← The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 673: Children Are Growing Up Without a Future They Can Clearly See | Issy Butson, Stark Raving Dad
01:09:07
Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
Izzy Butson
Oh, it's a beautiful world Ain't nothing on screen that's ever gonna be this view oh, it's a beautiful world and I just want to share with I just want to share with you this beautiful world Such a beautiful.
- [00:34]
Jenny Urch
Hey friends, before we begin, I want to say thanks for pressing play and spending a little time with me today. This episode has been years in the making for me. Our guest is Issy Butson from Stark Raving dad and this conversation goes straight into this looming situation that the world our children are growing up into and will enter as adults looks vastly different than the one our childhoods prepared us for. Basically, the arc from childhood to adulthood is changing fast and the way we structure the youth years has to change with it. We talk about AI motivation, boredom, agency, and why the skills children will need most in the future aren't taught on worksheets or measured by tests. This is one of those episodes that gives you insight and a lot to consider. It'll be a great conversation to discuss with your friends. Before we jump in, I want to invite you into a few practical tools that can support your family this year. Our free 20261000 hours outside tracker sheets are available. They are simple, beautiful, and incredibly effective at guarding childhood. They help make time outside visible, build momentum, and give families something real to celebrate. You'll find them at 1000hoursoutside.com trackers. This year we participated in the 1000hours outside bundle and contributed the 1000hours outside kickoff pack. The bundle includes our Kickoff Pack but also over $800 worth of thoughtfully created resources that will help get your family outside in 2026. It is available through January 12th and you'll find the link in the show Notes if paper trackers aren't your thing, our 1000 hours outside app is available on iOS and Android. It is consistently top ranked and right now it is just $25 for the entire year, which comes out to about $2.08 a month to help you lower screen dependence and build a more grounded family culture. All right, I've been waiting for years for this conversation, so let's get into it.
- [02:21]
Izzy Butson
Prime's exclusive Wild Card playoff game is Saturday night. Jordan Love and the packers take on Caleb Williams and the not a Prime member. Sign up for a 30 day free trial to stream the game.
- [02:31]
Jenny Urch
That's gonna be card for the touchdown.
- [02:33]
Izzy Butson
NFC north rivals square off in the latest chapter of the NFL's oldest feud, the packers and Bears in Prime's exclusive wild card playoff game Saturday at 7:30pm Eastern only on Prime. Sign up for a 30 day free trial today. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.
- [02:50]
Jenny Urch
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And when I tell you that I have been waiting years, years for this interview, it's, it's even years. I've been such a big fan of Izzy Butson for years and years and years from Stark Raving Dad. Welcome.
- [03:07]
Izzy Butson
Thank you so much, Ginny. And vice versa, too. My wife and I follow all of the Thousand Hours Outside stuff. Have, have for years. We're big fans of getting kids outside more. So it's so funny that we've circled around the same kind of space for years and years and not have actually connected. So this is great to be here.
- [03:23]
Jenny Urch
I've been so inspired by the inside information that you've put out and four years, because we've been probably raising our kids in similar time frames and I've needed it. I've needed the encouraging things that you said. I've needed your perspective. And for parents that I'm really, it's all parents. We're raising kids in a, in a really different world and we're sending them out into a really different world. This matters a lot. So whether you're home educating, whether you're unschooling, whether you're doing traditional school, whether you're doing a bit of a hybrid, this is information for all parents. And so as we talk, if you're finding that you need, need more and you're probably going to want more, you can make sure you check out starkravingdad blog.com I'll make sure. I'll put the link in the show notes. You have this whole Life without School collection and it's phenomenal. It's organized, it's pleasing to the eye, and it's just information that you need for today's parenting. Can you give us your backstory? What is your homeschooling, unschooling deschooling? What is your background? Because it's definitely something that's not the norm and so people usually have a path there.
- [04:26]
Izzy Butson
Yeah, yeah, good question. Because I'll try and keep this as brief as possible. But we've probably had, you know, we've jumped around a few different paradigms in education. And I probably have to rewind right back to the start where my wife and I watched. We distinctly remember watching a 2006 Sukine Robinson's Do Schools Kill Creativity? Talk. And that was a year before we had our first child, we were just starting to plan our family. She was a primary school teacher at the time and it's funny because we had. We were spending our, as a young professional couple, our evenings and weekends really wrestling with how she was finding this teaching experience in the classroom. She was looking out at the sea of faces, tiny wee faces, she was teaching 6, 7, 8, 9 year olds and just trying to reconcile this battle between how do I, A, teach you all of the things I've been told I have to teach you, but more importantly B, how am I going to make you care about it? Because so much of what I'm tasked with delivering you here, this is going to be very difficult for you to find interest in. And there's 30 of you sitting here and I have no idea how I'm going to go about bringing each of you along on this journey when you're all at such different places in life and developmentally and from an interest perspective. So she was kind of battling with that. And we'd spend the evenings together and weekends trying to put together lesson plans and that kind of thing to make it interesting. And then that talk from Sukin dropped and it just brought home so much for us about the education system and what we were wrestling with. And so at that point we said, well, this is it, we'll never put our kids into the school system. We'll do it our own way. This will be amazing. And fast forward to when our kids actually got to school age and through lots of different life circumstances. We actually needed school for a little while. I had some health issues way back then at that time, and so we actually, our intent was always to home educate in some flavor, but we actually ended up needing to put our two older boys into school for a bit. We did that in both New Zealand and Australia, where both of those countries have good school systems. You know, these are, these are good examples of the formal education system and we could not have had a better experience in terms of seeing the different paths for two different children. And so our eldest was. He was able to fit into the academic kind of lifestyle relatively well. He was a people pleaser. He wanted to listen, he wanted to make his teacher smile, he didn't want to ruffle any feathers. He had a horrible time socially different, different story for a different day. But our second son, he was much clearer on who he was and what he needed. He found it very difficult to sit still. He very quickly became what his teachers described as a bit of a problem in the classroom. You know, not in a negative kind of way, but in a, hey, this is a problem. We need to keep the class moving forward and he's disrupting that. And so it was sort of through that experience across about 12, 18 months that we got to see firsthand, okay, all of those things that we had talked about all those years ago when Sir Ken's talk dropped and Kate was teaching in the classroom. This is now living it quite viscerally through our own children. And so we, we got to that point, we were able to take our kids out of school, our two boys, and then of course we went straight into, well, we homeschool now. So let's, let's sort of recreate school at home. This will be great. We'll have supplies on everywhere and we'll have the right books in the right place and we'll have a desk and we'll have worksheets and this is fantastic, fantastic. And we'll design it all out. And lo and behold, our eldest said, okay, I'll do that. And his brother said, I'm not doing that, that's not happening. And so we kind of went, ah, okay, yeah, I see. So we can't actually replicate this thing. It's not just the classrooms that are the problem. It's this whole philosophy behind how we're designing childhoods and how we're kind of deciding to deliver information to children. And so that's when we threw out the rulebook completely. And just sort of as an aside, I've spent my professional life and almost like a high performance business coach really. I started off in junior sales roles, but by the middle of my career I was leading teams and running some teams in some pretty big software companies. And so I had poured myself into the research and literature on how to build high performing humans in that kind of professional space. It's really interesting because so much of that applies to children, the human, you know, the same kind of things apply to that. So we threw out all of their educational kind of rulebook. And it's really interesting because a lot of people say, oh, it's easy for you. Your wife was a primary school teacher. And we say, no, no, no, no. It was really difficult for her. She had to rework everything, unlearn a whole lot of things to be able to kind of show up authentically to help our kids. And so that's when we, I mean, I guess we would call ourselves unschoolers. We're probably not radical unschoolers. We do a lot of structured stuff in terms of coaching and we put a lot of rigor around making progress as individuals, but that's kind of how we've found our way to, to where we're at now.
