Host 3 (8:23)

How flexible are you?

Host 1 (8:25)

How flexible is your schedule? How. How are you at being judged by other people? Are you and your spouse on the same page with expectations? You've got to make sure, because you're going to have to pull together on this in a big way. What are your natural gifts and talents? What do you bring to the table so you can kind of customize this education for your child? I'd also define what you really value and what's important. And by the way, while I'm saying this, I'm realizing this is just really good for every parent. This is where you should start when your child is two to begin laying out their life of, how am I going to raise this particular child? Because kids are different. So define what you value and what's really important. Our overall guiding principle with Casey was this. We want to raise a curious kid who loves to learn. And so every decision we made went through that prism. Hey, are we raising a curious kid who loves to learn? And then we expanded the definition of how learning takes place far beyond worksheets and regular schooling. What are all the different ways that you can learn? You can learn by starting your own business. You learn by playing. Actually play is such a critical part of this. Just going outside and running around in the neighborhood, experiments, messing up, failing at things, helping other people, volunteering down at a homeless shelter. It was a big part of our life with Casey was volunteering.

Host 3 (10:00)

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Host 1 (10:15)

Don'T have what you want.

Host 3 (10:16)

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Host 1 (10:41)

And care for the right plants.

Host 3 (10:43)

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Guest (11:15)

Minute over gut health because I'm really into this. I just learned that prebiotics are the.

Host 1 (11:20)

Food that help fuel the growth of.

Guest (11:23)

Healthy bacteria, the probiotics in your gut.

Host 3 (11:27)

So you have to have both.

Guest (11:28)

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Host 1 (11:48)

I just don't have that stomach distress.

Guest (11:51)

Anymore where that bloating, you know, that kind of interferes with your day and puts you on edge. Plus my weight is down. I've got energy for this hiking season. I'm drinking my Ag one right now while I'm recording this, and I think.

Host 3 (12:03)

You should as well.

Guest (12:04)

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Host 1 (12:08)

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Guest (12:10)

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Host 1 (12:25)

Your gut in different places. Animal shelters, homeless shelter, in all kinds of different places. Because guess what? You learn about human nature. And if I had one thing that I would teach kids more than anything, it is learning to understand human nature. Because relationships are the most important thing in your whole life. We make it all about schooling and education and your degree. How many people do you know that have PhDs and advanced degrees and their life is a complete mess, right? So I want to teach the kids about life more than anything else. Here was our other focus. Our major academic focus for Casey was number one, learning to enjoy reading. Now that wasn't hard because we are avid readers and so that was a natural part of our family DNA. But reading is really important one because it's about curiosity and learning. But you also learn about grammar by reading. Because when you start to write, because you've read a lot, you can tell if something sounds good while you're writing it. And so we expanded the reading. See, in second grade there was an assigned reading list For Casey to read. Well, it happened to be created by. This is not being sexist, but most teachers, when I do teacher training, and I do a lot of teacher training across the country, it's 90% women. And so a lot of the books that are chosen tend to be more along the lines of things that girls like to read. Again, not being sexist. Just, this is human nature. Cayce wanted to read about trucks and bombs and things blowing up and bloody stuff. So we got to ditch all that and just go to Barnes and Noble and let him just look around and say, huh, that looks interesting. Boom. I don't care what grade level it's on, just start reading. As it turns out, Cayce was reading at an advanced level, and he was the one that got me actually into Russian stuff. He's the one who started reading Dostoevsky. That's not easy to read. And so, anyway, so reading was a big part, and then learning how to write really well was a huge focus for us because I've seen it in when I was in the business world, I see it and what I'm doing now, it will set you apart, any child apart, who knows how to put his or her thoughts together in writing. Especially now with texting and everything else, it's made people really horrible at it. Casey is a fantastic writer. In his side job as a general manager of this catering company, he sends emails and proposals to the president of the company, and he will copy me on them. And I'm like, that's really well done. Like, you could have killed it in the corporate world, putting your thoughts together like that in a concise way, in a very powerful way. So here we focused a lot on reading and being, writing really well. And again, you can write about anything. Write to Kellogg's cereal company, because the last cereal box you had didn't have enough cereal in it, and then ask for a refund. Write to politicians, Write to movies, Write to whoever you want. Just write to your grandmother. Write about anything that you're curious about. You have a lot of freedom in that, and that's paid off a lot. So now here's what we did know. Cayce was never going to be a scientist. Now, he was really into the weather. He's really into psychology. But we knew from a young age he just didn't have that natural bent toward being a scientist. So we didn't put a lot of effort into science. Now he learned science and physics by partly by just listening to us as we were interested in things, listening to podcasts and such. That was a great way for him to learn math. Wasn't a big focus. Why? Cayce was never just great at math. If you ask him now, right, to ask him some simple multiplication, he'll probably fumble a little bit and you'll be like, well, aren't you worried about that? No. Because in everyday uses of math, he's perfectly fine. He doesn't have to know trigonometry. But here's what he can do. He can budget and manage his finances like a beast. He knows how to invest. He knows self control. Look, all these other things of self control, understanding how to listen to people. He learned that a lot in putting him in situations. I traveled with him lot. We went on the road. You know what else we did? We took vacations when everybody else was in school. It's cheaper and less crowded. We did a lot of experiential learning in the real world and we took advantage of all that flexibility, right? The, the whole thing of like, oh, they're gonna have problem with social skills. No, they're not. Only if you like, put them in a basement where they never get exposed to anyone. Casey had exposure to all of his friends because he played hockey and we lived in a neighborhood. And because Casey didn't have homework, he could go out every afternoon and play. He could stay out later at night. Why? Because we didn't have to wake up at 6:22 in the morning to hop on a school bus at 7am so the social skills thing, he's great at social skills. He was also exposed to talking to a lot of adults. Well, where do you spend most of your life from age 18 till the day you die in the adult world. So look, I hope that gets you started down the path. I think it's a pretty exciting path. It's a scary path. I'm not recommending that everybody do homeschooling or unschooling. Some kids thrive in public school, some kids thrive in a smaller private school. Every child is different. Just what I most want is if you have the flexibility, time, income, all the resources to do this, look at each of your kids and know how they're made, know how they're created and wired and customize as much of their, their entire upbringing. Right. I'm not going to go into this, but we discipline kids in slightly different ways. Right. With a compliant child, discipline isn't that hard. You just look at them like you're unhappy and they're like, okay, I'll go do it. With a strong willed child, it takes a different path. Different tone of voice. And so I'm going to educate them in a different way as well to get the optimal result. Look, if you ever want to talk about that, email us. Email Casey C a s e yelebratehome.com just say unschooling in the subject line. Tell us about the situation. I've got a I'll send you information if you want, but if you want to do a phone call consultation, I'll send you a couple options for doing that. So that what I'm doing with most families is we do an initial kind of brainstorming session and then after that they walk away with a lot of questions. They come back and say, okay, here we've answered these questions. Here's what we're looking at. Now. How do we put this into place? And then if we do multiple calls, then we do a lot of emailing in between answering questions. Because look, I just want to help. I'm on the back end of this stuff. Hopefully I've got a lot of wisdom in these areas. I'm terrible at a lot of things. I can't come to your house and fix anything right that you've got wrong. I'm not a handyman. I'm not especially great at a lot of things. But this I've got some wisdom with. So if I can help you and save you some headaches and times and fight with your fights with your spouses, I'm happy to talk to you and help out with that. But hopefully this is a nice framework to begin thinking this through. Hey, we love you. We want to help. If we can in any way, let us know. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Thanks for sharing it. We'll talk to you soon.

Host 3 (20:16)

Bye.