii, we literally fill in one form. The office asked no questions and was like, great, we'll send you a receipt. That's all you got to do. They didn't ask for what curriculum I was going to do.

They didn't ask how many hours a week I was going to do anything. It was pretty wide open for my own creative plan. However, I think the state does require at the end of every 3rd, 5th, eigth, and twelveth to take a standardized test to make sure they're at grade level. But you can choose to do this testing on your own and then submit the paperwork instead of going to the school to take the test. My next advice, I'm almost done here, is to choose a simple curriculum. I mean, man, I went through the gamut trying to look at all the different things. There's online programs, there's co ops. There's all these things.

But the one I landed on was the good and the beautiful. It's this one right here. And so we just did language arts and math in here. And it literally teaches you, like, as the parent, read this line. Okay, student, read this line. You don't have to think about it. It's an open and go type of playbook, and really beautiful. There's a focus on a lot of art and just culture.

I feel like that we wouldn't get in traditional workbooks. I love the good and the beautiful for that. So we did math and language arts through here, and then I just kind of hodgepodged the rest, to be honest. So since we're moving back to the farm soon, we're super into farm stuff. So I got this farm anatomy book that's really good. Roman's been deep diving into it. He wrote out over here, like, how many eggs a chicken lays? And he wrote, like, 260 eggs per year. And they needed the life cycle of a bee.

So he's definitely, like, getting nitty gritty onto this stuff, and it's self led. Like he's asking me, hey, can I read the farm book again? And we had lost that spirit of learning when it came to public school. Instead, it was, do I have to go to school? Do I have to do homework? And now it's like, mom, can I read the book again? I really want to keep reading, and it's just totally, totally different. So I would just say, simple, simple. Just get the basics down, like math, language arts, and probably spelling at this age. And then from there, you get to creative with the rest. Like, history can come and go through life, right? You can get that in social studies, economics. He's seeing economics through my business.

It doesn't have to be, like, a standard workbook. Okay. Organizing what you already have. So as a parent, you probably have some semblance of art supplies at your home, and then you have a pencil and a pen and eraser. That's really all you need to get started. You don't have to go crazy and get the 50 piece art set and all this stuff that can come with time. But I didn't have to buy anything. We already had everything we needed aside from the couple of workbooks, so that's great.

And then taking advantage of the free resources, there are oodles and oodles of free things online for worksheets, for guides, for videos, and just get creative with what you can for free. Okay, last step on here. And I think this is the one that I've had to work through the most, is the emotional side of it, and it's facing the fear head on. You're going to have many, many moments of WTF and, like, what are we doing? Are we crazy people? Are we messing up our children? Like, what is happening? Emotions are going to run high and hot at times. There's been many tears on my side and on my son's side already just kind of clashing and learning how to know each other again and learning his learning style and my teaching style. It's not going to be smooth like beta. It's going to be a little bumpy in the road, but I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel and we're already having so much fun that I'm just encouraged to keep going. But, man, it's a stretch on the patience and I know it's going to get better, but we're on the same page.

And I just keep reminding him that of, like, we're on the same team here. This isn't being graded. You're not turning this in. This is just for mommy. And we can slow down. We can take a break anytime. We don't have to get super emotional. We don't have to destroy our pencils.

Like, let's take some deep breaths and we'll get through it together. And then really, when it comes to the parenting teaching side of it, just realizing that you are made to be a mother or father and you are the most qualified person to teach your child because it's your child. You know them the best. Despite what your education is or your degrees are. God aligned you with this specific human to teach them and raise them up in life. And there's no one more qualified than you. Perfection isn't the goal, but your presence is. And I think that's such a gift that we underrate today, is just being present.

That's really what our kids need, right? They really just want eyes on them. They really just want the hug. They want the screen down and attention with mommy and daddy. So, I mean, with all of that said, there is a lot. This is a heavy packed episode with a lot, a lot of tips and a lot of things. And I might put this together into a PDF guide for you so you can reference it back. But remember, I'm going to be sharing this kind of stuff in my weekly newsletter for the podcast, so it's a lot more personal than my real estate Friday email. This is going to be more on the life side of the personal stuff of hey, this is what we learned.

Hey, this is what's going on here. Hey, we're planting this as a farm this week. It's going to be more of a vlog style ish newsletter, and I'm just excited to see what comes of it. But before I wrap this up, there was a passage in the call of the wild and free that I wanted to read, and it's just so, so good because I think it sets the reframe of childhood, what it was before and how even us as millennials grew up in the looking at 2024 today and the world we were living in and just two weeks ago, how drastically it's changed. Okay, so it's a poem called oh childhood, where did you go? Oh childhood, where did you go? We sped up the process, thinking that's how you'd grow, gave up fort building and climbing trees to avoid muddy hands and skinned up knees, enrolled you in things you were expected to do, not stopping to realize it was for us more than you. Remind me. Giving up daydreams was better for who? When did we quit dreaming to notice or care? Stop looking at the stars or remembering they're there? We put you on buses and shipped you away to preschools and programs and perceptors for pay. Who said that the experts know better than us anyway.

You were made for summers that go on forever, getting lost in good books in inclement weather, making up stories and writing new songs until long past your bedtime and the porch light comes on. No need to rush childhood. It goes by too fast. What you need is the time to make it all last. You belong out in nature, staring up at the sky, blowing dandelion puffs and watching them fly, turning clouds into shapes that you want them to be. Fending off dragons I see what you see. If there's only a way to be wild and free. We read the great books but ignore their wisdom.

Go our own way instead of trusting what's in them. Childhood is a treasure, a gift to behold. I'm sorry to say you've been traded and sold. Oh childhood, where did you go? Oh childhood, say it ain't so. We'll bring you back home if it's the last thing we do. We'll reclaim the wonder. That's my promise to you. Okay, guys, that will wrap this up.

I'm on the journey. It's fresh, fresh, fresh. And I will keep you posted as we go, but thanks for tuning in on this one. And I hope it planted some good seeds. And I'll see you next week.