- [09:33]
Jenny Urch
And you started Stark Raving dad, which I remember. I mean, I can remember the first time I saw it. I thought that is the most clever thing. Like stark raving mad, but stark Raving dad with gorgeous imagery, just gorgeous imagery of childhood. And we get these phenomenal photos. And then you would just have these long posts that are really thought provoking about why are we doing what we're doing. And if people are hungry for more information, you're going to want to check out the complete Life Without School collection. It's the full library of all your content. You have weekly podcast episodes that come out, guides, courses, recorded sessions and more. And you're talking about things that everybody has questions about, like what about if the kid is bored? And how do we help kids with self direction? What about teenagers preparing them for adult life? You're talking about what if the partner does not want to homeschool? How about reading? What about school readiness? Is my kid behind? What would that even mean? Does that even make sense? What are some things that make home education harder than it needs to be? What if you feel like you're not enough for your kids? There's so much there. There's so much there to learn. And we'll hit what we can as we have time. You're talking about social skills. Basically, any question that you have, any concern that you have, you're going to find it in that collection. I really want to kick it off and this may take up a majority of the time. I really want to kick it off with AI. This is something that I am passionate about because I'm going to send my kids out into this world and you have so much good information that parents need to read and to be thinking about. Because we are sending our kids into a world that is completely different than the world that we entered in. You say a five year old starting school today will graduate in 2038. And the world they'll step in absolutely will not ask them to sit still, follow directions or fit in it. Will not care if they aced their standardized test or ticked all the right boxes. For the first, first time in our history, children are growing up without a future they can clearly see, without a clear picture of what they're preparing for. The arc that connects childhood to adulthood is gone. Can we start with where we're at with AI? What do parents need to know because you talked about you took some percentages. I think that it's off the radar for a lot of parents.
- [11:48]
Izzy Butson
It is. And I think one of the reasons is because we see these sensationalist headlines everywhere and I don't think they're helpful. I think, you know, you see one headline that says 95% of jobs are going to be gone in a year and then you see another headline saying all of these other headlines are just a hot air and actually it's going to take much longer. I think you have to live in the space where a company is using AI to change the way it operates, to really get a feel for it. And so I've had the privilege and horror, I would probably describe it as both of those things over the last few years of being able to see that firsthand. I've been hiring and managing teams for 20 years now. And for most of that time it's funny because I would say things like, hey, qualifications are dead now. The last thing I look at on a CV or an application is a qualification, right? So if someone went to college, it's almost completely irrelevant. I want to know what kind of battle war stories they have from their life, what have they learned, what have they experienced, what have they self led themselves into, what kind of character are they? And so for years I talked about that and then it got really interesting because as AI started coming through it was, I'm actually starting to cross lines off the spreadsheet where we were going to hire people. And so I know a lot of people are saying, oh, but it's not really that real, we're not going to lose that many jobs. But I have sat in front of spreadsheets and I've sat in boardrooms where we have said these five roles that we have earmarked for the next 12 months to hire for. We are not going to hire for those anymore. And so when you sit in a room and you make that decision, which is actually a really difficult decision to make when you are a fan of humanity and lifting people up and wanting to give people jobs and then grow them. But it's very hard to reconcile that against the commercial interests of a business that will never win out, humanity will never win out over the commercial interests of a business. That's just how it is even in a business that has a wonderful management team. So as I sat there and I started drawing these lines through and used AI myself and watched our engineering teams and creative teams and content teams and marketing teams and analytics teams, every single unit in these businesses embrace AI and start to use them in the roles where you would hire young people into and absolutely smash the work in that space. Not just do it in an okay way, but actually execute on it very well. And this is now, this is not in five years time. This is right now. And so when, when we see that happening, you just have to stand back and say, well, that's in this one small business, in the tiny, this tiny part of the world where these roles don't exist anymore. And so the kind of point is that arc that I was talking about, how do you go from I'm an inexperienced young person to I'm now an experienced kind of middle person in a business where you go through those early rungs of the career ladder. They are the ones that have been removed already. And I would say we're fast getting towards some of those middle rungs too.
- [14:56]
Jenny Urch
So that's where we're at. And you talked about how you kind of pulled parents, and parents are not totally aware of what's going on. You say for more than a century, school has been like a machine, a system designed to mass produce workers for a factory driven world that's efficient, it's predictable, it's built to teach obedience, repetition and conformity. And for a long time the machine worked. The world needed people who could fit neatly into a system, people who could follow instructions and meet deadlines and perform the same tasks as everyone else does. So that educational system works for that. So we need to really talk about. I think this is probably one of the most important things to talk about in this day and age, which is what kind of an educational system works for a world that you don't even really know what you're aiming for. A world that you can't picture. You say, my younger two children are 5 and 10. I think a lot about what the world they're going to walk into is. That's how I feel. And sometimes people do not. Like, like I've done five or six AI and they've been about different topics, but five or six AI podcasts. And the feedback is kind of like, I'm like, this is the most important thing, right? That's how I feel. What might their 20s look like? What kind of a life might be waiting for them? And you say, you cannot clearly picture it. So we were raised with certainty about the future. It's not perfect, but at least there was some direction. You kind of know I'm going to earn a living, but this is really changing quickly. The things we were taught to aim for. Like job security, linear careers, predictable professional paths, those ladders we get on and then climb are all going to reduce and in many, many cases completely vanish. How does that affect how we educate our kids?
- [16:32]
Izzy Butson
Yeah, this, I agree with you. This is the crux of childhood and particularly the teenage years right now. This is what we should all be obsessing over as parents. I think for me, I lean back into self determination theory on this. There's a lot of really interesting things to untie, to untangle. Self determination theory was pioneered by psychologists Edward D. And Richard Ryan in the late 70s and early 80s. So experiments at the University of Rochester where they explored what fuels human motivation. Because human motivation is, is what contributes to the world, right. Without that, we're kind of all just much more passive. And so when we talk about growing up into an employment space and making money and contributing to the world and all of that kind of thing, that's kind of, that's kind of the key thing. Are we motivated? Can we get out there and do what we're trying to do? And so there's kind of these three concepts inside self determination theory. And they found that there are three fundamental psychological, let's call them nutrients for motivation. That's autonomy, which is a sense of control over your actions. Competence, which is a sense of capability and progress, and relatedness, which is a sense of genuine connection with others. And when you have those needs, methods, you have motivation and learning start to flourish. You grow authentically as a person. When they are undermined, your motivation and engagement in life start to wither. Now the classroom environment, the formal education system actively strips out all three of those things. We have this really big disconnect where the nutrients that our children need to develop into motivated, contributing humans are totally absent. So you have a classroom space, there is very little autonomy. You don't. Children don't have much say at all over what they do, when, how, where, why, and even who with. You know, they have almost no real say in any of that. And that gets worse the older you get. And that's a really key point because the older you get, the more important those nutrients are through the teenage years and the more, more we take from those nutrients and don't get, put them in the environment at all. A teenager's world inside a classroom is extremely structured. Think back to your own schooling when you're five and six. Yeah, you, there's a little bit more fun and there's a bit more finger painting and that sort of thing as a teenager. Very structured. The expectations are Much higher. It's very highly controlled. And they get to. What do they get to do? They choose a small set of subjects each year if they don't clash. I remember having clashing subjects. Very small.
- [19:12]
Jenny Urch
Hardly any. I remember. I just kept. It was like less and less and less. Maybe you get to pick one class and then they're sending you home with all sorts of homework.
- [19:20]
Izzy Butson
Exactly. And so. And so that's autonomy. Totally, totally stripped out of a classroom.
- [19:26]
Jenny Urch
The new year always feels like a reset for me. Not just for schedules and routines, but for our home, too. I want our space to feel calm, functional and ready for the season ahead. Essentially the opposite of what it feels like over the holidays, with a stream of parties and gatherings, family visits that are fun and meaningful, but also add to the craziness. And honestly, Wayfair makes that so easy. If you're refreshing bedding, upgrading towels, organizing kids rooms, or finally tackling storage, Wayfair really does have everything in one place. I love being able to shop for practical things like mattresses, bathroom storage and kitchen essentials and add in those finishing touches that make a home feel cared for. This season, I'm focusing on simple, cozy updates. We are refreshing bedding and adding a few accent pillows and mirrors to our living space. Nothing over the top, just pieces that feel warm, lived in and inviting. I was honestly surprised by how many styles and price points there were. It made it easy to stay on budget without sacrificing quality or style. And I love how convenient it is to find everything from kids room updates to work, from home setup to storage solutions for all the outdoor gear that somehow always piles up. Get organized, refreshed and back on track this new year. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Some weeks I just don't have the time or the brain space for real meal planning. I want to eat healthier. I care about what we're putting in our bodies. But by dinner time, I am tired and overwhelmed. And that's where Hungry Root has been such a gift. Hungry Root is basically like having a personal nutrition coach and grocery shopper rolled into one. I told them what we like, what we don't like, and what my health goals are, and they planned everything for me. The recipes, of which there are over 50,000. The groceries, all of it. And the more we use it, the smarter it gets, tailoring things even better to our tastes. I love that it makes healthy eating simple without overthinking it. Whether you're trying to eat cleaner, get more protein or reduce inflammation, Hungry Root does the work for you without junk ingredients and with high quality meats and seafood. And if you're trying to stick with healthier habits past January, which aren't we all, this really helps make it doable right now. Take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time get 40 off your first box. Plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com 1000hours and use code 1000hours. That's hungryroot.com 1000hours code 1000hours to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. As we step into a new year. And yes, take those first steps outside to kick it off. I always feel this pull to simplify, to reach for pieces that feel good, layer well and actually last. And that's why I've been loving Quince. Quince makes those wardrobe staples you reach for again and again. I'm talking about their Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the designer price. 100 silk tops and skirts that instantly dress things up, and denim that's cut just right for everyday life. Their Italian wool coats are a standout too. Beautifully tailored, soft and made to last for years, not just one season. You can feel the quality in the details, the stitching, the fit, the fabric. Everything is thoughtfully designed to become a true wardrobe essential. I can't tell you how much I'm loving my new cashmere sweater. It's getting so much wear already ready and it's holding up beautifully. I've even picked up a few quince pieces for home and travel and the quality has been just as impressive. And the best part, Quince uses premium materials from ethical trusted factories and prices everything far below traditional luxury brands. Quince is a big hit around here and I know you'll love what they have to offer as well. So refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com outside for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com outside to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com outside so then let's look at.
- [23:04]
Izzy Butson
Competence, second second nutrient and and that's just that feeling that we're capable, that we can make progress. Really, that effort leads somewhere, right? Well, inside a classroom we very quickly twist competence into compliance. And they are very different things. And so you have a child's sense of capability becoming very closely tied to how closely they meet someone else's standard. And the moment they kind of fall short of that standard, they get a low grade on a test, or they don't meet the teacher's expectations or whatever it is, they start to doubt their ability. So instead of thinking, hey, I can figure this out, I'm a motivated human, they think, I'm not very good at this. And so there's this huge disconnect with competence when you sit in a classroom. It's just how it's designed. Of course, we needed that. We needed these factory lines and these offices to be very structured and very regimented. So, you know, real, real competence is very different. It comes from seeing cause and effect between effort and growth, from trying, from failing, from adjusting and seeing that I can change the outcome of what's in front of me. And that's how children build mastery. And that's kind of impossible if you don't have that. And then that third nutrient, which is relatedness, and that's the sense of belonging and connection that sits underneath motivation. It is such an important ingredient and something we just put far too little value on in society now. Well, you put a child into a classroom of 25 kids, if you're lucky, maybe it's 30 kids, maybe it's 35. And they spend most of their days in a group that is far too big for genuine connection. And they're spending their time with adults who are way too overextended to ever form a genuine deep bond with them. And I'm speaking absolutely from my wife's perspective as a teacher there, where that was one of her biggest issues. She just found it so hard to genuinely connect on that kind of level with each child. It's effectively impossible. And you know, as humans, we are just absolutely wired for belonging. And that's why it is such a key ingredient in this, this kind of self determination motivation picture a child who feels emotionally safe and seen by the people around them will objectively take more risks in their learning. They will stretch, they will persist more, they'll explore more. This is not the default environment of most classrooms. Then I guess to be clear, it sounds like some of this might be a little bit fluffy. But self determination theory is not a fringe idea. It is now one of the most widely validated and influential frameworks in psychology. And over the past four decades, since that was first kind of put out there it has been supported by thousands and thousands of peer reviewed studies across education, workplace performance, parenting, sport, healthcare, mental care. It is genuinely the cornerstone of modern motivation science. And so we have this huge disconnect. We know all of this now. We didn't know this when we started inventing classrooms in the formal education system. So we should have in the 80s and 90s said, oh, we had it completely wrong, we need to completely, you know, reform education. But we haven't, it still looks exactly the same. So we have this very clear view of what creates a motivated child and an autonomous child and a connected child. And it's completely at odds with the education system that we currently have. And so when we talk about going out into the world, all of those things that come from self determination theory and that develop a motivated, persistent, confident, capable child, they are the skills, they are the attributes, they are the characteristics that I, sitting behind a hiring desk will be looking for. It will be, do you have these attributes? I don't care what you know, I don't care what you've learned. I want to know that you are this kind of person and if you are, then you will be able to come into this business and adapt because you will be much more adaptable than anyone else. You'll be able to, to adapt to whatever is coming. And whatever we get thrown at us, which has been a huge battle in businesses every month we're trying to deal with something else that is coming our way in terms of how we're going to have to pivot due to AI and the development of that. And so when we have kids coming out of classrooms and out of the formal education system, I just don't know how they're going to show up into adult life and be prepared for that. It's just a huge disconnect.
- [27:34]
Jenny Urch
This matters right now.
- [27:35]
Izzy Butson
It does.
- [27:35]
Jenny Urch
It matters right now. Yeah, it's happening right now. People can go to your site and find a lot of information there right now. If you don't know anything about it, you say we're facing, and even if you know some, you probably need to know more. We're facing a huge change to the world and our children are not prepared. You talk about how this is affecting so many types of businesses. So you talk about how the, you know, if the parent is like, well, it's chatgpt, they're just writing emails and you say no, like it's, it's not just that. And you have to know what's going on. It's not targeting one industry, it's Sweeping across all of them. Law, medicine, education, design, finance, software, marketing, journalism, logistics, customer support. It's not starting with low level or entry level work. It's eating into high paid, high status, university trained professions. The very roles we used to hold up is safe, respectable, worth aiming for. And so this is a critical time to be aware and to make decisions for your children for the future that they will be stepping into. You say if you talk to any CEO at any forward thinking company in almost any industry anywhere in the world, chances are they'll tell you they are working hard to figure out how AI agents can replace human workers at scale and the moment these tools can perform at the level of a competent employee, which may be just a few years away, or in some cases is already now, that companies will start making the shift as quickly as they can. Why? Because humans are expensive. They need salaries, they make mistakes, they need time off, they need support. There's health care, there's laptops, there's offices, there's HR departments. And AI doesn't need any of that. Once it works, it just works 24 7. No overhead, no burnout, no salary negotiations. This is the crux. That's the word you use. This is the crux. This is very critical. And so it really matters how we're educating our children and how they're spending their childhoods. You say the 40 hour work week is probably going to die full time. Employment is going to become economically unnecessary for companies to engage in. We're entering a world where it simply won't take as many people to run a business anymore. So you're talking about getting the resumes from different candidates. It's like, well then there's more competition for those spots and all the more reason why you need to be able to be this type of person that can shift and learn and grow. I've got so many notes here. So can you talk then about what that looks like for the day to day? So the overview is really important for people to know. I think it's important to realize that a typical school structure is going to, like Sir Ken Robinson said, it's going to squash a lot of that internal motivation and drive to grow and zest for life. What could it look like for an unschooler or you know, like you said, we lean more that way. Like I'm not going to interrupt if kids are doing something that is really meaningful to them. But we also have some structure in our day too where we do some formal things. And it's a little mix of both. Give Us a vision for what it could be and how that could prepare a kid for the world that they're going to be stepping into.
- [30:48]
Izzy Butson
Okay, well, I guess I like to ask this question of myself and I asked this many years ago and this is really what kicked off our style and our approach. Is it really what a child knows in terms of facts or dates or formulas or narrative styles with writing, whatever it happens to be? Pick anything from a normal school curriculum. Is it really what they are going to learn and know from that bundle of things, things that is going to set them out to become this capable, confident, curious, engaged adult. And that seems, there's a, that seems very strange to me that you could ever believe that if we go through this process of making absolutely sure we pour all of this knowledge into this child, that the end result of that is just going to be this highly motivated, creative human. That just seems so odd to me. What really drives a person is what do I mean in this world? How can I contribute in interesting ways to the world around me, to the people around me? How can I find a way to align how I make a living with what I'm good at and what I'm interested in? And those three things don't always have to align, but you at least want a couple of them to start lining up. Right? Right. And, and I think we see this in the disconnect with, you know, whatever the latest. I follow the Gallup research every year when it comes out. I think the latest was something like, what was it, 71% or something where 71% of adults are disengaged in their work. Let's say it's 71, don't quote me, but it's something like that. It's pretty close to 3/4. 71 odd percent of adults are disengaged in their work. They sit there on Sunday night and they go, not really that excited. They don't necessarily want to quit tomorrow, but they're really not that excited. And so I think we can draw that back and say, well, that's the result. If we talk about preparing children for life, that's what the preparation we have been giving our children results in. We prepare them with all of this knowledge and all of this learning and all of these things that they should take forward. And they get so wrapped up in that that. Because that becomes the most important thing in the world. Of course it does. My teacher is telling me that, my mum and dad are telling me that this is the most important thing. However I feel about it, I've got to put that aside and just learn the stuff and get through it. And eventually they end up on that. Well, now I go to university or higher education or some form of college or whatever it is to get this piece of paper that now tells me I know even more of that stuff. And then I get into the job, job and now I'm working. And they do that for 10 or 15 years and then they hit midlife and they say, what am I, what am I doing? This? I never chose this. And that is, you don't have to go far to find someone that feels that way. That is not a coincidence. That is because we are preparing children for an adulthood where they don't believe they have choice. And so I believe the essence of doing it differently is saying to a child, hey, you're not going to get to choose everything. I'm still going to expect you to brush your teeth and make your bed and contribute to the family home and all of these good things. But who are you and what are you naturally leaning towards and how can I help you explore more of that? And I think this is where I kind of diverge a little bit from the radical unschooling end, which is you just do you 247 and I'll be here as sort of a safety net, but not too much more. It's right down that end of the spectrum. All of my years of business coaching and mentoring people in business have really helped me understand that especially with children, you have to wrap the right support around for growth to really happen, for potential to be met. And so for Kate and I, it is very much a process of, hey, we want to help you become the absolute best version of who you want to be in this world. And that's going to take effort. You are not going to get to just sit back here and rest on your laurels. But we're also, we're not going to expect you to sit here at this desk and do maths for an hour a day or this topic for, you know, six hours a day. We're going to split it up into these subjects. You're going to drive what happens. But that means you have to drive what happens. There's no option to kind of opt out and do nothing. And so let me give you an example of what that actually looks like because we have, you know, early on this was theoretical for us, right? Oh, we've got a six year old and a five year old. This is going to go great. Now we have an 18 year old coming out the other End he's going into young adulthood. We have our second son's about to turn 16 and then our younger two.
- [35:29]
Jenny Urch
Girls are the exact same ages.
- [35:31]
Izzy Butson
Five. Ah, awesome. Yeah, yeah. Well, so, you know, you get to see. Oh, the results of it. So we have some living proof out the other side. And I've had that in the business world all the way along, but nice to be able to kind of tie it back and say, well, this is the result of it. So our eldest now really, really good example that I like to use. He decided he wanted to become a lawyer. Didn't even know why. He just thought, that sounds really interesting. And that was when he was 15, 16 years old. He didn't actually know that I went to law school and totally bombed out of law school, by the way, and did a terrible job of it. He had no idea. But I learned that I didn't want to become a lawyer in a very, very, very expensive way. I accrued a lot of student debt doing that. And so when he said, I want to become a lawyer, my brain went, oh, this is the perfect opportunity to explore that. So let's go deep on this. So he spent about six months reading books on ethics and reading up what he'd have to do to get into university and starting to study for the exams and reading some case law and that kind of thing. And then he sort of surfaced from it after six months and. And threw the books aside, said, nah, not into it, it's not for me. And. And I thought my first reaction was, oh, I'm sort of disappointed. And then I caught myself and thought, oh, no, this is, this is great. This is what the teenage years are for. Invest your time in exploring who you are and what, what you might do in the world. Don't just wait until university. And that's like I say, that was a very expensive mistake for me. And so we really celebrated that. And so he's a very creative kind of person. He now almost runs his own little creative studio where he creates his own animations and he writes little stories and narratives and he's into comedy and he goes to an improv group, really wants to develop that. He'd love to work for WETA workshops and the kind of movie industry or something like that one day. So he is very, very clear on who he is and what he wants to do. And so when you look at the. That this super creative person, if he had gone to school, I think he would have chosen to do law. I think he would have gone to law school. I think he would have spent years doing that, becoming a lawyer if AI hadn't prevented his ability to become a paralegal for a while first, which it probably would have. And then he would have got to the point at some, some stage through life where he would have said, what am I doing? I don't want to be in a courtroom. I don't want to be sitting over all these papers. I want to make people laugh. I'm a creative person. And so now as an 18 year old, he's working part time. He's, you know, investing is so easy for kids these days, right? So he's stacking most of his income away and he's investing and he just wants to make sure by the time he's in his mid-20s, he's got some of that money behind him and he's just building creative projects. So that's amazing.
- [38:14]
Jenny Urch
January always feels like a fresh start in our homeschool. It's that reset moment after the holidays where you're refining what worked, letting go of what didn't and finding your rhythm again. Oh, and also you actually know what day it is again as opposed to being in that holiday induced fog where time and space seem to just meld into nothing and everything all at once. One thing we've learned over the years is how important it is to meet each child exactly where they are. That's why IXL fits so naturally into our homeschool life. It adapts to each learner so one child can review last year's skills while another jumps ahead without pressure, comparison or busy work. I love how effortless it is as a parent. Everything is organized by grade and by topic. So I'm not digging through resources or reinventing the wheel. And the real time feedback is huge. Kids learn from mistakes immediately and the progress reports give clarity and confidence. As a guide, IXL covers math, language arts, science and social studies from pre K all the way through 12th grade. And it grows right along with your child. It is flexible, proven and trusted by millions of families. Make an impact in your child's learning. Get IXL now and 1000 Hours Outside listeners can get an exclusive 20 off their IXL membership when they sign up today at www.ixl.com 1000hours. Visit ixl.com 1000hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.
- [39:33]
Izzy Butson
Our second son was the problem child at school and so we, we saw exactly where that was going. You know, a few years in that sort of system and all of her self confidence would have been, would have been completely eroded away. And instead when we gave him space, he realized he's very musical and loves being in the kitchen. And so he started exploring the piano. He's now the best pianist I know by far, adult or child. It's amazing. So accomplished because he spends so much time doing it and he's in the kitchen all the time. So right now he's just applying for his first job. He's got this plan to save and create, fit out a van, build a food truck, work hard at that for a few years and then save and then open his own restaurant and put a grand piano in the corner and that kind of thing. He is so clear on what he wants to do. It's just going to happen because he's going to put his mind to it. Right. So we have these two young adults who absolutely would not have found their way to that meaning of their life. Absolutely no chance. And given the time and the coaching and the support and the encouragement and the continual, hey, remember, you can't do nothing. You've got to be exploring something here. Let's you push yourself. Keep, keep exploring, keep finding. They have taken themselves to the door of adulthood, very clear on who they are. And so those skills are so transferable to anything now. I mean, they can pretty much go and do what they want with those skills. They will be able to apply them, but they're so clear on what they want to do anyway, so they're good to go.
- [41:01]
Jenny Urch
And that's the point is they have to have transferable skills because they're probably going to have to transfer. Just, you know, that's how the world is. It's changing so rapidly. And what you do one year might be very different from what you do the next year. You say within the next 10 years the school system as we know it will be totally redundant because the world will have outpaced it entirely. You say it's already happening, that this is outpacing, it's outpacing the school system. You said you believe the formal education system is already broken and already doing it is disservice to children that are sitting in it. And within 10 years there won't be many people left who don't agree with that. Education is too locked into slow moving cycles. It's too slow. You gotta adapt. Curriculum reviews, policy reform, it's so slow you cannot make any changes. And AI is evolving at an exponential pace. What's relevant one year is already outdated the next. The school isn't just, it's not built to adapt to that speed. It's hard for the parent too, but you've got a better shot at it. You've got a better shot at adapting. And just by being in that environment. My book is called Homeschooling. You're doing it right just by doing it. And that's what I believe. I think just by having, you know, everyone has their different capacities of how much you can push your kids and how much you can source them. But at the very least, they're going to have boredom. Like, at the very least, they're going to have some autonomy, because that's just how the way life works. As a parent, you can't fill in all that time. And so then they start to explore the things that they're interested in. Our kids are similar to yours. You know, they've got their interests and, and, and also I feel like they feel that they can pivot. Our oldest son is also interested in film. He's interested in creative things. But then the other day he was like, I, I could be a plumber. That probably be a good job too. He said, that's not gonna get taken over by robots. And I just unclogged my sink in my bathroom and I did a really good job. And I think I could do that as well. And so that's the point, right? This transferable. Can they pivot? Can you talk about managing themselves? So this is one of the things that comes out of having time where you're bored. And if we're heading into this world where you may not have a job, that's eight to four. It's already like that. Think about how many people work remote. There's no boss that's sitting there that's kind of looking over his shoulder. Make sure you're working from eight to four, sitting at your desk. You have to have a lot of self management. Can you talk about how this type of lifestyle helps a child with their aging? Agency and managing themselves?
- [43:28]
Izzy Butson
Yeah, agency. I love that word. I use it a lot because again, it is a thing the formal education system removes from a child. You only have to think back to your own childhood years to, to really say, okay, genuinely, how much agency did I have in my life, over my life, in my days? Moment to moment? Almost none. And you mentioned boredom as well. We have never been a more comfortable society. Life has never been easier. And I think that's a huge problem. I think that kids now aren't having the opportunity to get bored. And you know, they literally. There are screens everywhere. There's notifications coming at them. There is streaming services, there's algorithms. They don't have to think at all now. And I'm sure you're just as horrified as I am by the screen time statistics, which are somewhere between seven and nine hours, depending on the age. It's. It's crazy. And I think the average of quality unstructured out time out outdoors time now is between four and seven minutes is the most recent statistic I heard, which just blows me away. And so agency comes from boredom. It comes from getting through that restless feeling of I'm not sure what to do. So I've. I've kind of ticked off the things that I thought I was going to do or that have been fed to me, and now I'm in this uncomfortable moment where I'm not sure what's next. Every time we fill that space or every time we allow something else to fill that space, like a screen, an algorithm or something that just serves them something really easy, we take away their opportunity to build their own agency, to influence the world around them and to move themselves forward. So a child that is in that space and says, mom, I'm bored, you know, dad, I'm really bored. And we say, well, you could go and do this and go and do this and go and do this. If they pick one of those things that you've suggested, that's not agency. That's you coming up with an idea for them and now they've gone off to do it. Or you say, well, you could go and play with those toys, or you could unpack the dishwasher. And they're like, oh, I'm not going to unpack the dishwasher. And they go and play with that toy. That's not agency. You know, you've kind of backed them into a corner and you've given those two options. What you really want to say is, that's interesting. Okay. It sounds like you've run out of things to do and then say nothing else and then see what they do, you know, and they'll go, yeah, give me an idea. I'm like, I can stand by you while you have a think about it, but I'm not going to tell you what to do with your time. That's totally up to you. You know, why would I tell you what to do with your time and see how they start handling that. And that uncomfortable little feeling that they have to sit in is where they start to go, okay, right, well, I've got to make some choices here. And so then they start having a look around, and maybe they stomp off, and maybe they get grumpy. But I guarantee you, within 10 minutes, you'll probably find them doing something somewhere that they have initiated. And even though it might be one of the things that you would have suggested, the point is that they, too, took the step to make it happen. And so when they're doing that, they are saying, I have agency in my life. I can make decisions, and then I can go on and do the next thing. And there's lots of ways you have to help solve boredom sometimes. Sometimes, really what they're asking is, I actually just need connection with you right now. You know, you'll notice a kid follows you around in the kitchen for a while, and they're like, I'm bored. I'm bored. But they don't. They sort of follow you from room to room. Room. That's probably them saying, I actually just sort of need to be close to you a bit. And I don't know how to say that in those words. And so you might say, why don't I sit down with you while you start something? And then they're like, yeah, and then they'll probably choose something, and then you sit down with them. And then within a few minutes, you've extracted and you're back to making dinner or back to your desk or whatever it is, and they're away again. And so you've fueled it with connection, but they have still made the choice on what they're going to do. And so, again, I just think we take boredom away from childhood. We put kids in classrooms and we tell them exactly what to do. They never really have to make a choice over anything. They don't even get the choice over a pen color. A lot of the times, you know, hey, make sure it's this color, not that color. Hey, you can do some coloring. Oh, but I didn't want you to draw that way. I wanted you to draw this way. I still remember, you know, one of my boys, it was a portrait drawing session in class, and they came home in tears. Like, the teacher didn't like my drawing. They said it wasn't right. You know, they said my nose was wrong. And I just thought, if that doesn't sum up the whole thing, then nothing does, you know, that he had done the nose wrong. You can't boil drawing down to a right or wrong. It sort of blew me away. But this is the kind of level. And this is, you know, this is not that long ago. This is not the 1950s we're talking here. This is recent stuff. And from a teacher's perspective, you have to be doing that. You have to standardize. So when it comes to boredom, I think we really underestimate it. We think that it's making our children uncomfortable. And so we worry about that they're in that discomfort. And so we try and solve that discomfort. And it's annoying for us, right? I'm bored. I don't want to hear that. I want someone to solve it, go and do something else. But we really are taking from them that opportunity to exercise their agency. And that is so critical as we go into adulthood now having that agency and saying I can make a decision to go and do a thing so important. So we have to give them 10,000 opportunities to do that every year.
- [49:00]
Jenny Urch
It's like basically two different childhoods. I feel like they're diverging. There's the kind that says I'm not going to tell you what to do with your time. And then there's the kind that says I'm going to tell you everything. I'm going to tell you from 8 till 4 and then I'm going to tell you because you've got homework. And then I'm going to tell you because you've got all these adult directed activities in the evening which are resume builders for college. Entering into this world that is undergoing, like you say, the most rapid transformation in all of human history and yet we're still educating children like it's 1980 and the, the. Everything has changed. So you talk about how so in a world without job structures or set working hours, which we're already there, we've actually already been there for a while. Your child will need to know how to manage themselves. Not just their time, but also their energy, their attention, their output, their emotions. These are skills that most adults were never taught and your child should start learning them now. I'm gonna tell a quick story about our second child just because I've, I've told it before. But I'm hoping this one's getting spread far and wide so maybe people are like listening and haven't heard it before. And if you're interested in this and you just need support, you need more information, you gotta go to starcravingdadblog.com and check out the complete Life Without School collection. It is very affordable and you will get these weekly episodes, plus there's a course. You are an incredible writer. I've been drawn to your writing for years and it's encouraging and it's thought provoking. And this is imperative because it is happening, and we are going to be sending our kids out into this. If not, they're kind of already on the cusp of.
- [50:30]
Izzy Butson
Cusp.
- [50:30]
Jenny Urch
When our daughter was 14 years old, this is our oldest daughter, and she struggled with, like, the. You know, we did, like, some spelling books. And for a while, Izzy, I was kind of like, oh, you know, I mean, I had some years where I was like. And we waited. We wait for the formal education till they're, you know, seven, eight big teeth are coming in, all that Waldorf stuff, and the adult teeth coming in, and the internal organs are formed. And we waited in. And for a while, I thought, man, I don't. I don't know about this one. You know, when we joke around about it, how, like. But maybe this homeschooling isn't going to work for this particular child. Maybe I don't have what it takes. You give it time, you know? So she came to me when she was 14 years old, and she said, I want to be a personal trainer. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I don't know anything about that. She said, I've done some research, and there is this man named Joe Drake, and he teaches a course through the National Academy of Sports Medicine. It's the best credentialing that you can get. And I would.
- [51:27]
Izzy Butson
To like.
- [51:27]
Jenny Urch
Would like to take his course, and I would like to become a National Academy sports Medicine personal trainer. She says, here's your phone, and here's the number. Call him and see if I can take his class. 14 years old, in middle school. She's in middle school.
- [51:39]
Izzy Butson
Is he amazing?
- [51:40]
Jenny Urch
So I call this man and. And I say, my daughter's interested. She's 14. She's in the eighth grade. He says, no problem. We've never had anybody that young, but sure, she can take the class. So it's a zoom class. She's with all the adults. She takes it for about eight weeks. She gets this huge textbook book on anatomy. She knows all the body parts. I mean, she's constantly talking about it. She's super interested. She's asking questions. I hear. You know, she's on this zoom call, asking questions, answering questions. Then she has to study for this exam. So we're just doing all these practice tests. She had never taken a test. This was her first test that she would ever be taking. So she turned 15, and I had to drive her to a testing site because it's legit credentialing, and so they have to make sure that you don't cheat. And I had To I walked her in and they said, now you leave because you can't stay here. Only the test takers can be in this building. So I wait in the parking lot. Fifteen years old, first test she ever has taken. She walked out. Nailed it. And she is a certified personal trainer through the National Academy of Sports medicine at age 15. And then she came to me and said, I want to get my nutrition certification next, and here's the textbook I need and order it. And, you know, and I just thought, that's a kid who, no matter what comes. Who, no matter what comes. If, if person, if no one ever needs a personal trainer, which actually, I think that's probably a pretty solid career. People are really struggling with their health, and I think that's one that's going to last for a while. She's got good relationship skills. I'm like, no matter what comes, I believe she's going to be able to find something that she wants to do, figure out who can teach her how to do it, and just do it. And that's the agency. And it, in some ways, it comes out of the failure. It comes out of the fact that there was boredom there. What we sort of perceive as failure, it's not failure, but we perceive downtime sometimes as failure. And that allows them to make these decisions on. This is what I want to do with my life, and I have the capacity and the capabilities to do it. And now I have the confidence to know that no matter what comes, I can continue in that realm. And I think talking about that story, I want to hit on one other thing. You talk about this a lot. It's a misconception with homeschooling about socialization. And you talked about the relationship piece. And I talked to this woman named Isabel how. And several people have said this, that the competency of the future is relational. You know, you're gonna have to have good social skills. You're probably going to have a lot of different people that you work with. You may have a lot of bosses over the course of your adulthood, career, a lot of co workers. You're probably going to switch jobs a lot. You may be an entrepreneur, so you have to have good social skills. Can you talk about how home education supports that? It's opposite of what most people think it is.
- [54:16]
Izzy Butson
Yes. And I just love that story about your daughter so much. And that's really, you know, that's the biggest disconnect that let's just tell children what they should learn and spend 13 years telling them that. Or let's Help give them the time and the space and the encouragement to find their way to what they want to invest their time in. And when they choose to do that, gosh, it happens fast, doesn't it? They just go all in. And it does take a long time. It was the same, same with our son for him to find music and, and fine cooking and baking and that kind of thing. It took years of trust in that model, but exactly the same thing. Amazing.
- [54:48]
Jenny Urch
Oh, and let's. I mean, that is the thing and that you have to have. You're going to have shaky knees when they're nine. When they're 11, you may be thinking, I don't really know if this is working, but you, you have to give it time.
- [55:01]
Izzy Butson
Yeah. And just, just before I get to the socialization, Socialization point, one more thing on that. So my daughter was nine years old, had never been to school, and she still couldn't read fluently. And, and, and this was very different to what we'd experienced before. Our eldest son was reading novels at five. He was inhaling the things. And so we thought, oh, well, it's easy. You know, that's just going to happen for every child. And she just was not interested. It wasn't that she was struggling with it, she just wasn't interested. She loved audiobooks. We read to her every day. We surrounded her with books and literature and, and narrative and storytelling. She just didn't want to do the mechanics of reading. And, you know, my wife and I would look at each other kind of side of our eyes for years going, oh, okay, maybe we've got this slightly wrong.
- [55:50]
Jenny Urch
Yes.
- [55:51]
Izzy Butson
Is this actually going to work right? And then one day, and I did a big series on this for the Life Without School collection recently because I think it's so important for parents to understand that I broke it down into three parts. I looked at the history of reading and, and just went right through that kind of experience and those, these two big different worldviews of reading that clash together. And, and we kind of, we know that it sits now. And then she just decided, it was almost overnight where she said, I'm ready for the code of reading now. And within a matter of weeks it went from I'm stuttering through really basic readers to I can effectively read anything now, now. And all of that groundwork that she had been laying over the years and that we've been helping her with through storytelling and reading and that kind of thing, it all just clicked into place so, so quickly. And, and of course, there's lots of research out there now that says later reading has no adverse effects on your life whatsoever. You catch up and you. It's just all normal. By the time a child is 12 or 13, no one would ever know the difference. And so, so what's the problem? But I just thought I'd share that because you do get wobbly knees, as you call it.
- [56:57]
Jenny Urch
Yes, because. And because if you were to think about the alternative, a child who is nine years old in today's world, who is not reading, the baggage that they would carry into the rest of their life thinking that they are not smart, it would be.
- [57:13]
Izzy Butson
And the difference is that she loves reading now. She loves reading. And I can guarantee you that if she had chosen that timeline in a, in a formal setting, she would not love reading now. She would have read earlier, she would have been reading by 7 or 8, but she would not pick up a book for joy. And we know that teenagers, only one in five of them do now. It's a, it's a horrifying statistic. So you force reading too early.
- [57:36]
Jenny Urch
Right. The point is, is that you have to be pretty solid on your philosophy.
- [57:41]
Izzy Butson
Yes.
- [57:41]
Jenny Urch
And in order for you to be solid on your philosophy, you have to read and you have to be in the know and you have to be paying attention and you have to join. Join. You have to join your collection, your complete life without school collection. I think, because there are going to be times where you doubt. You doubt, you look around, you feel nervous about your choices. And I think you have to have some solid stories, some solid information. The research you go through, the neuroscience, you know, you talk about all of these things. You have to have that as a foundation because that's going to help you, help to see you through. And then once they're starting to hit those teen years, you really see the benefit of it and you see how it could have so easily gone south.
- [58:21]
Izzy Butson
Yeah. It's so important to understand it because we take it as read that the formal education system is the gold standard. And so anything outside of that would be lesser. And when you look into the neuroscience, when you research child development, when you look at the dozens and dozens of studies over the years about any given one thing, thing related to education, you realize that actually putting a child in a classroom is very much a compromise. It is a second or third best option. And I'm not saying that as I'm a raving home education fan, I'm saying that as someone that has spent years in the research now, and it's very clear it's just black and white that that is not the right space to develop a child. It is a secondary option if you need it. It is a compromise if you need it, but it's not kind of. And so to the socialization point, this is a really good example of where we think that a classroom is the gold standard for social development. I mean you ask 95 of parent, 95% of parents on the planet, you say where do children go to get their social skills? School, of course. I mean where else would they get them? And if you really stop and think about it, it and you put 30 kids who are the same age and we, we group them by birth year and we put them into one space and we compress their environment into a pressured space of assessment and expectation and lower their ability to move, take away their ability to really express their emotions. We have to even all of that stuff out. You imagine that as an adult and you compress it all into one space and then say now what kind of social skills are you going to develop? Well, you're going to develop masking, you're going to develop coping, you're going to suppress feelings, you're going to learn to not bring up conflict, you're going to learn to avoid conflict. And so you've actually got all of this really unhealthy social development that happens in that space. It's extremely unnatural. There's no other space in the rest of life where you, you're sorted by your birth date. No professional environment I have ever been in has looked anything like a classroom. And these are, I've worked for some wonderful companies led by wonderful people. And they are not like classrooms, they are very different. You have all sorts of ages coming together to solve problems. You have emotionally literate people who know how to resolve conflict and know how to question each other, know how to question the decisions that are being made because if we can't do that, we never going to make progress. And so all of these really interesting things about social development, we actually constrain them all in a classroom. So if you think about, let's use my two older boys as an example when they're karate dojo. So the three of us go twice a week, sometimes three times a week and we're in this space and they start really young and I've got these people above them who they can see, oh, this is really interesting. I want to get to where that person is and that, that person supports and mentors them and so they're seeing how different people interact with each other. And they're seeing how these older teenagers are interacting with the younger ones. And as they get older, they realize that now I'm becoming one of the older ones and I'm now turning around to mentor these younger ones. We're all in the same space, we're developing together. If we sorted that by birth date, that would be extremely unnatural and it would not result in those same kind of, of social skills being developed. It's a very. If you really stop and think about it, you think about a child going out to a karate dojo and then they go to a sports practice or they play a game and they go down to the local library and they interact with a, with a librarian there, they go to a dance class and there's, you know, their teacher and a couple of teenage student helpers, that kind of thing. Then they're at the park and they're meeting different, different kids of different ages. It's so say we're going for a surf and there's four or five surfers out on the same break and the young ones are interacting with the older ones and they're all kind of bantering about things and then we're visiting grandparents. And the key thing about that, which no one would argue is not healthy social development, that is all very, very positive social interactions. And the key thing is that they're different ages. That's the key thing to all of that, that you're interacting with different ages and different backgrounds and different cultures and different life experiences rather than here's one postcode and one birth year and we're going to bundle you all into that space and we're going to tell you to stay quiet, please, because this is not a place to socialize. Just very odd.
- [62:53]
Jenny Urch
Wow. And I, I mean, I'm reading book after book about loneliness and one of the things that we talk about is how these kids are actually in a way stunted. Because what happens is you spend 13 years of your life where you're put in an environment where you're around a bunch of kids and then all of a sudden that disappears. And then what? No one's actually explicitly taught how to make friends. And as soon as you hit age 19, you're no longer sitting around 25 other 19 year olds that no longer exists. It doesn't exist at all. And so you may not have the skills that you need to figure out how do I go out and build a community and where do I find people that I can banter with and enjoy being around? And so, yeah, well, maybe it works for 12 years, but it's because it's a part of a system that all of a sudden disappears. So I just. I really cannot recommend your stuff more highly. Your writing, like I said, has just been inspiring me for years and years. I'm so thankful you have been a part of my own homeschooling journey and giving me confidence and courage along the way. Stark raving Dad, I. We. Just. From the very beginning, I was like, man, that is so brilliant. If I was a dad, I wish I would have come up with that. Star craving dad. And whether you're following on social media or you come and check out the complete Life Without School collection, it is, like I said, so affordable. And it's all. I mean, you hit on all the current topics, all the topics that a parent might be wondering. It's like, if there's anything at all, you're gonna find it there, including very current information about artificial intelligence and what's going on in the job market. You say we have to shift from the question of how do I make sure my child keeps up to what kind of human will thrive in the world that's coming. That is the work now. Raising kids who can think for themselves, guide themselves, ground themselves, who can walk into uncertainty and still know who they are and what they have to offer. There is no roadmap for that, but there is a path. And we build it with every choice we make. Every day, every conversation, every opportunity we give them to grow in the real world, not just rehearse for a world that is disappearing. Gosh, I have chills. I mean, it's so deep. And I have just. I. I have scratched the surface. If, like. If we're Talking about, like, 100 is all of the things that you offer, Izzy, I mean, we've talked about. Point to, you know, I mean, there is so much that you offer and that parents desperately need. And more than that, the kids. Kids need it. We need kids who can be raised in a way that builds the muscles they'll actually need in this changing world. They need motivation without any external pressure. They need adaptability when things change, because they will over and over again. They need confidence to try things they've never done before. And they need patience to get good at something hard. You say, I believe we're at the edge of one of the most fascinating periods in human history, but I also think we are woefully unprepared for it. So this is a call. This is a call to parents who want to get ahead of this. This is A call to families who want to spend the next 10 years building resilience and confidence and adaptability and purpose. Because I strongly believe that families who take this seriously, that parents who step into this big unknown space to help their children develop skills and attributes and qualities that will serve them regardless of where all this goes, while they're giving their children a real head start.
- [66:12]
Izzy Butson
And I think it's. It's just worth saying as well that I think there's so many opinions out there on how to parent and. And about the education system and about homeschooling and home education and unschooling and all that kind of thing. And I just think there's so much opinion. And the real key with my work is that I have tried to move away from opinion and into research and into studies and into child development and just really work out how it is a child develops in the best possible way and learns in the best possible way and becomes motivated and that's, you know, the best version of themselves. What is that and how do we find it? I just think there's too much opinion out there, and it's really easy to get sucked into that. So I've really tried to build a library that is just so research based and so grounded. So, yeah, that's kind of the key.
- [67:00]
Jenny Urch
It's such a library. Let's look at the neuroscience of developmental timelines and why the idea of school readiness is so deeply flawed. Let's look at the research about what school says. You know, they. School says teenagers need grades, exams, and transcripts. But what does the research actually say? The research tells a very different story. So people are going to find what they need. You're going to find your foundation, you're going to find your confidence, and you're going to find answers for raising kids, you know, in an unknown world where we don't. We can't clearly see what's up ahead. So. Izzy, what an honor. I am so thrilled to finally have met you. I mean, I just. I like. It's happening. It's happening. So I've been looking forward to this for a long time. Time and so grateful for all the work that you have put into what you've shared over the past however many years. I mean, it's been a long time that you've been sharing. We always end our show with the same question. The question is, what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside.
- [67:56]
Izzy Butson
All that was outside. Okay. So I would say we had this near where we lived when I was a kid. We had this. What was basically a. A dump for old bricks and things and dust and that kind of thing. And so my friends and I would go down there and we'd have these big wars where there's two massive piles of brick dust and bricks and that kind of thing. And we'd kind of lob bricks over at each other and that kind of thing. It's crazy. In this world, you would never consider, you know, kids doing that, right? And so we'd have teams on. On either side, and we'd be throwing it. And one day I decided to get brave and I ran over the hill. You know, I was picturing myself like a soldier in a war. And I ran over the hill and I started, you know, pelting these. These kind of rocks at my friends over the other side. And someone just stood up and threw a rock straight at my face. And it kind of hit me. Hit me right in the cheek, this horrible injury. And I thought my eye was falling out, and it was all this kind of thing. But then, as in the aftermath of that, it really wasn't a bad injury. It was just a little, you know, a little graze on my chin, cheek. And then the aftermath of that, going, I went back to school the next day, and all my friends like, wow, look at that injury. And I remember thinking, wow, that was fun. That was such a rush. And I think about that sometimes because I think about just how sterilized we've made childhood now. And even though that probably wasn't super safe, and I don't condone coming out and throwing bricks at each other, there is definitely a middle ground, and we've gotten way past it. So I do think about. About that a lot, about how safe and comfortable we have made everything. And how, you know, a lot of the stuff I remember from my childhood had more risk in it, a lot more fun.
- [69:35]
Jenny Urch
Oh, yeah. And that's where we're heading into. We want. It's going to be risky, but also we want to have fun. Stark Raving Dad. Life without school. You can check out the complete life without school collection at Stark Raving dad blog dot com. There are a couple free things on there as well. So you can go, go, go check it out, and then you just join in on that collection because our kids need it. Our kids need it for the world that they're entering in. Izzy, thank you so much for being here.
- [70:00]
Izzy Butson
Thank you so much for having me. Jenny. I could have spoken for hours. We need to do this again.
- [70:03]
Jenny Urch
Yeah. As we wrap up today, I want to say thanks for being here. Episodes like this help us to think more deeply and to parent more intentionally in a world that's changing quickly. If this episode got your wheels spinning, please pass it along. If you know someone who's been wrestling with how to raise kids for an uncertain future, this is a good one to send in a text. Then you can talk about it with them after they've listened. Also, it is such a support if you can leave a review wherever you listen. I read them all. I find them super encouraging and they help other families find the show. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Until next time. May you find extraordinary moments on ordinary paths.
- [70:41]
Izzy Butson
Get outside, open your eyes Feel that sunshine kissing your skin Throw your worries out to the wind.
- [70:53]
Jenny Urch
Climb some trees.
- [70:54]
Izzy Butson
Skin your knees Feel that grass on.
- [70:57]
Jenny Urch
Your feet again get out there and take it in.
- [71:03]
Izzy Butson
Oh, it's a beautiful world Ain't nothing on the screen It's a ever going to beat this view oh, it's a beautiful world and I just want to share with I just want to share with you this beautiful world Such a beautiful world the New Year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important, important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals with LifeLock, save up to 40 your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply.