Pints With Aquinas - Homeschooling, Parenting, and the Read-Aloud Revival w/ Sarah Mackenzie

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Sarah Mackenzie joins the show to talk about Homeschooling, audiobooks, education, and parenting. Show Sponsors:  Strive21: https://strive21.com/matt Ascension: https://ascensionpress.com/fradd https://readaloudrevival.com/  

Sarah McKenzie, what is up? I'm so happy to be here. I'm happy to be in Steubenville. I have two kids in Steubenville. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm happy to be here to talk to you. That's what I meant, Matt. Did you go here or? No, in fact, so my oldest transferred into Steubenville

her sophomore year. And the first time I'd ever come here was earlier, to drop my, our third is now a freshman at Steubenville as well. So at Franciscan as well. And so it was just recently to drop him off. I had never heard, she'd been here for two years before I had ever come here. So yeah, but they love it. It's been such a good place. You know that people haven't been to Franciscan or live here when they, I did the same thing, refer to the school as Steubenville. So when did you start going to Steubenville?

Yeah. What else is there to do in Steubenville but go to Franciscan? Yeah. Well, and then your beautiful daughter helps homeschool our children. So it's been lovely to get to know her. I'm jealous because I would like her to help me homeschool our children. You can't have her back. Sorry. Yeah. She's pretty great. And then I heard about you, I think it was like five, Cameron, was it? Seven years ago when you started listening to Read Aloud Revival, which is the name of your podcast. And just this morning I was,

I see that you're moving over to YouTube a little bit. Am I? Are you? Your podcasts are on YouTube. No video that I'm saying about. Oh yeah, there are a few of them over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. YouTube we haven't done a whole lot of yet.

But you're crushing the podcast space. Like what kind of downloads do you get? We get about 40,000 downloads on each episode in the first, you know, I think six weeks or something like that. It's been so interesting. I really started the podcast on kind of a whim. So we have six kids and our youngest were babies. And I think I just needed something else for my brain to do.

And I also loved podcasts. This is back in, let's see. Before they were cool. Before they were cool, because it would have been like 2014, I think loved podcasts. This is back in, let's see. Before they were cool. Before they were cool, because it would have been like 2014, I think. Yeah, that was before they were cool. Yeah, how long have you been podcasting? It was a quick uptick, wasn't it? It was while Trump was running for president.

When was that, 2016? 15, 16? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I was just right before you then. So yeah, and I just, I started doing a couple of episodes thinking, well, I thought if I was gonna do a podcast, I started doing a couple of episodes thinking, well, I thought if I was going to do a podcast, I'd love to talk about reading aloud because it's made such

a big impact on our family. I'll just do a few episodes. And I thought if I'm going to have anybody on this show, I'll have Andrew Poudoe from the Institute for Excellence in Writing, because he had made a really big impact on my own desire to read aloud with my kids. And so I didn't, he didn't know who I was. Like I sent an email was like, does Andrew Poudreau want to be on my podcast? And they wrote back right away saying yes. And I thought, I guess I better figure out

how to start a podcast. I don't really have one. So I created one and we had a few, I thought it would just be a few episodes, but it sort of got a lot of momentum and it was very fun. And it, so we just kept doing it. How do you think it got the momentum? I think it's because other than you're excellent and you do a great job. I mean, I mean, was there a real hunger for, yeah, I think honestly, well, most of our listeners are homeschooling families, not all, but most of them. And I think families, especially moms who have like so much on their plate,

they have so much to do, and they have such a desire to do a really good job with their kids. And then they realize that reading aloud takes very little time or energy and it has this profound impact. I think it feels like this super tool. So I think people get kind of like me,

we get a little zealous about it. Like, do you all know about how amazing it is to just sit down and read The Hobbit with your kids? You know? And so I think zealous about it. Like, do you all know about how amazing it is to just sit down and read The Hobbit with your kids? You know? And so I think that's why I got momentum because it was simpler maybe than we're all. I mean, I know most of the homeschooling moms I know were trying so hard to do a good job and it feels like everything is so complicated sometimes. This feels like how can this be as effective and positive when it's so simple?

Not to take a shot at public schools immediately, but here we go. I'm shocked that we're doing this already. Dr. Andrew Swofford once said to me, because he teaches at Benedictine in Kansas. And he said, when he looks at those who've been homeschooled versus those who go to regular school, he says, it's just night and day

He said I'm convinced that if all you did was read books to your children on the couch like good books Yeah, they'd be head and shoulders above the rest of them. I think it's true. Why is that true? Okay, one thing that when you say that that reminds me of is back when so we have six kids like I've mentioned our oldest three are all graduated. They're all two of them are here at Franciscan. And when they were younger, I worked evenings sometimes at the library. So my husband would come home from work, we'd like tag news. I was like a sub at the circulation desk, basically. And so I would work in the evenings.

And I remember at this one particular library, this homeschooling family that would come in and the kids, their older kids, would come right up to the desk and they would talk to me like a person, and have these great conversations. And I remember thinking, I thought homeschoolers were supposed to be unsocialized, but these kids have better social skills

than any teenagers I'd ever met. And it was sort of well known, and the library was a pretty big library, among the library staff. And I remember thinking, that's so interesting. And that's been true, I feel like, time and time again, when, I mean, I'm a little biased toward my own children, of course,

but, you know, we hear from people all the time, like, your kids are so delightful. And I think about all the worries I had early on, especially my husband had it early on about like, are we going to be socially inhibiting them by keeping them home? No. There was, I think though, that probably was, I think it's a lie, right? The homeschool kids are weird. We are a little weird. All kids are kind of weird, right? But I do think, you know, like 20, 30 years ago, if you were homeschooling, I don't know about in America, but in Australia, like you were a weird family.

Yeah. That doesn't mean bad. It might mean significantly better and more moral and all that. But you were weird. And so your kids were also like you and they were weird too. So I think there was some truth to that. Yeah. Oh, for sure.

But it feels like it's become more popular, more acceptable. And now what I'm seeing is exactly what you're seeing. Like my kids talk to everybody. They don't just associate with people at their age. When you think about it, Matt, it's so interesting, right? We have classrooms of kids, of 20 kids, let's say that's a small classroom, right? 29 year olds, and all learning the same thing. There is nowhere else in life where you replicate that. So we call this, this is like normal socialization or normal education, right? But there's actually nowhere else in life where that's replicated again. Anytime after you graduate from school, you're working in it, whether you're no matter where

you're working, you're working with people of all different ages from different that are have different experiences. Real life looks a lot more like homeschooling where you have this, your family life, and then you go out into the world and you're at the library, you're talking to people of all different ages and asking questions. And one of the things that I have really appreciated about homeschooling is the ability for the kids to have friends that are not the same age, and it's not weird at all. You know, like for the older kids to be playing with the

younger kids or helping. I mean, it's just, it's different because I think it's normal, like that whole, um, I mean, it reminds you really of the old one room school houses in some ways where you had all these different ages together. I see. I didn't know that. I didn't know that was the case. Yes. Yeah. All different. So a teacher would have 50, 40 students and they would be from, you know, the time they were from their first, when they first came to school at six or seven or eight, all the way up till they were graduated, all in the same room. So when did it change? Do you know?

I don't remember. There is a book by John Taylor Gatto about having it's called like the underground something of education. I can't remember now where he kind of goes into the industrial complex and what happened when we started moving toward making schools look more like factories than they were looking like places where real education happens. And one of the things I should say, and I, we don't like at Read A Lot of Revival and

anywhere I go really, I'm not really necessarily like on a mission to get people to homeschool. Because I really feel like God gives each of us the grace to parent our own kids. Like I don't know the best way for you to educate your kids. Like, God's given you and Cameron that. And you don't know the best way to educate mine because God's given Andrew and I. So I feel like there is, I know so many really good families

who have decided and prayerfully considered that going to parochial schools or going to public schools is where their family should go. So I wouldn't ever tell somebody you should homeschool. I just really want people to know how joyful and wonderful it can be. And I think so often we have this idea that, well, I can't homeschool because I'm imagining what they do at school and I'm trying to replicate that at home. I can't figure out how that would work.

And so instead of... What I love is for people to realize that it's totally different. Like, shed everything that it looks like at school. It doesn't need to look like that at all at home, you know? That's really helpful because I know when we kind of homeschooled, we were both nervous and we also had, let's say, family members who talked to us like we might be abusing our children. It was brutal. And so you feel insecure. I don't even know if this is the right thing. I just know that the schools aren't an option and I love my kids and I

love us having a tight-knit community even though sometimes I want to kill them. Don't get me wrong, I love them for sure. And so I already feel a little insecure and then I've got a parent saying this and then that's very awkward. And then you have a child who's a late reader who has any kind of like a late reading is the really big one because I think that it's so common and it also feels like I know my kid can't succeed unless they're reading well right so if I can't figure this out you know we have it puts a different weight of burden parents have have that burden anyway. We already feel the burden of like, oh, I've got to fix this thing for my kid or help them

be ready for, you know, X, Y, Z. But then you add homeschooling on to it and it just takes all of the burden that most parents probably put onto the schools. Like, well, it's your job to teach my child to read, right? And we put it on ourselves and then wonder if we're just... Talk about that because I'm sure that's a common problem. It's true of us right now. We have a child that's struggling to read and I think he probably has dyslexia and other

things that we'll get to. Probably, yeah. Significantly, yeah. But what kind of advice do you have for parents out there who are homeschooling and their children don't seem to be reading as quickly as they'd like? I didn't realize it was as common as it sounds. It's extremely common. There are some really good work done by the, oh, I don't know if you say it Giselle or just Sal,

it's G-E-S-S-E-L-L Institute. And they have done a lot of work showing that kids who start to learn how to read between the time of like four and I wanna say eight, I might be getting the exact numbers a little bit wrong. That's all normal. It's all very normal to learn to read for the very first time in that huge stretch of time. What's happened, it's so interesting too

because when you look at the standards in our public school system for what kids should be able to do at kindergarten, that's changed remarkably in the last 100 years, 50 years even, and you think, well, that's so interesting. It last 100 years, 50 years even. And you think, well, that's so interesting. It's not like the children are coming out smarter or something. You know what I mean?

But why do we at age five in kindergarten now, they expect children to be learning how to read? That was not the case when even when we were in school, not that long ago, right? And then you go even further back to our grandparents age, they were not teaching kindergartners how to read. That was not even something that was on their radar that young. So the goalposts have kept changing. And then we start to feel like, oh, if my child is not reading by the time they're six, they're behind. But that's sort of a new interesting way of thinking. A couple of other things can come into play here.

And one is that there's a couple of things that parents can do to help their kids learn how to read. One is phonics. One is reading aloud. That's the biggest one is reading aloud. Actually, we know that that's the single best thing you can do to help your kids learn to read. And that makes sense, right? Because if you are, you have a five, six, seven, eight year old who can't read, but you're reading aloud all these good books, you're reading the Chronicles of Narnia and the Hobbit and the Little House on the Prairie books to them, they're hearing how language sounds. All those grammatically correct,

sophisticated language patterns are being stored in their brain through the ear. And then when the phonics and time, that's the third component. So I should go back and say, we can do phonics. The most important part is reading aloud. And then the third part is just time. And some kids learn how to read when they're three, four, and five. It's true. It happens. And other kids, it just flips. My son, who's a freshman

at Franciscan now, he, um, he learned how to read when he, he was the one I was most worried about. He was close to nine. Um, and it was so interesting because he went in the space of about a week he went from reading like really struggling through the Frog and Toad books, Little Bear books like just sounding out words painfully to reading full novels in almost about a week and this is what I had heard would happen based on the research that if kids have all this good language coming in through the ear, they're getting all of the pacing and the cadence, they know what it sounds like.

Then when the phonics and the time kind of catch up, then they know what it sounds like so they don't need to now go through all the same stages they would have to if they had learned younger. Does that make sense? Yes. And then the other thing we know is that whether a child learns how to read when they're four or when they're eight, they're all usually about the same level by the time they're, it's either 12 or 14, it's somewhere in there. So there is no real advantage to teaching our kids

how to learn to read earlier. So that takes a lot of pressure off when we realize like, oh, okay, so we're not in a hurry, we're not in a rush. You're probably in a rush a little bit more if they're in school because teachers have a lot on their plate and they're trying to, they have these standards. Yeah, they're trying to keep them up with everybody else.

Yeah, they're trying to keep them up with little bit more if they're in school because teachers have a lot on their plate and they're trying to, they have these standards. Yeah, they're being judged based on whether these kids are reading too, right? And they're trying to teach all these kids at the same time. So but if you're at home, you have a lot more wiggle room. You have a lot more ability to let your kids learn whenever God's timetable inside of them. So I know that you said you don't go on a crusade to tell everybody to homeschool, but I still want to talk about homeschooling. But it is interesting, right? Because it seems to me

that whenever you set out, here's a really good option, it's difficult to do that without making someone feel bad. But that doesn't mean we should stop saying it. You know, like if I say, like, you should save sex till marriage. If you want a better marriage, this is what you should do. Well, that's going to make a lot of people feel bad. But what am I going to do? Not say that truth? Well, no, I'm going to say that truth. Or if I say, yeah, homeschooling, I think is probably all things considered, all things equal a much better idea. It's going to make someone feel bad.

And I understand that there are cases where people don't have that option or they just feel like I don't have that kind of relationship with my children. I really don't think I'd be good at it. And maybe there are legitimate things there. And yet I think we should still say it. And it gets tiresome, I think, having to button up, keep buttoning up every sentence with a caveat. So maybe we just need to get the caveat out of the way. And then we can talk a little bit more about homeschooling. Whoever's watching this right now or listening to this right now, you and I don't have the grace

to parent their children and to make those choices. God's not giving us that wisdom and grace. I don't know. I want to push back on that a little bit because I still think homeschooling is a better idea. Well, that's interesting. I mean, I am not an unbiased source here. Occasionally someone will ask me, you know, like, can you help me think through whether to homeschool or to put my kids in school? I'm like, I'm not the person you want to help you think unless you want me to just tell you all the reasons to homeschool. I have six children and none of them have ever stepped foot in a classroom until college. So I'm not the, I'm clearly, I have a strong favor for homeschooling. One of the things I don't like about the way

people talk about homeschooling is as a, the best option because of the state of the world or because there's no other better options. If there were better Catholic schools or they were better private schools or for public schools were better, that would obviously be the better solution. This is, I think fundamentally. Okay. So we are often as homeschoolers seen as the people who are opting out of the more natural option, which would be to put your kids in school.

Great point. But the catechism tells us that parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children, right? So we know that all parents are actually responsible for the education of our kids. That means, and really all of us are educating our babies, and we all taught them to walk and to eat and to talk and to use the toilet, right? We're just keeping on going as they get older with the other things that you add to that, all those basic things that they learn when they're young, when they're babies.

It seems to me that everyone is a home educator in that way, like regardless of whether you decide to send your kids to school to help. It's kind of like outsourcing, like, and which is an awesome thing to do, right? Like I outsource all the production of meat that my family eats. We don't grow around cattle or butcher it, right? So in the same way, you can say, you know, now that my child is this age, I would like to outsource to a tutor or to a school

to help me with this piece. But it seems like fundamentally, it should almost be turned upside down that you're opting out of that part of educating your kids at home, instead of us as homeschoolers being the ones who are opting out of the natural thing. Does that make sense? I love that. That's such a great way to put it.

But that still does feel probably yucky, I don't know what better word, to somebody who goes, well, now I feel bad that my kids are in school. But I like I like that you said that saying, well, I'm homeschooling because the world is a mess. It's like, no, you're homeschooling because this is the natural way to educate your children. I like that. And even if you're in a place with good schools, homeschooling can still be a really beautiful, wonderful option. When we started homeschooling, we were in a terrible school district. I was reading some blogs.

Elizabeth Foss, this beautiful Catholic mother of nine, was reading her blog and I thought, I know I was a convert, I'm like, this is what I want. This is like, this is what I want for my kids. And I didn't know any real homeschoolers in my real life. And then my husband knew one homeschooling family growing up and they were super weird. So he was like, no, you know,

children are gonna like, do you speak in their own language? You're gonna, no, we're not doing this. And actually we would get into these arguments because I really wanted, Audrey, our oldest, was getting to be about school age and I really wanted to homeschool and he really didn't think it was a good idea. We'd fight about it and argue about it. At some point I realized God would not call him to one thing and me to

another. So one of us is wrong. We know who that was. Now I'm just kidding. I'm sure you'll appreciate that. Look right into the camera and say, Andrea. I love you darling. And I, so I thought, okay, I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop fighting him on this at every turn. I went and toured the schools in our area. We did not live in a great area. The schools were terrible.

There was a lot of violence in the schools. There were, it was anyway, there was all kinds of things. I picked one because at that, in that school district, we were able to actually pick whatever public school you wanted to put your kids in. So I chose one and I would just be like praying, oh my goodness, okay, I'm trusting you Jesus. And really out of nowhere, my husband comes home from work one day about two or three weeks before kindergarten registration date. And he doesn't remember why he doesn't remember if there was a story at work or like what

happened that he just said, okay, one year you can do kindergarten. That's it. I'm like, I'll take it. Right? And then the next year it was like, well, you can do first grade too. And then we, you know,

you find these other homeschooling families and then you like really enjoy, your kids are really fun at that age actually. They actually get really fun. And then we send them away all day. And then you get them tired and cranky at the end of the day. Really we should be sending them away in middle school age. That's a joke. Yeah. That's where they... Yeah. Send them to an island from the age of nine to 15, at least boys.

Yeah, that's true. You said something in a recent podcast. We were driving around Florida listening to this and it was so freeing for me and I'd love you to kind of explore it here on the podcast. You said asking yourself the question, am I doing enough? It's a really bad idea and the wrong question to ask. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Yeah. We, I think it's, this is a question that we constantly ask ourselves. And as parents, we all do it. Right. And then you take like a homeschooling mom, especially, and she's like, look, I mean, I, I be looking, when we had our fifth and sixth, they're twins.

We had Audrey, our oldest was 12. We had a 10, we had an eight. We had a one year old. And then we had twin newborns. And there, that question was always answered with no, am I doing enough to teach? No, like I'm not doing enough. There's not enough of me to go around.

Yeah, which is just crippling, paralyzing, isn't it? It's also an incomplete question. Okay. So, you know, if I was to ask you, Matt, are you doing enough with your kids? In what, in what regard? Yeah. What do you mean?

So then if I was to say, well, are you doing enough to help your kids understand the math they need to understand this year? No, your daughter is and my wife is, hopefully. She's fabulous, she is fabulous. Okay, but interestingly enough, if in my head, if I go, am I doing enough? I immediately start thinking, well, gosh, I mean, I should be teaching my kids more about the faith. We don't go to daily mass. Also, that kid's not reading yet. This one's behind in math. But I haven't actually found a question yet. So the answer is going to be no, because am

I doing enough to do everything? Like, What actually, what do we mean by that? So then if I say, well, am I doing enough to help my kid with their math this year? Well, then you can, like, solutions will start to bubble up. Like, what does that look like? What would it look like to do enough? What's the goal here? So then if I go, well, my goal is for them to do,

to like, achieve the next step in math, let's say, then solutions naturally start to present themselves. Like, okay, what does that require? That requires like 20 minutes a day of sitting down and doing some math together. Now am I doing enough? Yes. So, or am I doing enough to pass on the faith to my kids?

That's gonna have, doing math for 20 minutes a day ain't gonna answer that, right? That question about am I doing enough to pass into the faith, even that going to have a very doing math for 20 minutes a day and I'm going to answer that. Right. So that question about am I doing enough to pass into the faith? Even that is seems to be an unfair question. Unless you know what the next step is, the next goal is because it's like, no, of course you're not like children can't recite the entire book. I mean, your children probably could recite the whole Baltimore Catechism, but most children can't.

So it's like it's this unrealistic standard that I can never meet. Yes. So I'm going to always feel like a failure. And if I'm feeling like a failure, I'm probably not going to be joyful and motivated and interested. Well, and the truth is that. The answer is almost always am I doing enough to? And even when you finish that sentence, the answer is almost always no anyway,

because like you said, well, there's always more that you could be doing, but also doing more might not actually get you the results that you want either. But here's the thing, this is the key, I think. We weren't actually asked to get results. Like there's that beautiful quote by Mother Teresa saying, oh gosh, it's something about how we weren't called to be. Something like he doesn't demand, he demands our effort, but not success. Something like that doesn't demand, he demands our effort, but not success.

Something like that. Yes, yes, it's faithfulness, not success. That's right. I really, so the picture in my mind that has helped me so much over the years is of Jesus feeding the 5,000 on the hillside. And you can imagine this throng of hungry people. And also, I don't know if you've ever been around somebody who doesn't

understand that, like, okay, this will happen with our kids, right? Where, like, I can tell this particular kid, if they don't get fed, like, in the next hour, we are going to have, like, things are going to get... I feel that way about my wife. Honey, let's get you a steak real quick. Quickly, we need to do something about this. So I can just imagine these disciples like this crowd is hungry and Jesus is not paying any attention to that.

Like he's so into his preaching, he does not even. And so then they tell him like we need to send them away, like send them away to go eat, which is how I feel most mornings, right? Like the school bus trundles by and I think- There's the quote, God does not require that we be successful and that we be faithful. Beautiful, yes. The bus trundles… Yeah, the bus trundles by and I think like, send them away, right? Like, I don't have enough.

There's not enough here, which I'm sure is how the disciples felt. Look at all these people. We don't have enough. But what Jesus didn't say, he could have just instantly fed everybody, right? And that might have been even more impressive, but that's not what he did. What he did is he said, bring me what you have. So they bring him this measly basket full of loaves and fish, and he makes it enough. Now this is what we do every single day in our homeschool. You will never feel like you are enough or you have enough for your kids.

That's not what he ever asked you to do. He said, bring me what you have and I'll make it enough. I think this is what we see time and time again. I can look back now having graduated three kids from our home school and think, I know there were years I didn't give them enough. The years from the time when the twins and Clara were like, like I said, we had three kids that were one and under at the same time I'm trying to homeschool these other kids. There were several years I did not give my kids enough.

But we brought what we had and he made it enough. And that's the promise he's given us and the charge too. So I think sometimes we confuse what our job is. We think our job is results. I want my kids to turn out this way. And we're never promised those results. That's not even the job we were given. I actually think there's a little bit of,

I push back a little bit in my mind when I hear like that we are supposed to be raising saints, which I know is true, but also. Really not your job. Really not your job. And I think it leads to all kinds of problems when our kids get older, and we start to take our own value from their decisions, right? When they're like a completely separate image of God. I hear from a lot of moms of teens and older kids that say like, well, young adults, you know, it's parenting gets really hard here

because then you lose control. You don't have the control. I don't think that's true. I think you never had it, right? Like you don't really have control over your three-year-old. Yes, you can physically put them in a timeout or like put them in a high chair to eat lunch or I guess not three-year-old. Yes, you can physically put them in a timeout or like put them in a high chair to eat lunch or I guess not a three-year-old. But you know, you but you don't actually you don't have control over whether their heart continues to beat. You don't have control over when they're going to learn how to potty train. You can try but like anybody who's potty trained more than one kid knows is a lot less to do

with you, a lot more to do with the child. I like this idea. Someone gave me some advice recently and it's changed a lot of how I think. He said that his wife said to him, I'm afraid my daughter is going to hate me. And I think that's a lovely, vulnerable, beautiful thing to say. I think a lot of parents have this fear

because of the relationship they might have with their parents. I don't want him to grow up and resent me. I'm so afraid my daughter. I'm so afraid my daughter, I'm so afraid my son's going to hate me. And he said, and it's so simple, it's going to sound banal, why even say it? He said, well, if you're afraid that she'll hate you, then you don't hate her. In other words, put first things first. I can't make you like me. I actually can't. But if I try to, that's manipulation. But I can put first things first and love you.

I think that's really good. We were also talking to another mother recently who said this same thing about her baby. She said, she hates me, this baby, you know? And we just found that so sad because it's not the baby's job to meet your emotional needs. It's your job to give her her basic needs. But of course, this woman probably didn't receive that from her parents.

And she looks to her children to meet that need in her. And I suppose when we start schooling our children, whether we want them to be saints or whether we want them to be this or that, a lot of the time it is more of a reflection on us and how we want to be. Yeah. And then we start to gather whether or not. Can you imagine if St. Monica had had taken whether or not she was doing a good job based on Augustine's behavior for years? You know, she would have thought, okay, this isn't working. I'm failing. She wasn't failing. She was a saint.

Yeah. Augustine was failing. What's that? Augustine was failing. Exactly. And they're completely separate. But I think what happens when our kids get older is if we are taking our personal success or our value from the results we get, what we're doing is we're turning our kids into projects. And then we absolutely start to treat our children instead of the images of God that they are,

we start to treat them like we're the potter and they're the clay. Like I have to shape you and mould you. And then we start to make them in our image and make them respond to us. Give us like if you behave well, if you hold your faith after you leave home, if you XYZ, then I did a good job. And if not, then I failed. This is wonderful advice. I tell you what, it's good advice from someone like yourself who has something of a reputation to keep. I mean,

I'm not saying you're interested in that, but anyone who is out there in the public talking about how to raise children is probably concerned that one of them is going to be a little shit and like, you know, like rebel completely and go off the rafters and not make it into college and can't read. And then you're like, crap. Yeah. So did you, crap. So did you learn that lesson over time or is that something you've always felt known? Because it's one thing to know it. Like you could have told me that before I had kids and I would have nodded sagely and not understood a thing.

And I think I understand it a lot more now having four children. But. And you know how like in parenting, you understand things in a different new way like every stage that they get to. So I think I have a different appreciation now for, there's a reason I think that we always say that like,

when you're first, you know, it's the story and my daughter would say no different. Like we are younger kids, there's a lot of things that we're more lax on than we were when she was young. I think there's a reason for that. And it's not just that parents get older and that we get tired. This is my point. You go, you tell me. Yeah, yeah, tell me. Well, all right, I'll tell you, I don't mean, was young. I think there's a reason for that. And it's not just that parents get older and now we get tired.

This is my point. You go, you tell me. Well, I'll tell you. I don't mean I just sorry. I'll tell you mine because I mean, the Leslie and you tell me it matches up. OK, so I used to. So my youngest son several years ago went to a friend's house. The dad knows that I don't like screens and like phones. And he texted me on my screen and said, would you, would it be okay if your son watched this movie? So I look it up and I see that there's a masturbation joke in it. I guess it wasn't explicit, but it was something. I'm like, what the hell is wrong with you? No. And his wife said to him, ah, I forgot, youngest, youngest kid.

And I was like, ugh, I was like, no, you're just lazy. You're just you've given up. Like, but I don't think that's true anymore. I think what happens is you learn what battles are worth fighting. Yes. And you become gentler. Yeah. And a gentle parent turns out to make them far less anxious child. And I know that we've done that with without I have done that with my my eldest child, just this white knuckling Everything has to be okay, right? It's got to be okay Whereas now, you know our youngest he'll speak back to us and or he'll do something where if my eldest had done I'm like next he's gonna be a bloody drug

Where as now I'm like, okay, like we'll deal with this. Yes a lot more. Okay, that's yes you tell me your way Exactly that there's a there's like a seasoned mom chill that we all know from like the mom who's got like a lot of kids or older kids. And it's easy to go like, oh, she's just got so many. She's tired or she. No, I think it's because she realizes

that hell's not worth dying, you know, fighting on. I also think then you have this same people that I mentioned early, the Giselle Giselle Institute. They have they make these books that are I don't know if they still make them. I have like old, old copies. There's like a book that's like, you're one year old, you're two year old, you're three year old.

And what I loved about these books is they just tell you what's developmentally happening in your child's brain at that time. And so I remember reading, I don't remember if it was like the seven year old or the eight year old book, but when one of my kids was about that age, I was, they were lying to me all the time. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm raising a kid who's going to just go like, this is terrible. What am I doing wrong? And then I read in this book that at this age your child will probably start lying a little more often because this developmental, now that doesn't mean that my response shouldn't still be to curb the lying,

but it also lifted a burden from me that said, like, you're not actually raising a tyrant, it's just developmental, right? And so I think we then have that. Now that my oldest kids are 22, 20, and 18, I can look at when my next boy, my younger boys who are 10, when they get to 14, I'll be like, oh, that's right. I remember hearing a mom say there was nothing worse on the planet than a 14-year-old boy. And I was like, that is a horrible thing to say. And then I had a 14-year-old boy. It was like, noted. And also, it's not my fault. And this is just normal. And it's also helpful to know, isn't it? That's not a glitch. The fact that we're more uptight with our oldest kids and loose – don't we think

that's part of God's design here? It's not that our – I mean, my oldest daughter will crack jokes all the time about the things she would never have been able to get away with. But at the same time, I think there's – it's not a – God knew this was going to happen. He knew that that's how we would parent. Not a bug with a feature is Yeah, yeah, I'm sure if I could use a program or joke on here Yeah, yeah, no, that's beautiful when we moved to Steubenville

it was shocking to us because we came from a little community north of Atlanta with some really tried homeschoolers, you know and There's a certain expectation that you feel from being among them. And some of it's warranted and maybe some of it isn't. But then we moved here and there's a lot of people homeschooling, but they're very different. Like there's wild people and there's soft spoken people

and there's tidy house people and there's holy crap, let me pay for a cleaner people, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and so I remember being at first scandalized by this. There was one family who just, all their kids had phones. And by the way, this is not going to end with the point that it's okay for your young children to have phones. I don't think it is.

But I was like, why would they do that? But then what I saw was these kids were standing around the kitchen late into the night talking to their parents. And there was just this casual friendship among them and their children, you know, with respect towards their parents and things like that. And I'm like, Oh, wow. Like I want that. Whereas I do think in some more, I'm going to use an unfortunate term, maybe rigid families, there can be this sense where you raise a child who's continually got his elbows up against the world, like he's in this defensive or she's in this defensive posture against it.

And so that was really a bit of a paradigm shift for me. It didn't mean that I then absorbed all of the things that they did. I thought, no, I still think that's wrong. I wouldn't do that in his way. But it, yeah, it helped break me out of those strict black and white categories that I thought this is what a good parent must be doing. Right.

And I think even if we keep our mind on the idea that the goal then isn't to get us, like our kids are on a pie if we put all the ingredients in, put it in the oven, we're going to get these results. They're images of God. That's exactly right. Which is, yeah. If we keep that in mind, that doesn't mean that then we give our kids phones and throw things out the window. Of course not. Again, what Jesus asked on that hillside was not that you just

kick back and don't worry about a thing. And I got it. He said, bring me what you have. And so then we make, you know, we can look at something like homeschooling or public schooling and going like, okay, it's still worth it for me to do a hard thing, even if it's uncomfortable or deciding not to give my kids phones, right? Even though everybody else has their kids have phones. You still can do the hard thing, but doing it out of a sense of like, this is how I'm bringing my basket, this is what God's calling us to do, is different than doing it because I want to make sure my kids turn out in the image of me, which is not usually a good idea. The other thing that's hard is when you make these templates, this is how you will raise your child,

you're not taking into account them as individuals with their individual temperament. So our eldest, we got him a dumb phone, like a gab phone, which is an excellent phone, I'd recommend people check out. It looks like a smartphone, but you can't access the internet. When he was 14, but like we, our

daughter is now 14, like there's no way we're getting her a dumb phone because of the way the phone, even without the internet, takes them out of the family. So now we're sitting around, but there's this thing. But the point I'm trying to make is I feel like it was the right decision for this child because he was feeling very suffocated and very frustrated with the way in which he felt we were sheltering him. And it felt like it was going to do more harm than good and therefore that we chose the lesser of two evils. And so we had to kind of open that world up to him and help him navigate it at an age where I don't think we're going to have to with our other children. So the point being to take into account. They're individuals. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's actually one of the glorious things about our families and about homeschooling in general is you can look at the individual child and see them the way God sees them or try to see them the way God sees them, right? That also reminds me sort of of, yes, like I'll remind my oldest daughter, yes, it's true that we are a little more lax when the kid talks back than we used to be,

but these kids are probably going to have stricter rules when it comes to social media because now we've got a little more wisdom and are like, Oh, you know what the hell's worth the hang on this one? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd love to know a bit more about reading aloud and why that's a good idea. I was speaking to someone recently, you know, if you ever say to someone you hear people say, Oh, I read this book. Well, I mean, I listened to it on Audible and there's kind of like a shame there. Yes. But my friend who's an educator and classically trained and wonderful fella who's critical of every school system imaginable somehow thinks that it's actually

more natural to listen than to read. Like that's how we grew up. That's how we grew up listening to stories. Storytelling was passed on as oral storytelling for generations before we ever wrote it down. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting too, because we do have a tendency to prioritize or like value more reading with your eyes. But really you're just changing the mode. Now you're reading with your ears. There's some interesting things that happen with reading aloud or audio books that don't happen when you're reading with your eyes. Let's do it. One of them is that good readers, especially the better you get at reading,

the faster you are. So a lot of times we'll skip like connector words. So if I was to hand you like the first page of the Hobbit and you were to read it silently to yourself, you would be able to read it much faster than if you were reading it out loud or if I was reading it out loud to you, right? And that's because you're skipping

all those little connector words, which is fine. That's how we read with our eyes. And they can see this with the way that our eyes, like how they scan words. What happens when we're listening is that every single word, all of those grammatically correct sophisticated language patterns are being stored in our brain. It is the only time that happens. We don't speak in grammatically correct, sophisticated language. We don't see it in movies, in media, talking to our friends, talking with our parents.

We're not doing it right now, right? We're not speaking in grammatically correct, sophisticated language patterns. The only place this happens. Unless you're Jordan Peterson, who seems to speak like a book. That's probably true. But that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. So the only place we get it is from not just books, but listening to books. And so, and for a lot of kids and adults, I'm one of them. I retain better through audio than I do with my eyes. Cameron's the same.

Is that right? I hate audio books because my mind drifts almost immediately. And I'm like, oh my gosh, it's been five and a half minutes. I don't even know where to scroll back to. Whereas if I'm reading a book, I can pretty much figure out on the page where I'm at. I like to put the sentences, the back and forth between the characters. I like to emphasize what I want to emphasize. I enjoy that. But you shocked me though, how much my wife is able to listen and absorb a book without any effort. So we'll go on a big road trip, like an eight hour road trip,

and she'll listen to an entire book on like triple, double, triple speed. Oh, can you do it on fast speed? Okay. I'm horrified. And also add to keep it in double time. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't listen to it in double time, but I do prefer to listen. Although I will say like if I'm listening to a book and I'm like,

I need to write that down, especially a nonfiction book that I'm like, I wanted to write that down or something. I'll oftentimes get it in print too so that I can look at it and see in a different way. But for our kids, there's a lot to be gained in some ways. So in our homeschool, we actually prioritize and value reading aloud over independent reading, especially because we can do it now and then we have storing all this good language in their brain and then they'll carry that on with them. That's wonderful.

Yeah. I, we've read books to our kids. Like I've read The Lord of the Rings to the kids and I've read. Shocked. I read The Hobbit. But, but honestly now we read Brother Grimm's fairy tales because it's like, okay, just like start, finish. Oh yeah.

You know, we'll read another one and another one. Yeah's like, okay, just like start, finish. Oh, yeah. You know, we'll read another one and another one. Yeah. Yeah. And we really, I think we enjoy that. I really like that. My job is to read. My wife's job is to tell everyone to shut up when they start talking.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a good point, actually, that for a lot of kids, they actually listen better if they're doing something with their hands. My kids are always doing something with their hands, or my son, my oldest son,

he would be like jumping on the trampoline. And I would think there is no way this kid is hearing anything I'm reading. Then the next day I'd say, who remembers what happened? And my girls that were sitting very prim and proper might just sit there like, and then he'd be like, well, and he'd give you like the rundown.

I'm like, I guess you're paying attention. That's kind of amazing. Yeah, yeah. So giving them something with their hands can help. Because I think sometimes we have this picture in our mind that reading aloud our kids. I mean, I know I had this. I'll be like sitting there reading,

I don't know, like a Heidi or something and my children would all be sitting around. I don't know, expecting them to whittle or something like in my head, you know, like, or crochet. I don't know. They don't do that. In general, like they're sitting on the couch and it's like, he touched me with his toe.

When I'm telling kids like, that is your cushion. Do not take your, no limbs off the cushion, right? Someone has to run off and use the bathroom and the doorbell rings and it's just messy. You know what it reminds me of is, you know when you watch a movie when you were younger, maybe with an annoying friend, it's like, oh, watch this bit, watch this bit.

And they really need, and you're like, oh, just, I was going to watch this bit, but now I don't know. I'm like that when I read. I'm like ever sharp and pay attention. This is gold that you guys are hearing, gold. It just happened like last week where I was reading aloud and I did not think my twins who are always wrestling

all the time, like a couple of puppies that are just rolling around the ground. I did not think they were listening at all. And I was like, what did she just say? And then one of them looks up, gives me the line, word perfect. And I'm like, my husband just started laughing. He's in the other room. And I'm like, okay, fine. I guess I can't die on that hill because there's no hill to die on. Fine. Well, I'd love your advice on how we parents can begin reading to our children. I mean,

I think short stories or fairy tales are the best way to kind of dip your foot in. Like, we'll get the kids jobs. So like Chiara, our daughter, will light the candles and, you know, people do different things. And it's easy. Like, you don't feel like a failure. Like, if you've never read to your kids before and now you want to read The Lord of the Rings, these are very long chapters, The Lord of the Rings. They take like 40 minutes to read. I mean, even like, thinking about The Hobbit, like all the different voices. I remember the first time I tried to read this aloud and the voice I did for Gollum, I was like, we're not going to be able to keep that up very long, are we?

That's not going to work. I'm like, bring this one back down to normal. I think short books are a really good way to go. And also realizing there's something, we kind of do this as parents where we think picture books are for little kids. And then as they get older, they should like there's more value in novels or longer books. And it's very interesting because a couple of things about that. One is that a picture book or shorter story has the whole story arc.

Every story, most stories are like about a hero who has to overcome obstacles, you know, and to become who they need to be, to be changed. That's the story of any book, whether you're talking about The Hot It or Little House on the Prairie or actually any story, so we can even talk about a football game. We're talking about a hero who has to overcome obstacles to get what they want or need. That's what a story structure is. A family, I mean, a picture book has all the elements

of a story, of a full story arc, just like a novel does. Also, because publishers are expecting that novels and chapter books are most often read by students themselves. They tend to assign like reading levels, for example. They don't want, if your child's gonna read Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary, for example, they expect like a third, fourth grader is gonna be reading that.

So they need to make sure it's at about that reading level. So they simplify the language and the syntax because of that. That doesn't happen with picture books. Picture books don't have a reading level because they expect parents are reading these a lot or teachers are reading these a lot. So what happens is we often see the language actually degrade just a little bit when you

go from a picture book to a novel. So often we think, I need to, my kids are getting too old for this. I need to read something longer without pictures. No, we're actually, you don't, you can, but you don't need to. You can stay with shorter stories, picture books for longer. What kind of things do people say to you? What have they written into you as they've tried to implement this in their family? And what's some good advice? Yeah. OK, so a couple of things is oftentimes we, especially in Catholic families, we've

got kids of all different ages. And I will hear a lot this advice to read to the oldest and the other ones will come up. That did not work for me. If I read to my oldest, my two oldest were girls and they would have gotten what they needed and my son would have been completely left behind. He was the one that I really needed to get to love books, right? So I've always found it a little bit easier to read about toward the middle of the, toward the middle, like the interest level of the middle kid, which is nice because a lot of times those middle kids get a little forgotten. My husband and I are both middle children,

so we have a lot of fondness, sympathy I should say, for middle children. And so one of the things is to just kind of go toward them, also don't feel like they all have to be the great classics, right? There are a lot of really good books that are coming out today, it's true. You have to look for them, you have to be the great classics, right? There are a lot of really good books that are coming out today, it's true. You have to look for them.

You have to use Booklist to find them because there's also a lot of junk coming out today. But finding books that you enjoy reading, because if you're just doing it because you feel like you have to, your kids are gonna pick up on that, you know? And you're also, there's a lot you have to do. You're probably not gonna get around to reading aloud.

Speaking about reading books to your kids that you like. I once took my family to the beach and over the course of three nights read the Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy to them and made them reflect on the beauty of death. I think they liked it. Did they? Did they like it? Of course they did.

I was just playing a role-play. Oh, they love that. I want people shot. Yeah, exactly. There's a really terrifying, if you guys wanna look up a terrifying fairy tale, Robber's Bridegroom by the Brother Grims. I don't know that one.

That is fricking horrific. I'll give you the breakdown because I was reading this to the kids once, not knowing what it was. I got this big book of fairy tales. And as I'm reading it to the kids, I can feel my wife looking at me like, probably time to stop

Don't you think and I'm like I'm pressing on I gotta press on So it's about this Fella it's just bad. It's about this fella who's got a daughter and he can't afford to keep her anymore So he says I'll give her the first suitor that comes along so this fella shows up and he says right you can marry him and he's very creepy and she doesn't like him. And one day she sees him at the market and he says, look, we're about to be married. You've never even been to my house. I'll screw some ashes into the forest on Sunday

and you can come see me. So she shows up and he's not there. She walks throughout the house, doesn't see anything. She goes to the basement. There's this old woman stirring a pot. And while she's there, her fiance and these other men bring this woman in, drug her, chop her up and eat her. That's what the woman's doing in the pot. And in the end, she goes through with the marriage. She's terrified. The woman leads her out. She's prisoner. And the father says, don't say anything.

And they wait to the wedding day and then they kill him. It's amazing. I loved it. The kids loved it. Did they love it? Of course they did. Yes, yes, yes. I'm all about good violence in an appropriate way, you know?

What's interesting, especially with... Karen's like, we should stop. Like, it's the classics, damn it, we're gonna read it. Maybe we should stop, yeah. That's the interesting thing about fairy tales though, they bother us as adults, I think more than they bother our children.

Life is terrifying and mysterious. When you were a kid and you're listening to conversations your parents were having without fully understanding them, or they were chatting with, you know, their brother or sister, your aunt and uncle. The world of adults is so mysterious and dark and life can be dark. And so talking about a woman who builds a house out of candy to seduce children. It's a good story because witches actually exist.

And there are people who want to kill children. Yes, everywhere. There are dragons. Yeah. And who is that? Chesterton or Lewis? Chesterton. Yeah, I forget the quote, but it was something to the effect of Thursday. You could look it up. I, it's a good quote. Yeah. It's a good quote about, yeah, we can. Something. Yeah. Speaking about not speaking grammatically, correct? Some, some stuff he said it was about the dragons. Super smart. Super smart. Yeah. you guys would love it. We could remember it. Well, he also says that, you know, in fairy tales, apples are golden to remember us of that forgotten moment when apples were green.

And the rivers run with wine to remind us for one wild moment that they run with water. Here we go. Fairy tales do not tell children that the dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. That's beautiful. I love Cheston. I learned this about Cheston the other day. It just made my heart so happy. I guess he was in his twenties when he got married and when he got married, he had two things. He went and he bought a big pint of milk to remember his childhood and drank it. And he also bought a gun, which he carried on him for the rest of his days to protect his wife.

Oh, that's sweet. Yeah. Milk and a gun. Milk and a gun. No, but Flannery O'Connor is a big one that I would recommend parents maybe read first. Certainly. And I think it depends on the kids, too. My my now 20 year old was there.

I remember when she was three, we were actually this isn't we weren't reading we were watching Winnie the Pooh and it got to the point where Winnie the Pooh is stuck in the honey tree and she started sobbing like that really and I thought oh this child and then she ended up becoming the kid that really loves the fairy tales really loves the fantasy that even some that scary creepy stuff that comes up in all those fantasy novels, she could handle it. And I don't know.

And then now my youngest are 10 year old twins, they're more sensitive, I think, to like, like emotional, I don't know, I don't know how exact I don't know the words I'm trying to find to describe them, except that as their mother, I choose books differently for them than I did for their older brother, you know, like kind of depending on the kid. We have a child who's quite sensitive and kind of takes on what he's reading. I remember as a child watching a movie about Jack and the Beanstalk, which terrified me. And I somehow still believe that if I was to find this kid's movie, it would be equally terrifying. I know it couldn't possibly be terrifying, but there's something about it that just really got in.

Yeah. Well, and a lot of times I think actually the fairy tales work because there is that sort of element of like, it's the realistic stories that are really, that can be really, at least for me as a kid, the realistic stories, kidnapping sounded a lot more scary than like a dragon because that could really happen. You know what I mean? Like there was a different although dry. I mean, yeah, we know I get it. Yeah, no, totally.

We I mean, we had a child who heard the amber alert on our bloody phones and that's what that meant. And I think someone explained it to him in the most banal way possible. And he was up for a night or two. I was, if I can just jump in for a second, that reminds me that, um, have you read The Hiding Place by Cory Ten Boom? I've read very few books. Okay. The Hiding Place is this beautiful, she was a, I think it was Danish, right? Or Polish. Uh, daughter of a watchmaker during the Holocaust. And there is, this is her, um, memoir, basically basically. Rabbit Room just did this beautiful video, I mean, film adaptation of The Hiding Place. Anyway, in this story,

she is recounting when she was young, and she asked her father about some grownup thing. And he, instead of answering her, asked her to pick up a suitcase that was full of like watch parts and really heavy bits. And so she tries to pick it up and she's like, I can't, it's too heavy. And he said, that's right, and I would be a poor father if I asked you to carry that heavy suitcase a long way. And it's the same way with knowledge that I'm going to carry things. I'm not getting this as eloquently as she says in the book, but basically

things. I'm not getting this as eloquently as she says in the book, but basically part of his duty as a father then is to carry those heavy bits until she's old enough and strong enough to bear it. And to me this feels like one of those things that why we read aloud, we read aloud because every time our kids encounter a story, they are reading about a hero who has to overcome obstacles against usually insurmountable odds, right? So they're bearing witness again and again and again to these people, these or creatures, right? These heroes having to overcome obstacles and they see that it can be done. So they're bearing witness and then they're also walking a mile in the shoes of another, but they're doing it through story,

which feels a lot safer than a lot of the other ways that our kids encounter the evils and ugliness of the world, which is all very real, right? I remember Peter Crave said that every book has a, what did he say? A set up, an upset and a reset. Isn't that nice? Oh, that is nice.

I have not heard that before. Yes, yes. What's your favorite book?? Oh, that is nice. I have not heard that before. Yes. Yes. What's your favorite book? Oh gosh, that's such an impossible question. No, it's not. Answer it. You have one book you can read for the rest of your life, not including the Bible. You've got to pick one before you leave this studio. Can I put a whole bunch of books in one volume? No. Okay.

My own personal favorite. This would not be like the one book I would want to read over and over and over again. But the one that comes to mind for me is Anne of Green Gables. I love these books so much. My beautiful wife plays Anne of Green Gables for the kids who love it. I love that my wife has this conversation with the kids about the characters. I've never read it, so that's lovely. Yeah.

I'll let you in a minute. We'll swap because I'd love to hear you chat too. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anne of Green Gables. Yeah. I've read it, so that's lovely. I'll let you in a minute, we'll swap, because I'd love to hear you chat too. Yeah. Yeah, okay, integrated. Yeah, yeah, but as far as read alouds, like fantasy ends up being usually my kids' favorites. This is so interesting

because I asked each of my three adult kids recently, just like, can you tell me what you loved about homeschooling or some happy memory you have of homeschooling? And they all named books separately. They all named books, which I was like, that's so interesting, we did a lot of other things. But that's what they remember. And I think it's the fantasy novels

that tended to stick with them, The Hobbit, The Green Ember by S.D. Smith, I mentioned earlier. Yeah, good books coming out. Yeah, good books coming out. They're a little bit harder to find, but it's really important that we keep making them. And I think there is this tendency, especially among homeschooling families, especially amongst Catholic families, to prioritize the old classics over everything else.

But if they had done that in Lewis and Tolkien's time, there we wouldn't have those books. You know, we still need to be making really good stories, timeless stories that are inspiring to the imagination and that help cultivate that Catholic imagination in our children. So, um, S.D. Smith, the Green Ember series is another one, and, um, The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson is another fabulous fantasy series that kind of sweeps you away in a Lord of the Rings Tolkien-esque kind of a way. Mm. I didn't read a book till I was 17, I don't think. Is that right? Yeah, I read, like, a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Yeah. You know, it's like five pages I was dead. Yes or I May have read, you know bits and pieces But I never picked up a book and said I'm gonna read this book until after my conversion when I was 17 I think one of the first books I read was the joy of st. Francis And then I read a lot of philosophy and theology and then it was my pride that led me to love Dostoevsky.

Right. So and I've said this before, I wanted to be the kind of person that liked Dostoevsky. Yeah. So it was complete vanity. Yeah. And then I had a motivator for a lot of us for a lot of things. I'm a big fan of allowing our lesser sins to truncate the big ones. To help us grow in virtue in some way. I think so. I think that could be possible. But yeah, I fell in love with the brothers and I actually just really did fall in love with it. But then there's other books I'll pick up and people assure me they're great. I just like, I just, I don't know. I read like, I got about

three or four books that I circle through and that's it. Well, isn't that interesting though? We do have this tendency to think like, we'll get asked a lot at Read A Loud Revival for book recommendations. That's what we do, right? We give book recommendations. But a lot of times I think sometimes, I should say sometimes I think those questions come out of,

like I don't know how to pick good books. But yes you do. Just like you and I probably have different tastes in food. We probably order two different things off of menu. Yeah. And so that's one of the wonderful things is that you're allowed to not like books that other people love I there are plenty of classics or books that

Go on, give us one Yeah, I'm gonna get myself in trouble I will say Little Britches is a whole series that homeschoolers love and man I thought reading that book aloud was gonna kill me like every single book I was like, this is just not my thing Yeah I mean and I could spend some time trying to figure out why, or I could just find something that is more enjoyable for me to read aloud and then put that one on

audio for my kids. Yeah. Yeah. What do you do? Because you know, and I just want to throw this out there for parents who are watching and feel like failures right now. Like, I'm pretty sure like three of our four kids have pretty severe dyslexia. They don't actually read books.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I don't think it's because they're lazy and I don't, you know, I'll let you come in a bit, but my wife has really bad dyslexia and then it's extremely likely that your children do genetic. Cammy will read a book and it's every sentence. There's a stop and then a not. And our kids have that. And that's that's just that's sad for me. And there's a sadness there, because I hear you talk about your kids like getting into a book and getting lost in a book.

I'm like, God, that sounds nice. I don't think as a parent, I'll ever experience my kids doing that. So what kind of thing do you see? I'm asking this on behalf of the thousands of people who feel similar to me. What do you say to us? Okay, well, a couple of things. First of all, you said you didn't read much similar to me. Yeah. What do you say to us?

Okay, well, a couple things. First of all, you said you didn't read much as a kid. Was reading equitable in your mind to school? Reading is something you do for school. Do you think? Yes, but I think I just didn't want to read. You know what? It's kind of like if I had a bag of Skittles and I carried it around with me all the time

and then you were like, why don't you eat berries? I'm like, why the hell would I? I have Skittles. Yes. All right. so for me growing up, it's like I have television and the Sega. I don't understand why you think I would read paper. Which is actually still true. So, you know, I'm a reader, I love reading,

I want to be a reader, I want to read more. And yet when I get climbing to bed at night, a lot of times I'll pick up my phone and I'll be like, I'm just gonna set the alarm. And I'm gonna check this one thing. And then like 45 minutes later, so imagine how much harder this must be for our kids. In his book, Raising Kids Who Read, is that what it's called? Yes. Raising Kids Who Read by Dr. Daniel Willingham. He talks about this idea of like, if he puts out a watermelon on the table for dessert, like

after dinner, his kids would all wander by and they would enjoy it and they all like watermelon. But if he had put a bowl of candy or ice cream, I can't remember what his analogy is, and watermelon, they would all choose, I would choose ice cream over watermelon too, right? So his idea is basically, it helps your kids if you just put watermelon on the table sometimes. And you do that with reading by making times like, you can go to bed now or you can stay up later and read for example or listen to audiobooks. But I think one of the things that's really important is that we don't just add reading as like, oh, I should be reading aloud to my kids.

Like, this is another thing that I need to do. We all have enough of that. There's a lot of things that we need to do. Mothers especially are feeling like they're failing at so many different things, especially things they need to do every day. So adding reading to that list doesn't really help. But if we can kind of flip it and go like, actually reading aloud or reading with your kids

can take something off of your plate. A couple of things, it gives them all those grammatically correct, sophisticated language patterns. We know it's the number one thing we can do to help our kids be successful in language academically. I cannot think of another way that you can give your kids a front row seat to characters facing obstacles, overcoming them, bearing witness to that

again and again and again, and all of it's free. So like let it take something off your plate, let it be something that makes your life easier. But that's probably going to require that you ask, either you go to a book list, or you ask somebody for a good book recommendation, and that you don't use reading the right books or reading enough as another way to sort of beat yourself up,

is not doing enough as a parent. And then again, if we go back to what we were saying earlier, Matt, you can't really judge whether or not you're doing a good job there, or whether or not your kids are reading a lot. All of my older kids who are avid readers have gone through stages where they weren't reading hardly at all. And I thought, oh, I hope that's not going to stick. But it wouldn't do much good for me to anxiously be

like, you need to be reading, you know, that's not necessarily going to help. I could carve out some space for them. Yeah, I could read aloud to them to make it easier for them. Like you work on your whatever. Also, Hitler was an avid reader as a book. That's not true. I didn't make that up. What do you- Did you just make that up? I made that up.

That's not true. I was trying to make myself feel better. Look what he became. Yeah. What do you think about bribing children to read? Bribing's too strong a word. I'm not against bribing as a parent. I tell all six of my children to use the bathroom by bribing.

It could be a very effective strategy. I think that you can incentivize your kids to read with the right reward. There's a lot of evidence that doing like these summer programs where you read a certain number of books and then you get a pizza at the end, or our library where we lived a couple cities ago, their reward was actually a Nintendo, like the kid who wants, so that's your reward for reading. So what message does this send, right? It's like, eat your vegetables, you'll get the dessert.

If you eat well, we'll buy you McDonald's. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But for what our kids really want usually is more time and attention from us. And so one thing you can do if you feel like you need to incentivize reading is I did this with my son for many, many years. I would say, hey, here's a basket of books that you need to read for school this year. Like I don't care what order you read them in. You don't have to do anything else with the book, but you get to pick one of these books. When you finish

it, come find me and I will take you. We're going to go out for burgers because burgers were his love language. Still are actually. I told him last night when he picked me up at the airport, I will take you out for a burger. It was still just as effective. I might've used steak actually. Maybe I use steak now. He's a little more refined. So he would be incentivized to finish the book because he got a burger and time with me, right? So we would talk, I would talk a little bit about the book, like ask him, like, okay, tell me about it.

Who was the most courageous in this story? What's something you don't want to forget? Not in questions that are making him feel like I want to know the right, I'm looking for a right answer, but more like, I want to know about you. How was this book like, how was this experience for you? I like that, yeah. It kind of shifts it. And that is an incentive, but more like, I wanna know about you, how is this book like, how is this experience for you? I like that, yeah. It kind of shifts it.

And that is an incentive, but it's not bribing them with money or candy or screens or something. It's incentivizing them to spend more time with you. It's like a win kind of all the way around. Let's zoom out here and ask a more fundamental question. Why read or encounter stories at all? Like what is a story and why does it matter that we even encounter them? I think Lewis is CS Lewis who has this, the quote is, and Thursday you might have to correct me

if I'm wrong here. I read to live the lives of a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like we read in order that we can imagine with other imaginations and love with other hearts and see with other eyes. And if we think about how our commandments are to love God and to love others, then when we read and we walk a mile. A book is so interesting. There is nowhere in your life where you get to get inside the soul or the mind of another person the same way.

Like my husband doesn't get into my mind the same way that I get into Laura Ingalls' mind when I read Little House on the Prairie, right? You want to read that? Yeah. But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, I love in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself, and am

never more myself than when I do." He did, you were right, he did say that better than you. Usually does. That's usually true when it comes to Lewis. I know, it's always dangerous to go off memory. He did. You were right. He did say that better than you. Usually die. That's usually true when it comes to Lewis. I know it's always dangerous to go off memory. Or say a thing you said about, you know, you can be like a bunch of fellas. Yeah. That's not it.

At the same time, we're meaning yourself. Yeah. What it when we read. So what is a story? What does that mean? Oh, I'm going to look it up. I'm interested to see what you get. Okay, because here's an interesting thing. So at Read A Lot Revival, we started our own publishing company this last year,

because what we know is that there are a lot of different interpretations of what a story is, right? So we're seeing, we can see a picture book or a story that its main purpose is to preach or teach a child a certain thing. Now, depending on where you are on the spectrum, morally or politically or whatever, you can find a book that teaches your child,

that's almost trying to make the child into your image. This book is going to teach you to value the same thing I value and teach. That's not a story story that is propaganda. Like it could be like we agree with it but it's still propaganda. A story is something else entirely. A story is something that helps you inhabit the life and mind of another helps you see the world with fresh eyes. But what's your? Well, I mean, Google says an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. How interesting. I disagree. Google.

Is that right? Entertainment. I mean, yeah, that that makes sense. It's good to be entertained. Yes. Yes. I mean, I don't know who would ever tell a story for a different reason, maybe for warning. Well, if you think about ASAP's fables, those stories were told not just for entertainment, but also to convey truth. So if we as Christian parents, if they're not told in an entertaining way, you wouldn't have the book.

Yes, that is true. Yes, that is true. Yeah. So necessary, but not sufficient, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Imaginary or real people and events told entertainment, a plot or storyline. imaginary or real people and events told entertainment a plot or storyline. What's interesting to me is that the stories that last have a timelessness about them. Right. So that's why. Yeah. Like a really good story would have been interesting a hundred years ago and is interesting today and will be interesting a hundred years from now.

And if we're making stories or if we're choosing stories based on just this moment, it's. I want to know what makes a story not timeless. I mean, obviously, if you're speaking about specific events of the day that aren't understood. But even then, you could talk about events that are happening today that could be translated, that makes sense to be able 200 years from now. So I wonder what would be a story that's not timeless? Interesting question. What makes a timeless story?

I guess it's like it's like kind of those those themes that run. Like that ring true, that something that rings true, because, you know, we, a story is always going to take place in a certain time and place because it's set in a certain setting. Right. So why is, you know, little house on the prairie as an example, why is that a timeless story when it has her life has very, looks very different from our lives today.

Like star Wars would be a timeless story. I don't like star Wars, but typically, I like the first three that ever came out. But I mean, those themes, it's about family drama and overcoming evil. So maybe it's the timeless themes, the way that we feel seen and understood. Let us know in the comments section below what makes a timeless story. I got to tell you guys about my new favorite app. It's called Ascension and it's by Ascension Press. This is the number one Bible study app in my opinion and you can go to ascensionpress.com slash frad. Go there and so that way they know that we sent you. It is absolutely fantastic. It has the entire Bible there, very well laid out. The whole Bible is read to you by Father Mike

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So I remember back in the day I had a big DVD case of Jeff Cavins Bible studies. Well, it's all there on the app. So go download it right now. Please go to ascensionpress.com slash frad. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right now, or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link. It's 100% free, and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome pornography. Usually men know that porn is wrong,

they don't need me or you to convince them that it's wrong. What they need is a battle plan to get out. And so I've distilled all that I've learned over the last 15 or so years as I've been talking and writing on this topic into this one course. Think of it as if you and I could have a coffee over the next 21 days and I would kind of guide you along this journey. That's basically what this is. It's incredibly well produced. We had a whole camera crew come and film this and I think it'll be a really a real help to you. And it's also not an isolated course that you go through on your own because literally tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course. And as you go through

the different videos there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other, offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive21, that's Strive21.com slash Matt or as I say text Strive to 66866 to get started today. You won't regret it. There's an interesting book called The Dyslexia Advantage that talks about because these students, these people process language differently, their brain actually, I'm gonna go through this around, we're gonna have to like, like I'm just gonna reference the book and say go read the book if you're interested in this.

Yeah, because basically your brain will, because it doesn't process language the same way that a non-dyslexic brain does, it becomes capable or is capable of thinking outside of the box. There's like all these genius people who have done great things who have non-dyslexic brains. And it's actually a cultural thing for us to say then that this is the way a human should learn language

and your dyslexic brain is deficient somehow. Well, according to who? Like this whole construct of writing and reading is a human construct. That's why I can go along with that. Yeah, yeah, I see that. And with Cammie, she said that that was how she would work. Like you're in school, you're gonna get in trouble

if you don't figure this thing out. And so she would just come up with all sorts of workarounds that I think actually made you a lot more smart and whatever because of that. Yeah, interesting. I think you're a much smarter, I think she's a much smarter person than I am. I can read fine.

Cameron can't, but I find her more intelligent than me. And I think that is a stigma that kids have. Hey, you can't read, you're not smart. Yes, or spell, you know, poor spelling, you know, it kind of gets. Cameron cannot spell to save her life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so interesting.

And dyslexia is. It's okay, I still struggle with Wednesday. Like, oh, where's the ad? life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so interesting. I love you. And dyslexia is- It's okay, I still struggle with Wednesday. Like, oh, where's the ad? Where's the key? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What was I gonna say?

Dyslexia. Oh, it's very genetic. So we know if you are, you know, if you or your spouse suspect that they're, that you were dyslexic, it's very likely that your kids will have, because we know this is just a different way that a brain is made, is created.

And so it's worth looking into. Also understanding that you can't fix it is another important piece. And a dyslexic student is probably not going to read early, and that's fine. There's no advantage to reading early. I mean, how do we treat dyslexic kids 100 years ago? That's interesting. Maybe you don't know because you didn't live then. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. But I also think education was so different back then. So much of it was oral storytelling or reciting. Like, like, um,

if you think back to, I just keep going back to a little house on the prairie on this podcast, but, um, those kids in those one room schoolhouses were reciting language. They would read and then they would recite it. It's a completely different way of evaluating learning and doing education. That's a terrible way to say it, but then it is now. So I'm not really sure. What about ADD?

I fear that in a day and age like this where we believe ourselves to be over-medicated. So I came from Australia here and my wife was working with young people at her church and I remember we went on this go away trip and this kid has a ziplock bag filled with pills. This is for my bed wedding. This is for my, and I know not every American teenager is like that, but I was shocked at how much pills people in America have. And you understand that there's obviously a financial incentive behind this. But my fear is that we see that gross overstatement

and then just go, well, there's no such thing as these things like dyslexia or an ADD. So I guess what's your experience of kids with ADD or working with parents with kids with ADD? I don't have a lot of experience here. So and I don't feel like I have any expertise with ADD and ADHD as far as like, I think it's all called ADHD now, actually. I think so, yeah, yeah. I do think that we're understanding, like we, I mean, this is one of the great things about,

as we learn more about science, we understand better. Like, I think that's why we have more terms in a lot of, not always, but in a lot of cases, that's why we have more terms for things that we didn't really have terms for 50 years ago. But Yeah, that's a good point. Like even if you think of as primitive as understanding what a bird is, right? You say, what's that? That's a bird. And then you go, well, there's feathers and eyes and a beak. And then you cut it open. You're like, oh, well, then there's this and

there's that. Like the more you know about something, obviously, the more terms you're going to. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know about. I don't know enough about ADD or to speak intelligently about it, I guess. That's a very beautiful, humble thing to say. What is one of your most popular podcasts? Oh, easily the most popular one is the one I did with my daughter. Episode 209, I even know the number on the top of my head. Audrey, my oldest, who's 22 now, came onto the show and talked about homeschooling, what

worked, what didn't. And specifically, I asked her about those years right after I had the twins where we had three babies, one and under. And I really felt like she was sort of getting neglected. And people in our life, well-meaning people in our life, made sure that I knew, like, you are probably neglecting your school-age kids, right? These are all the ways And it's so interesting now. She talked about it on that podcast about what that afforded her like yes We didn't really do much academics that year, but this is these are the things that we did do

These are the ways that impacted me and it's really beautiful. Yeah I'm like I want to bring you on in a minute I know I keep saying that but I'm so grateful for my wife because you, I think I had this like, I think most parents do, right? You have this way in which I must parent or else I'm failing. And just like, she's never steered me wrong. You know, like whenever it's like, no, let's do this with the kids. And this is fine.

Let's do it. Things have always worked out well. So I always had this idea that like our kids should never be listening to audio books because I want them to lay in silence and go to bed, which I think there's something to say about that, right? Laying in silence. But but it's so beautiful to see you and the girls talk about Anne Green Gables and stuff like that. Yeah.

All right. I got a couple of questions from our local supporters, if that's OK. Yeah. Tom J says, Oh, man, I love her with four exclamation marks. Switching my children over to a classical curriculum next year, specifically Memoria Press. Can you give any advice on integrating the different ages? I have three kiddos all two years apart. Thank you so very much. Yeah, Memoria Press is fabulous. One of the things to watch out for when you are using a curriculum like that, that's grade based because they have different programs for each year, is that it models, and I think Memorial Press

was built actually for the school because they have a private school. So it's sort of built for the classroom. And so we're gonna have to make some adjustments to make that work in a home school. No homeschooling mom I know can do kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade, all across, you know, with different,

all the subjects separately. So what I tend to encourage people to do is the skill subjects separately and the content subjects together. And what I mean is skills like math, I'm learning to read, handwriting, those you might need to do with each child based on their level. But things like history and science and literature, where you're not necessarily getting a new skill that needs to happen in chronological order, but you're exposing them to these ideas, liberal arts, right?

They can be done together because it doesn't matter if your child, when your child learns about ancient Egypt, for example, there's no, it just, the schools literally just pick a time and they plug it in there. And so instead of trying to do all the different histories, so if I was using Memoria with my kids, I would probably pick the middle kids, history and science and do that with everybody. And what the beautiful thing about that

is that it's really easy to scale up or down when you're talking about a content subject. So let's talk about history. If you're reading a book about ancient Egypt, since I mentioned that, with your older kids, you can ask them to write a paragraph or an essay about it or to read another book about it. With your younger kids, you can just read the picture book.

With all the kids, you can read aloud a book that's set during that time. So there's a lot of ways where everybody will get what they're fit for. Charlotte Mason talked about education as being a feast, like you present a feast. And if we think about that, you know, we have a big feast or a meal, everybody kind of gets what they're fit for, what their appetite is capable. Your three-year-old's not gonna eat as much as your 23-year-old son, can guarantee that, right?

And so everybody gets what they are ready for, but you're spreading the feast, you're presenting the material. So I would do content subjects together and skill subjects apart. Okay, that makes sense. Sarah says, how to be a better homeschool mom and book club hostess when it comes to leading discussions. I love thinking about the internalizing all that we are learning together, but I really

lack in knowing how to better discuss, engage ideas, moving beyond questions like, what did you like, dislike, what did you learn to spark conversations? Yeah. And the problem with what did you like or, you know, did you like it? Is that that, you know, especially if you have a 14 year old boy? Yeah. You'll just get. Yeah. A couple of things. I think if my if I was to finish a book and. Let's say I'm like reading a book, I finish a book and I put it on my nice kind of like, oh, I finished it. And my husband's like finish a book and I put it on my nice kind,

I'm like, oh, I finished it. And my husband's like, okay. And he picks it up and is like, so what happened after, that's not a discussion, right? Now I'm like, why are you, that would never happen. That's not how adults actually interact with books of any kind. If you were to go to a book club,

a lot of us are in book clubs, right? And you showed up at your friend's house and you have like wine and chocolate covered strawberries. And they said, well, before you come in, you need to take this quiz to make sure that you read the book. We just want to make sure. I would never go back to that book club, right? That's not how adults actually interact. Real readers don't interact with books that way. So I think if we can talk with our kids more like that we respect their actual experience reading, which means that I need to ask questions I don't have the answers to. Good examples of this are who was the most blank in this book or who was blank in this

book. And you can just use any adjective there like courageous, cowardly. You know, you can use absolutely any persistent, kind, compassionate, wicked. You can use any word there. And there's not one right answer. Cause I can say who was known as courageous in the line, the witch in the wardrobe. And you might say the fawn and I might say Lucy

and we're both right. Now tell me like what they did that was courageous, right? So I think if we can convey to our kids that we're interested in their experience reading it rather than we're trying to get the right answer to make sure that they actually read it. It feels less adversarial and more like we're. That's really good. I mean, that goes back to what you said a moment ago where you're not trying to ask

about the book. You're trying to ask about them and their experience. To Sarah, how do you homeschool with babies and toddlers to take care of, not to mention a house, laundry, cooking meals, etc.? I only have two kids. I thought you were going to say two hands, which would have been fair. I only have two kids, three and under, and I already can't keep up with housework. I want a home school so bad, but I'm not certain I could keep up with all the demands of family life. Just such a lovely, vulnerable question. So thank you for that. There's a couple of things that come to mind. One is that in many ways, I think homeschooling is a sacrifice.

It's a labor of love. And so you aren't going to be able to homeschool and keep a perfect house and make all of your meals from scratch. And something is going to give. Right. And usually most of the homeschoolers I know our houses, if you came over on a Tuesday at 11 in the morning, it's going to look like some things are happening in that house. Another important thing to remember is that if you have two children or three children,

you're being given the grace to homeschool them and in your current situation right now as it is, but you're not being given the grace to homeschool a high schooler. So right now as it is, but you're not being given the grace to homeschool a high schooler. So what we do a lot of times is we think if this is so hard, I remember being at a Bible study when I had three kids that were floor two and a newborn, it took me, like I did not sleep the night before. The only reason I went to the Bible study, honestly, was because they had free childcare

and coffee. And so I thought if I could get there, I can like put the kids in the nursery and I can just sit here for a minute and like hold my baby. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this woman there had a couple of teen kids and she meant well,

but she was having a hard time with her kids. And she looked at my newborn and she said, oh, just wait till they get older. That's when it really gets hard. Thanks. Yeah. I thought if it gets harder than this, like this is pretty hard, you know?

Yeah. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that we get grace the moment we need it, not a moment before. So if you're like catastrophizing about like, how am I going to do high school? Well, you're not being asked to do high school right now. So God's not giving you the grace to do that right now. He's giving you the grace to do exactly what you're doing today, what he's called you to today. And so I think that can help, but also to mitigate your expectations, I guess, of it's not going to look like the cover of a homeschooling catalog of your favorite curriculum. It's just not going to look like that. I don't

know any real homeschoolers. Instagram doesn't help there. I agree with you. And I think it's so important to say that. And yet at the same time, there's a virtue, I suppose, in wanting to be orderly and wanting there to create a functioning household, obviously. So how did you begin to balance that? Yeah, so- Are you just really good at that stuff? No.

Okay. Okay, yeah, so do you wanna get my daughter on here? Oh, that's good. Yeah, ask Audrey. One of the things that worked really well for us when we had those three little ones and the three older kids is that we would, I would rotate like, okay, for this,

for in the morning until lunch, my goal was to get 20 minutes of one-on-one with each of my older kids. It took the entire morning, Matt, to get there, right? So I would have two of the older kids play with the babies over here. And I would take this one over here, and we would just do 20 minutes of the most important thing

that she needed help with. And then we would rotate, which would take five hours, because of the diaper changes. And then by lunchtime, my goal was to get 20 minutes with each kid one on one. And then in the afternoons, I would be on babies basically, like I would be with the babies all the time and the older kids would be working through their list of schoolwork and they could come to me if they needed help. And so on my on readalouderevival.com, if you go to

readalouderevival.com slash spiral notebooks, you'll find a whole podcast and video I did where I showed these spiral notebooks because I remember going to mass and I had the three babies, the three other kids, this woman who had homeschooled her three kids goes, Sarah, how's homeschooling going? And just a nice like small talk, right? I burst into tears. I'm like sobbing. And she's like, okay, well, how much independent work are the older kids doing? And I was like, independent work? What are you talking about? Right? She said, I'm coming over tomorrow.

And she brought these spiral notebooks and she just showed me like, this is this you're making this too complicated. And basically, wasn't that the most beautiful sentence? I thought it was I'm going to put a pot of coffee on. But I think the most beautiful sentence in the English language is, you've making this too complicated. Yeah, yeah. Ah, wow.

And she taught me this method of using spiral notebooks to like give them assignments that didn't depend on me. So that also can be helpful. Also if, was her name Sarah? Was that right? Oh, I forget. If her kids are all young and none of them are reading, it gets easier once they're older

and can do like empty a dishwasher. Oh no, two Sarah. So this person's name is The Lashes. So maybe their last name is Lashes. Yeah, okay. Sorry, what were you saying? No, yeah. Just, I don't remember actually.

I lost it. But that's really good. Thank you very much. How soon, I'm blind, which may or may not be a blessing. How soon can you start homeschooling? As soon as Montessori. What does that mean? As soon as Montessori?

I don't think that you tell me. I think that's a proper sentence. And what does a typical day for homeschoolers, mother and kids look like? I struggle to find ways to engage my little ones throughout the day. Just a big I just want to give like a big affectionate high five to all of the homeschooling parents out there because this is hard. It is hard.

And that's one of the most beautiful things you can do is to come alongside a person and go, you're right. And there's nothing wrong with you that you find this hard. You would be weird if you found it easy. We once had a priest come up to us after Latin Mass in San Diego, and we were just so disheartened because all these other kids in their oversized suits were standing perfectly. And we just, our kids, it was brutal. And he came up to us and said, don't worry. I know enough about original sin to know those other kids aren't normal.

I wanted to hug him. That's such a great line. Oh my gosh, that's such a great line. But man, I mean, this is one of the, this is actually one of the reasons I love stories is that make me feel less alone. Because when I read the inner life of Dmitriy Karamazov or Alyosha, I'm like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one. Yes. And I think sometimes we use that as a reason like I shouldn't be homeschooling clearly. I don't have my stuff together. This isn't working. Like I can't I'm not doing a good enough job here. There's a kid that's not reading. I

can't figure out how to get dinner on so I must not be cut out for this. And that's not actually true. It's really hard for everybody and that's just one of the things that people will say all the time and all the homeschoolers watching this will have someone send this to you I bet. I'm not, I would homeschool but I'm not patient enough. And I always want to say like, oh yeah, for sure not here. But you don't homeschool because you're patient. You grow in virtue because of the obstacles. So you become patient by homeschooling.

That's how you grow in virtue, right? And so you don't, we're not pictures of patience either. You don't need to be, again, God's not asking you to do this perfectly. He's asking you to bring your basket but of of whatever you have to bring what you have and and he'll make it enough But at the same time What does a typical day look like is what she asked I mean and this is where I would feel really strongly by saying like you need to find other people in your area who are homeschooling

And then notice how differently they all do it. I love that you take this approach This is so liberating to hear this because that is one of the obstacles I think many new homeschoolers feel is their family has to look like another person's family and that can be so crushing Especially when you're just wild and crazy like our family. Well and social beautiful. I love our family Don't get me wrong with They're the best, but. But it doesn't look like. Yes, it's crazy and it's messy. Right.

We have I'm thinking of the Joneses. Like you'd go over the Joneses house. Someone's playing. This is a real Joneses, not like a theoretical Joneses. We can't keep up with these Joneses. You got some kid playing Beethoven, someone else reading the Latin

version of the Vulgate. Probably not, but maybe, you know? You come to our house and what are they doing? I don't know. I don't mean that. It's just, what the hell are they doing, Cameron? Okay, so, and I think this actually gets exacerbated by social media, because you know,

if I go on Instagram, which I can't handle anymore, so I just don't, I just don't go on it anymore. But I will, in 60 seconds, I can scroll up and I can see one homeschooling mom who like bakes her own bread and another one who's taking her kids on amazing field trips and somebody else who's lining her kids up with the stacks of books they read this year.

And somebody else is doing like salt dough map making and my kids don't even know like anything about geography. And everybody has chickens, right? Like everybody. And I combine all of these people into one fictional composite woman and compare. And her name's Sandra. Yeah.

And I hate her. Yeah. And I compare myself against her, right? And that's why you need real people in your life and not just the homeschoolers that you see online because we're all curating there. Would it be okay if I swap chairs? I'd love it, yeah.

Because I would love to hear you two talk and I love that you're getting excited. Yes, I am. There's so much to say. Can't put me in the corner and not give me a microphone. She's Thursday. Come on. That's true. That's true. Thank you, Thursday. I'm just giving you a hard time. Do I need to put this up or am I okay? Okay, so Matt's taller than me in real life, but I have an abnormally long torso. So when we sit down, I'm really tall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come down. Yeah, see, long torso, sorry. Yes, no, I love this. I love taking apart that woman because... Hold on. I gotta read just the camera. Sorry but I'm so excited can I drink your water good because I'm going to because I'm thirsty

Do you want to sit here too, honey? No. No. Are we good? I don't want to lose the energy. I had so much to say, I know, he's gonna turn on. I'm like, oh, hey. I have a feeling we'll be able to talk. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. I've never really had a problem not speaking. That's fair. We'll have stuff to talk about. Okay, yay. I have so many things to say, but I love taking apart that woman, that perfect, because it is.

We're combining like 20 different people on Instagram and making it this one person. Like she's so perfect. And I always love when someone does that to me or one of my friends. And I'm like, oh wait, you don't know her. She's a big hot mess. Or like, I've had people be like,

I didn't think I could homeschool. And then Cameron, I listened to you. And I was like, I could do it better than Cameron. Exactly. You're welcome, I've had people be like, I didn't think I could homeschool and then Cameron, I listened to you and I was like, I could do it better than Cameron. Exactly. You're welcome, I guess, but ouch. That's fair. And just being that and being like, yeah, okay, I don't know. And then especially I think in the beginning,

I really thought there was a right way and a wrong way to do it. And I am the 80, like I was diagnosed ADD before it was school. It was like back in the 80s. And I was like the only girl in my entire school. There was like one other or two other boys in my class, you know? And then it was more recently that I realized I was dyslexic.

I was given like learning disabilities as like a big thing. But they didn't tell me exactly what it was. I think especially in the education system too, I mean, a lot of teachers even who have master's degrees in reading specific areas don't understand, don't know dyslexia the way we do now too. So yeah. Yeah.

So it was my children getting diagnosed and me realizing, oh my goodness, I think this is me. And just recently had a couple more kids getting tested. And I was talking to the woman that was testing him, testing them and saying, like, yeah, I think I may. And she's like, oh, I'm so sorry, you didn't know you were dyslexic. And I'm like, wait, you've known I'm dyslexic this whole time. And she's like, yes, no, I thought you knew that about you. I was like, oh, cool. Yeah, no, I didn't. I thought about it. And the more of these books that I'm reading,

the more I'm like, oh my goodness, this is me. This is me. My oldest daughter tells the story of how she found out she was dyslexic is on my podcast by listening to my podcast because she works for me and she was listening to like do a quality control on that. And she heard me say, I'm pretty sure five out of my six kids are dyslexic. So she texts me and she's like, five out of six. That's a lot of us. And she's, and I said, apparently I don't remember this, but she remembers that I said, well, I know it's not Allison.

And she's like, okay, I guess I'm finding out I'm dyslexic at college, thanks mom. It's okay, you're good. You're good, you didn't need to know, you're fine. I feel like it's one of those things that it's like, okay, well, and then I think also I had a, like I struggled with like, okay, how am I gonna teach? So I really struggled with teaching how to read,

my kids how to read. And someone's like, you know hundred easy lessons It works every time I'm like this was 400 very difficult lessons and my kids still couldn't read at the end of it Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like it works really well for non-dyslexic brains. It turns out well there you go Well, it was very well for my one daughter who I think's not dyslexic. She got it. Oh my goodness This is so this is how this is supposed to work. That's why they're called easy. Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, it was not easy for me and my kids. But I think I also realized like, okay, just because you homeschool like this and you think this is the way you need a homeschool. Like we did hybrids for a little bit. And then we also like I've done Montessori. I've done, I tried public school for

one year and I knew that's that my kids wouldn't thrive in that environment. I did not. I was convinced I was stupid by first grade and I know that my kids would have felt the same and then also fighting against that the rest of their life. And I'm like, no, we're going to have fun and we're going to enjoy life and we're going to learn and we're going to figure it out. And even as you're talking about the importance of reading out loud, Matt loves to read out loud. I am great at reading this level with my children.

So I'm super excited about these books. I love picture books and that's always what I go for. And I can read them no problem. But novels, like even the ones you're talking about that are like geared towards middle school, I can't do it. Well, they're a commitment. Well, they're also a commitment too,

which is the nice thing about a picture book is you get the whole story arc in like 10 minutes. And where else do you get a win like that in motherhood? I know, right? Not in many places. I appreciate it. But I love Audible. I love audiobooks. I love, and doing that and my kids,

and then we also, we travel a lot. And so we listen to things on road trips and we listen. And I think all my kids learn through their ears. And I think we're tactile too. But I love being like, okay, your kids are gonna learn differently than my kids. And this is what we're learning. And like last year we went to France, we did a pilgrimage.

And so like I designed my curriculum around that. I'm like, this is what, I love the freedom that you give so many homeschool moms about, like it looks different. Like the way you're going to do it, the way the Joneses do it, the way I do it, it's all different.

There's no cookie cutter, this is how you best homeschool, other than the fact that it's like, you're probably trying to make it harder than it is. Yeah, and doing too much. You're probably trying to do too much. Yes. I think part of this comes from this understanding that Matt and I talked about earlier about,

if you homeschool because you think this is the only solution because the world's got a hell of a hand basket because there's no good options where I'm at then you're going to homeschool from a different place than if you do it because you think oh my gosh the whole world is our classroom and we can follow some interests and also learn at our own pace so this kid that learns math really easy is going to get to move at her pace and this other one that's struggling can move at her pace and every day we're just jumping from this lily pad to the very next one, right? Depending on where our kids are, we're meeting them where they're at. Then it becomes a thing of joy, but it also becomes a thing of simplicity,

I think, because it takes off that burden of like, what are the schools doing? Because a lot of us who are homeschooling, I think we still use the measuring stick of what are they doing in the schools at this age. You didn't put them there on purpose, stop using their measuring stick, right? No, I agree, totally. And then I also think it's like, okay, this is the other kids that age.

And it's like, every kid is so different. And I feel like I, even as a seasoned homeschooler, I have that same, when it's a problem, that I'm like, oh gosh, will they be an adult and not be able to do this basic thing, whatever it is. Getting nervous over that and finding ways to, I don't know, like I think we're really good about, like I can be bad about trying to get school done

and like check off like, okay, until noon, like we've got to try to get our schoolwork done. We try to and I fall into this and I don't know but then when we're traveling I feel like I'm more creative so I feel like I'm almost better it almost needs to take you out of your own routine yes yeah yeah and it's nice so like I just had my two youngest I had an eight-year-old and a eleven-year-old at the beach and we did homeschooling at the beach and like we came up with stuff and it was so fun Yeah, and it was like we loved Beach School like each school was so wonderful

Yeah, and we were teaching the same things but in very different ways and the kids were like writing things in the sand and we were you know, just doing math with seashells and whatever else, but it's like remembering that when I am in the every day in the thick of it and Doesn't it feel so much more like then you're respecting the child, like you're respecting the child as an image of God. And this is the thing where I feel like the putting putting an expectation that all third graders should be able to read at this level or do this kind of math or learn about this thing in history immediately strips them from their dignity as a complete person.

And that's the thing that we get to do in homeschooling that I think you're just you're talking about right there. Schooling on the beach is like meeting this child of God right where they are, right in this place and time that God has them. Yeah, yeah. And letting them pursue their interests, right? So like we have a son who all he wants to listen to

is Lord of the Rings and Hobbit. And he's a- I wonder where he gets that. I know. Dad read it to him and he was obsessed. And so like any other book, he's like, this is boring compared to that. And he's like, okay, yeah, no, that's fair. But like just letting them do their own desires.

So it's like, can I please watch a science documentary? And it's like, no, not until we do these other things, you know? But it's like letting them just be good at what they like, you know? Yeah. Yeah. What's your take on unschooling? So interesting, because early on, I really wanted to be a kind of homeschooler. And so I tried like going all in on a whole bunch of different philosophies, right? I've tried this too. Yeah. And again, we're immediately discounting the child of God in front of us that we're meant to

teach, the human, the individual. And so my first experience with unschooling was too extreme because I was I was like committed to the idea of it, overcommitted to teaching my child. But what I've learned from unschooling and have carried into just the way we homeschool now, which is just like a conglomeration of just learning with our kids, right? Following interests has been so profoundly impactful. My 20 year old who's an art student had so much time

because of the, all, she had so much time because of homeschooling, but then she basically unschooled art for herself, right? Like she looked up, she looked up video tutorials and watched different things online and got books from the library on drawing. And she would learn how to draw hands. And she would commit, one year she committed to drawing hands every single day for like a year, you know, that kind of thing. And so I think unschooling then gives that framework for us to really help our kids pursue

God's call on their life in a unique way. as long as we don't get dogmatic about it or about any particular homeschooling philosophy. Because I think as soon as we get dogmatic about any philosophy, we forget to teach the child in front of us. Yeah. What's your take on homeschooling? Yeah, I think I'm the same. I have people that have told me I unschool and I'm like, no, I don't. Like I don't. And I don't know why I took it as like, I don't know, I think because I felt like I was trying so hard to school my kids and I do. And unschooling sounds like you're doing nothing.

Yes. Yeah. And so I was offended and I was like, and then I finally had a friend that, do you know Bonnie Landry? She's Canadian. She does homeschooling with Joy. She has a podcast.

And she was the one that was like, Cameron, I know that I think you take it as an insult when I tell you you're more of an unschooler, but I don't mean it like that. I just mean your family, like you have the ability to, like you study Joan of Arc, and then you go and see where she was burnt at the stake. Like your kids went to Le Sioux,

like you're living these things. Like it's very tangible, and not everyone has that opportunity. And you take advantage of it and you like teaching because I'm like, I don't like homeschooling. Like I love my family and I love my family time but I know homeschoolers are like, I love homeschooling. Like when we're studying this or we're studying that.

And I'm like, yeah, no, I love that I homeschool but I don't like homeschooling. Like I feel best when I pay someone else to homeschool. Like same with piano. Like I'm not musical I pay someone else to homeschool. Like same with piano. Like I'm not musical. I hire someone to teach my kids piano lessons, which if he's watching, please come back. Where did my piano teacher go?

Anyone in student mode that wants to teach my kids piano, please message me. But I'm better when I can let them do that through someone else. But I love seeing their interests come. So like Matt got our youngest B bees when, how old was he? Yeah, five or six. My son became a beekeeper

because he had such an interest in it. And the same child like was talking to someone like a year ago and it's like, mom, there's this subject called science. How come I've never done it? And I'm like, okay, so please tell me what you mean by that. But like he heard someone else talking about it. And he's like, okay, so please tell me what you mean by that. But like he heard someone else talking about it and he's like, I want to do this.

Yeah, so I love that. I love like letting the kids see what their interest is. So how do you try to instill that in your children? Like someone that's watching, like how do they let their kids interests, like your daughter spending a whole year? Like if you had assigned that to another child, draw hands for an entire year. Even if I had assigned that to another child, draw hands for an entire year.

Even if I had assigned it to her, I don't think it would have taken off the same. It wouldn't have helped her in the same way, because it would have been like, I got to do this thing for school. It's like an assignment. You know, I also think I I want to one caveat with like following interests and stuff. I remember being a little worried when my older kids were younger that like, well, like this kid, this particular kid, like doesn't seem interested in much of anything except for getting school done. And so I would kind of stress out about that. And so I do think it's helpful to remember

to that entire kids are like reading and operating in some kind of sphere of independence, like autonomy, a little bit older, really, you're still providing all of the, you know, like all of the feet, all of the activities. It just doesn't feel quite as self-led as I thought it was going to early on. Okay. So there was nothing wrong there. Um, I thought that was one thing I wanted to just mention, but I think paying attention to like the stories for, so for example, um, I very rarely assign reading, which always surprises people. Um, I do not enjoy teaching my children how to read. They all can read now. Praise Jesus. I do not have to teach any more children how to read

until I have grandchildren. So it's just a struggle. It's like, I love reading with my kids, but sitting there through phonics is really stressful. It's hard. And it's like, you just feel like twitching, when they're like, ah, ah. Or even I find when we go over phonics stuff

and there's different sounds and certain things, I don't hear the difference. And I'm like, wait, is this different? So I have to double check with my child who's not dyslexic. And I'm like, what are the two different TH sounds? Because they all say, mm. And she's like, no, no, no, there's mm. And I'm like, they all sound the exact same.

So I get my daughter to teach them those different sounds. Which is actually, that's a really good point to make. Sometimes we think if we're homeschooling, that means we're doing the teaching. No, it doesn't. It just means you're facilitating that. It goes back to what the Catechism tells us that we're the first. We have the first responsibility to the education of our children. That doesn't mean that you have to teach your kids how to swim. You can put them in swimming lessons.

It doesn't mean you have to teach your kids math. You can put them in an online math class or hire a tutor. And that's still, you're still responsible for their education, regardless of where they're getting it. Right? I got off track there. No, totally. I, yes. Yes. Sorry. I'm going to let my husband come back on. It's his show. No, it's okay. I just wanted to be faithful to these wonderful supporters of mine who have put in some great questions. And I want to maybe think of this as the lightning round because it is About 15 questions or so. Okay. Okay, and I love how vulnerable people are

Yeah, this person says I feel like I often get frustrated with my kids while homeschooling I am constantly asking forgiveness from God and my kids for losing my patience with them This reminds me of the story of the mother who went to confession. She said, Forgive me, father. I yell and beat my children. He said, You're supposed to yell and beat your children. You can't see you right now. Okay, change it.

All right. Here's here's what he says. I am constantly asking for forgiveness from God and a lady. Sorry. And my kids for losing my patience with them. It's so difficult sometimes that I begin to question if this is what I am really supposed to be doing. But I feel so convicted by the Lord that this is where I'm supposed to be. My kids are fourth grade, second grade in the kindergarten.

We are enrolled in classical curriculum provided by a mother of divine grace. And it's so beautiful, but feels like so much. And there are so many subjects, even for the younger ages. I love my kids with all my heart, but she's struggling. Yeah. Advice. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that comes to mind is we, she, she said, I'm getting impatient and I'm frustrated. I'm constantly having to ask forgiveness.

So I don't think I'm from my husband, my children from God, right? I must be doing something wrong here. What a beautiful gift. She's giving her children to witness that every single day. What a way to look on the bright side. I mean, are you kidding? Do you think that they would learn that in school? Really? That's a good question. Like to watch an adult make a mistake

and then have it to come and repent and then turn. That's amazing. That's a beautiful, beautiful gift. That's right. As long as she's not flagellating herself in front of them or you know what I mean? Yes, that is true. That is true.

I guess what I'm trying to say there is that there's a lot they're getting that you don't, you can't see or quantify. One of the things that was interesting to me with my older kids is that all three of them have said, well, I guess I most recently heard it from my second daughter that she was just surprised at how well she can manage her own time and workload compared to her peers in university. And I thought that's so interesting because the only reason she can manage her workload well is because for years I had to basically ignore you while I was tending to the babies in the house, right? At the time, I thought that was a huge, that's like a deprivation, right? Like this is something that you're going to have to overcome because I was not able to give you what you needed. Like I was not able to

sit with you and like, do all your schoolwork with you or map it all out for you. But what she actually learned in that time is a skill that has been able to carry her into her adulthood. So oftentimes what we think of as a detriment or like a, what's the word I'm looking for? Something that we are not able to provide for them ends up being exactly what they can use to grow. The other thing is that I would just say a school like Mother of Ungraced, fabulous curriculum, fabulous people.

Also, whenever you're using a program or a curriculum and you feel like it's starting to tax your family relationships, it's also a good idea just to go like, oh, is there a way we can alter this? Because your homeschooling is about relationships, your relationships with each other, your relationship with God, and so, and your children's relationship with God, and the relationship with ideas. So if your schooling is ever at any point, no matter what program you're using, getting in the way of those relationships, then it's worth taking a look at whether or not it's serving you as your tool,

like as a good tool for you in this moment. And I don't know very many homeschoolers who can use the same curriculum all the way through and feel like it's the same useful tool to, you know, in all the different stages of homeschooling and family life. So just because they're beautiful clothes, it doesn't mean they'll fit, right?

Exactly. I think sometimes you look at classical curriculum, you have an idea of what that means. It looks really good on their family. Yes. You try to apply it to yours and then hate yourself for it not fitting. That's a great analogy.

Yeah, whereas it's like, how now do I, and what's difficult is when you already feel insecure in homeschooling. Yeah. What you want is someone to give you something. Yeah, a recipe. Make it so it can just fit, yes, give it to me. But it sounds like that's not going to work. It hasn't worked in our life. It's just been rolling and adapting.

Yeah. The other thing is you can't see the fruit in the moment. Like you have to wait. So it's like you can't plant a seed and then dig it up to make sure it's growing. You'll kill it. That's good. Right. And so we have to wait. That's what faith is for. Faith is for these times. And we're like, I don't know if this is working, but I am pretty sure this is what I'm supposed to do. So I'm going to do it. And then this is exactly what it means to bring our basket and let God make it enough and stuff instead of trying to manhandle ourselves. It's difficult when your first generation homeschooling parents is that all of the virtues of your children

are chalked up to luck by those who think you're doing a bad thing. And all of the deficiencies are chalked up to your stupid idea to homeschool. You actually cannot win. It's true. And actually I think that's across the board kind of true. We end up taking a little too much of the credit

when things go well and too much of the blame when they don't. Because then we're looking at the results instead of looking at what we're supposed to be called to do what our work is. Yeah, that's good. Someone needs to come up with a curriculum for for like anxious homeschooling moms where it's like this is legitimately the bare minimum.

And they put fancy classical language around it. But it just involves making your children sit and eat cookies while they listen to the Lord of the Rings. Yes. OK, so Liz says, for those who have gone through public education and have a lot of trouble understanding big classical works, does she have any advice on how to improve our comprehension and any good starting books for adults wanting to start reading more literary intellectual works? Yeah, the Well-Read Mom is a great resource for moms who really want to like dive into some of those literary classics. I didn't read any of those when I was younger. And so I oftentimes feel like when I'm approaching a classic for the first time

with my kids, I'll feel like, Oh boy, like I, there's nothing I can teach here. That's actually kind of a beautiful thing though. You become a learner next to your child. So for a lot of the classics with my older kids are high schoolers, we will listen to them instead of read them aloud or read them alone. We'll listen to the audio books. We oftentimes, and you can only do this if you do less,

I will say, my son and I, in his senior year in high school, we listened to several books twice. So we listened to like the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. And then we listened to it again. We got so much more out of the second reading than we did the first time. That's a sign of a great book, huh? It is the sign of a great book. And what occurred to me was that if we had had some long list

of like all these classics he has to read his senior year, we wouldn't have had time to go back and read it again. But because we were just like, it was more about spending time reading, not like getting through a certain list. But because we were just like, it was more about spending time reading, not like getting through a certain list. But if you're wanting to learn, if you're for your own interest and your own edification,

if you're wanting to learn, I think Well Read Bound is a great resource. The Close Reads podcast is also a fabulous podcast put out by Circe Institute where they talk about classics and they are very smart people. And so they will help you understand the things that when you're reading a classic and you're like, I do not know what's going on. Well, I think to what I said earlier is perhaps helpful that you just you bite off what you think you can actually chew and swallow. So beginning with a short story like the Time Traveler by H.G. Wells or the Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is the greatest meditation on death I think that's ever been written by Tolstoy or, you know, you know who I love is Poe, some of Poe's works. The Fall of the House of Usher, is that what it's called?

Like that way it's like, all right, Like, okay, I'm intimidated by these big fancy highfalutin names, but I can read a half hour read. I tell you, he's one of the most beautiful short stories I've ever read. It was by Dostoevsky. He's got a gentle creature. Do you like this one? I don't know this one.

It broke me. Okay. It just destroyed me. It was so beautiful. It's super depressing. Like all the, like here's how it starts. And I'm not giving anything away. Because it's in the intro to the novella. Okay, he wants you to know this. Yeah. The wife's just committed

suicide. On that happy note, and they bring her in and lay her on a card table waiting for the undertaker or whatever. And he's there recounting how it came to this. Oh, wow. broke me. Wow. I cry a lot when I finish books. That was very loud. I cry a lot when I read books. I don't know if it's just like the exhaustion of like, finally I'm done. Like The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Have you read that book? I have not read it. It ruined me. I was in a hotel room sobbing. I think you and I might have different reading tastes though, based on the things you've recommended thus far. What else did I read? Yeah, I finished Lord of the Rings and went into another room and I shut three doors so

I could cry in private. It destroyed me in the most beautiful way. The Old Man in the Sea. I read that with you and I cried. I couldn't help it. I had to leave her because I'm embarrassed to cry. It's like throwing up in front of someone. I don't need you to see this. This is embarrassing for me. Such a man thing. It's not embarrassing to cry.

Go over there, dig a hole and die. And it's left alone. Oh, man. What books have made you cry? Oh, hang on. There was something I was just going to say. No, that's OK. But I lost it. I want to see if I can find it. Call it Kathy.

Yeah. Emotions, different tastes in books. Oh, it'll probably just going to say. No, that's okay. But I lost it. I'm going to see if I can find it. Crying in the end of stories, calling it a coffee. Yeah, different tastes in books. Oh, it'll probably come back to me. Roll the rings. Oh, I know what it was. Earlier you had asked, you know, like, what do stories like, why read? Like, what do stories do? But I think you just hit it when you said like, that you cry a lot when you read, or like it touches you on some deep core.

I mean, I was thinking this morning on my way over here about the difference between sitting your child down and teaching them about the resurrection, the death and resurrection of our Lord, which is an important thing to do, to sit down and explain that happened and why, right? And then if you sit down and you read the lie and the witch and the wardrobe,

and your children learn to love Aslan and then they watch as land on the stone table I mean, it's it hits different right is remember that little letter that was written to CS Lewis from a little boy I think it's from a mother actually Okay, she said my son's afraid that he loves as land more than Jesus and he wrote back and said when you're old that your Son loves in as land. He's loving Jesus. And he wrote back and said, when you're old, that your son loves in Aslan, he's loving Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. So beautiful, right? It like, it like reaches us at a completely different level. That's like outside of us being able to logically think through or in our modern

age, we have such a preference for like the scientific and the empirical and things that you can explain. And yet, the deepest, truest things in life, they can't be explained that way. You can't just sit there and like, it's the difference between, you know, dissecting a frog or watching a frog hop through a pond. It's like this living creature that you can learn about and you can love and you can cry over when they die. That's so different than saying like, that's not to say that we don't need to learn also scientific things, that's not what I'm saying, but there's something that science can't touch.

There's a truth there that you can't touch. There's a Russian novel called Fathers and Sons. I think it's by Tegenev. Do you mind looking that up Thursday? I think it's Tegenev. And it's interesting you say that because there's an atheist in the story who likes to dissect things. Oh, how interesting.

And one of the, it was a frog. He found a frog on the pond and studied the thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful things that make us cry. He just sent me a big message and said, yes. Yeah, Ivan Tegenev. Yeah, but I like this idea of short stories. I think it helps people. I think doing something- Get their feet wet.

Yes. While at the same time, I loved your advice before about like, just because this person's regarded as excellent doesn't mean you have to like him. No. It's the same thing with classical music. Yes. You don't have to pretend to like something

that you just don't like. I mean, there's something to be said about trying to, trying to find the thing palatable. Like if I read Thomas Aquinas and I think he's wrong, I'm like, all right, this is probably my fault. Fair enough. But like if I'm listening to something beautiful and I just, it doesn't really, it's like, well, okay, just move on. What's some other good short stories you'd recommend?

Let's do it right now. Let's do a top 10 list. Oh, okay. Oh goodness. Well, They don't have to be top down. There's too much pressure. For listeners of this podcast, a book that might be really interesting and easy to get to jump right into are the is the father Brown reader. These are Chesterton's father Brown stories that

have been retold by Nancy Carpenter Brown. Nancy Brown, Carpenter. Nancy, I'm so sorry. I can't remember which one's first. They've been told for kids, like they've been re-told for kids. They're extremely well done, very faithful to the stories. I don't know if there is an audible version or not, but they're very short either way. My first time reading these with the kids is I was really into, I was doing this whole deep dive into Chesterton and my kids saw this book and my older kids they were younger then but they were like oh like mom's foisting her Chesterton thing on to us you know so I just read the very first yeah I just read the very first page and like I

can't remember it's the Blue Cross I can't remember exactly what happens on the front page except on the first page except for you've got like a criminal and a gun and a detective and I slammed the book shut and said, you're right. I'm you. You don't really want to read Chesterton. And they're like, keep reading. It was gold. It was a gold moment. Have you read that Chesterton's essay on cheese? Yes. Oh, my gosh.

Listen to this first sentence and tell me you don't want it to keep going. Let's see. My forthcoming work in five volumes, The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature, is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful that I shall live to finish it. Some overflowing from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to sprinkle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times,

but with too much Roman restraint. He talks about if trees were made of cheese, there'd be significant deforestation in his area. Ah, how do you become that playful? That's another thing that I think is nice is like, I want to be like him. I'm not like him. I'm kind of dour and too solipsistic when I want to be like him. Like Chesterton. Yeah, don't you? Like who wouldn't?

You see a saint. You want to be like a saint. I had Dale Alquist on the show the other day and he's like Chesterton. He reminds me of what he's just playful. Yeah. And just humble. I love his book so much. I love me of what he's just playful. Yeah. And just love his book so much. I love all Dale's books so much. Yeah. One of the Chester quotes that comes to mind as we're since we've been talking about homeschooling is that and Thursday, I might want to put the real one on screens. I can read the real one.

It's something about how we've got it exactly backward in our world where we forget that the school does not exist. Sorry, I'm going to get this wrong. The home does not exist as a jumping off place for the school, but the school for the home. Can you find that first? So I can read it the other way around. Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me, as he looks at that reminds me what Lewis said about the state, you know, like the state's only job

is to keep your family safe. It's so that you can play darts in the pub or dig in your garden. If it's not if it's not conducive to those things or if it's not facilitating those things, then what's the bloody good of it? Yeah, so your education then is secondary to like a happy home and a happy family. And so then, when we conceive of education

as being there to serve the home rather than to serve the school, it turns the whole thing on its head. I gotta keep going. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme, which says, if all the trees were bread and cheese, and he says, which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese, there would be considerable

deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Oh, so funny. How do you ride like that? I know. Have you tried to ride like Chesterton? Well, yeah. No. Well, I am for that. I mean, yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. Okay. Teaching from rest. Remember that book? Oh, yeah. She wrote that. Remember the one I called?

Yeah, you wrote that book. Teaching from rest. I apologize. I didn't know you'd written some books. Yeah. I should have asked She wrote that. Remember the one I wrote? Yeah, you wrote that book. Teaching from Rest? I apologize. I didn't know you'd written some books. Yeah, a couple. I should have asked you about that. No, that's okay. I wrote Teaching from Rest, A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakeable Peace. Oh my gosh.

And then The Read Aloud Family. That's so good. Have you read Jacques Philippe's book? Yes. I just have that. I play it in my house. We have speakers installed in the house. It just plays 24-7.

Oh, gosh. No, it doesn't really, but I should. Like, didn't you just say your house is chaos? It is, but it's not helping. The louder my kids get, I just turn up the volume and Jacques Philippe is shouting at me about why I shouldn't be upset. No, and that's a great book. Maybe that's a nice companion to your book. I love the name of that. I mean, really, I wrote it when the twins were babies. And really, I mean, I can I remember this really the moment that I first heard the phrase teaching from rest.

Yeah, I'm pregnant with twins. I have a one year old. No, she's probably not even one yet. I don't know. Yeah, she's probably one and three older kids. I'm cleaning out my six year old closet. So I'm like in a state of despair. Right?

I'm like, I'm pretty sure I'm failing all these children I'm listening to this interview where a home school speaker was talking about literature so I was actually trying to learn about how to teach my kids literature but at the very end I don't even remember anything about the talk except at the end where the interviewer said if you could tell homeschooling moms one thing what would it be and without missing a beat he said teach from a state of rest and I was, this dude has no idea what it's like to homeschool children, which is probably true. But also intrigued me enough to go, wait, wait a second, what would that look like?

And we were promised a piece that transcends all understanding, but I don't feel like I've got that. And I don't feel like most homeschooling moms have got that. So then I just kind of went on a personal mission to figure out what would that look like if I could teach from rest. And that's where that book came from. It just came from my own personal exploration of finding out what God meant by that and what could that look like in a homeschool. I'd love you to follow up on that. But I mean, one of the things that Jacques Philippe says, which I imagine applies to teaching as well, is he kind of compares our heart or our soul or our mind, whatever you want to say, to like a pond, you know, and if a pond is at rest, it reflects the sun.

That's right. But if it's disturbed, it doesn't reflect anything well. And, you know, when we walk about in our day to day life, interacting with people doing work, you know, thinking about ourselves and our plans. If we're disturbed, we can't see clearly. We're like blind people walking around trying to make our way places. And then everything gets worse. My relationship with my wife gets worse. My relationship with myself gets worse. My relationship with everybody gets worse. And I imagine that's got to be true as we teach our children too. If it's possible, maybe it's not, but if it's possible that I could be at rest or more at rest. And that's why I kind of love your emphasis, because it sounds like what you're trying to say is what you need right now in certain instances is less pressure on yourself.

Yes. Because it's that pressure we put on ourselves that disturbs us. Yes. So we feel agitated. And then we look at our children in a way like they're the enemy now. Yes. And now we're trying to love and teach these people who we are hating. Yes. Exactly.

That might be a stronger word, but maybe not. Some days, probably not. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure a lot of beautiful mothers are confessing that. Really, I mean, I feel so strongly that the most important key to a successful homeschool is a peaceful, content mother. Because if you have a peaceful, content mother, then she's just radiating joy and the love of Christ. Not always, because she's going to do that thing that that person asked about earlier, where she's going to have to repent again

and again and again, right? We all do it. We all have the days where we speak too unkindly to a child, where we slam a pencil down, we slam a door, where we say something we regret. All of us do that. And then we also repent. And then all of that, God turns all of that, like complete mess and our incapacity to be able to be enough for our children and He makes it enough. And that's the beautiful part. It's like, it has nothing to do with how amazing of a homeschool mom you are. It has nothing to do with how amazing your curriculum is. It matters how amazing He is and how if you show up every day begging for His grace, then he's going to show up with you. That's what matters. See, it's cool that you talk like that because I remember listening back in the day when Cammie

probably put on one of your podcasts and I couldn't tell if you were a Catholic or a Christian or not. So did you try to kind of keep that? Which makes sense. I mean, you want everyone to hear this goodness, not just Catholics. So I don't know, has there been a shift in the way you've presented? goodness, not just Catholics. So I don't know, has there been a shift in the way you've presented? Not really, but I was raised Protestant and I only converted in my 20s. And so I think I am sensitive to the kinds of things we talk about in Catholicism that immediately put up the Protestant wall. Yeah, good for you. And so like this is one of my favorite pieces of jewelry, for example. But I will not wear

it to a conference usually, because I know that it's a stumbling, I know it immediately throws up a wall or a stumbling block where there doesn't need to be one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then are you, so that's cool then. So if people who are listening to this and they want to get into your podcast, they could share it with other moms or dads who aren't Catholic, but are into homeschooling or reading. Yeah, I mean, the podcast is very specifically Christian, like we're not a secular podcast. So it's very overtly Christian. But I don't think if you were not Catholic and if you were Protestant, evangelical, whatever, I don't think there would be anything in there

that you would feel like, oh, this woman is super Catholic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you didn't ask me to do this, but I just these books that you have made are absolutely beautiful. In fact, it's funny. I just read the title a little more beautiful. It's it's never been easier. I'll hold that up for the camera. I don't know if you can see that, but it's never been easier to publish things. And so the problem, the nice thing is the gatekeepers are gone. The bad thing is, this is a lot of crap and well-meaning crap. You know, I mean, like, or maybe not crap, but it's not.

But I pick this. I mean, this is as good as it gets. So well done. Thank you. This illustrator is insanely good. Isn't she so good? Yeah, they're both are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where do people go to get these books or? Yeah. So, uh, read aloud revival. We started our own publishing company this last year. Come on. You know, and so these two are our first picture books.

Both of those were written by me, but we actually have three and illustrated by different illustrators. We have three books coming out every year into twenty twenty seven at the moment. That's how many we have in the hopper. So really what we're trying to do is write and make those timeless, beautiful books. It really feels to me like when we see books that have illustrations that are cartoony or ugly or garish, we're sending a very clear message to our children about what we expect of them

and what we think of them. Like we wanna make art, we wanna put the most beautiful language and the most beautiful art in front of our children because that's what's going to speak to their soul and so it feels to me like. Like a really good worthy thing to do to be making Tommy DePaola is one of my favorite children's authors he would say only the best is good enough for children. And I agree. I love it. In a little town not far from here, lived an old lady named Lou Alice. She was sly as a fox and swift as a bird. So beautifully written. No, thank you. Gosh, well done.

I mean, how hard is it to publish? I mean, it's almost like Amazon has the market on just quick. Yes, that is true. Yeah. Yeah. So the trick for us is that Amazon and all of those like print on demand systems that are now in place to make publishing easy are not set up to make really beautiful picture books. So they end up looking a lot like yearbooks kind of like really shiny over shiny pages. And we have, I have just a lot of love for the picture book for the whole form.

So like the end papers, if you open up and either of those books match the end papers, which are the pages, yep, right there, that are pasted onto the board. Those to me feel like a curtain that's like lifting to carry, transport you into a story, right? You're not gonna get those with print on demand or Kindle publishing picture books. Yeah, I'm not saying this because you're in front of me.

This is like one of the most beautiful children's books. This is as good as it gets. Well done. Thank you. So is waxwingbooks the name? Yes. So waxwingbooks.com is where you can find more. And we have next year, we have a middle grade fantasy coming out by an author who's 20 years old and fabulous. And two more picture books coming out. And we're really trying to make picture books that are great to share with all ages because that's what most of us are trying to do. We're not just trying to read to a, you know, two kids that are really close in age, but we want to like

share stories as a family. So that's what we're trying to make. That's awesome. I find that I have to turn my phone off and put it in another room. Same. Yeah. You know, the other thing you asked earlier about, you know, like short books and like how to do this, how to get started. I think sometimes we think you have to read aloud a lot or for a long period of time. Yeah. So we just don't start.

Yeah. But I did a little math on this at one point finally, because I was like, I wonder how much it really does add up to. So if you were to read aloud to your kids for 10 minutes every other day or so, that's about a half an hour a week. Yeah. That adds up to 30 an hour a week. Yeah. That adds up to 30 hours over a year. Yeah. Like you could listen to the entire Chronicles of Narnia

or read aloud the entire Chronicles of Narnia in that amount of time. So I think sometimes we, again, we're making it more complicated than it needs to be. Like all those little drops in a bucket, they add up over time. So it doesn't feel like, that's one of the things that I think is tricky about reading aloud.

When you're doing it, you're like, does this even matter? Especially if the kids are fighting and someone runs up to go to the bathroom and someone's like, I hate this story. And you're like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be joyful. Sarah said it was going to be joyful. She lied. Yeah. You can't you just again, you don't get to dig up the seed. It's like you're planting seeds and you just got to wait. You know?

But I mean, so I agree with that. But then in the sense, it's also like that's the beauty of play. We don't do play for the sake of something else. We do it for its own sake. And you're right. I mean, you can read for the sake of something else, namely to help your children, whatever, read better or understand English better, gooder. But but it's also it's just such a joy.

Like one thing our son's been doing lately, he's saying like, can we make hot apple cider and read books? We should actually let them sit in the living room. We never let them eat or drink, you know, because it'd be just crap. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Also, I'm a big fan of the rosary and not for any good reason. So here's my bad, well, my less than holy reason. It just makes everyone sit down and shut up for a bit. And even if they're not shutting up, spoken as honestly as anyone's ever been, you know, like my son, he built a little fort and he was playing in it. Like the more you can be like, that's fine. I don't know if it was someone can tell me in the comments section,

but I don't know if it was Jose Maria Escriber or not. I'm pretty sure it was. He said, let your nightly rosary be like a warm fire that just draws the family in. Oh, that's beautiful. Whereas when I got married and had kids, it was like, sit down. We're praying the rosary, which for some reason they weren't thrilled about. That's just chilling out and letting the kids get up to get their 18th cup of water. Like it's fine. It's all fine, but it's a beautiful way. I think to calm the family down. So it's like It's like all things in the faith, right? Like confession like it's good to say to another person Here's why I screwed up apart from the sacramental grace the reality of sin and repentance

Something true about the rosary which I think then prepares the way for reading a little book afterwards Yeah about the rosary, which I think then prepares the way for reading a little book afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, say it quick though, because poor Thursday's having. Yes. So sorry, sorry. It's awkward. I'm just gonna say like this. So two things. Hey, Thursday. No, no, no, no, no, we're going to wrap up the interview. It's fine. It's fine. Thursday. It's fine. Quickly. Okay. So when I was listening to Teaching from Rest, I listened to it on DoubleTime on Audible, and I was at the time, at the time I was trying to do a classical

homeschool approach that I had to spin all the plates for all the kids, and I was like so overwhelmed, and I'm listening to you in fast forward mode, right? And I'm like, okay, I think I'm really missing the point. I need to buy this book, and I need to sit down and calm down. But I loved it because it gave me permission. So at that point I had my kindergarten no longer memorize kindergarten poems. They were

memorizing second grade poems. And okay. Sorry, but no, listen, listen. They can't see you though. I don't think. Oh, well that's fine. Okay. But the other thing is more recently I was struggling again with homeschool stuff. And then I started listening to your podcast. I go like I binge listen, right? sometimes, and I decided on Mondays, because I just get really stressed out on homeschooling, I'm like, I have to start the day off right, or the week off right for homeschooling, and I decided I gave my kids the option,

do you wanna do a normal homeschooling day or do you wanna have a reading day? And we could do audible, we could sit and read books, we could do whatever, and my kids have been loving opting for reading day, and we're together as a family, I'm reading to them, we're doing auto. And so I love that. I feel like the gift that you give so many of us

as homeschooling moms is just permission to make it easier. And then we can actually have fun when we're not stressed out over it. So thank you very much for that. Thank you. Is that your idea, the reading Mondays? No, not reading Mondays. That was your idea.

That was her idea. Good job, baby. Yeah. Isn't it funny, though, how we oftentimes it has to be like difficult or hard and then we're like, OK, this is probably working. This is probably worth it, you know? But when something isn't, we feel it's like I think Joy Clarkson has written about this. She said that we have like an inner Puritan inside of us.

It's like this has got to be difficult if it's going to count. You know, it's funny how you get advice over the years and things strike you, but then you forget about them. But some things like kind of well up, like the sound of a drum growing and Paddy, our friend, about 15 years ago, maybe said to me, you know, I mean, how hard does life have to be? That it's kind of like the if you don't want her to hate you, you don't hate. It's that thing. It's like the if you don't want her to hate you, you don't hate it's that thing. It's like that doesn't sound that good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She had just taken

her children out of school because he was struggling with math. She's like, okay, we're just not going to do math this year. But then I like that question because there's this pressure like my kids need to learn an instrument and another language and they need to be playing this and it's like all of that you could do, but you'll drive yourself crazy. And where's the time for leisure in that? How hard does life like actually, how hard does it have to be? Does it have to be hard? Yeah.

That's kind of the that's the thing with the phone. Like I like what you said earlier about don't look at this as an extra thing, but look at what this will take off your plate. And this is very difficult to tell people because I've been telling because I used to speak about pornography for about 10 years straight. And I've been telling people not to have phones forever. Nobody listened. But now I run things as a great idea.

But I would say like, okay, you can get your get a phone, but then you have to do so much more work. You have to monitor it. You have to monitor the apps if you want them to have different apps. Like if you send them to school, there'll be a social leper by the time they're 10, because all their other friends will have it.

You have to deal with that or you have to give it to them. Like, again, I know that homeschool isn't the only option, but if it is the option you choose, yes, you take on some things, but you also free up a lot of things. Like I remember we sent our kids to school for a little bit and it was like, I get to wake up. All right. Already a negative. No, we have to make them lunch.

You know what I mean? You got to pack. No, we have to make them lunch. Yeah. You know what I mean? You got to drive them through traffic. You have to pick them up. You have to ask them about homework. Like, it's not like you actually get them after the best part of the day when they're already exhausted. Maybe you had. Yeah. And you get kind of the remains.

So I think for us, it was like, OK, even if this is even if it was selfish for us to send them to school, it's not working. It's actually easier just to kind of chill out as a family My husband used to tell me when I would text him like oh my gosh, I'm ruining your children when he's at work You said that? Yeah. I'm sure he appreciated that Yeah, and he would say, babe, the worst day at home with you is better than the best day at school Oh, he changed his tune. Yes, he did. He began this conversation. I never finished that. I never got back to that. Yes. Which is like, I know.

Also, I was like, I don't know if you realize how bad of a job I'm in over here. I don't know if your kids would agree with that. It's a little easier now, because now we have the perspective of those three older kids who I know didn't get much for a while, but they did. They just didn't get me planning, me controlling, me like digging up that seed, being like, see, look, this child can recite the presidents in order and this child knows this poem

and this child is in this math level. They didn't get any of that, but they were getting stuff. We just can't always quantify it. You can't always put it down to a page. That's the real beauty of homeschooling. And that's the invitation that I would love to extend to anybody who is like, I'm interested, but I don't know if I have what it takes,

is you need a lot less than you think you do. That is the beauty of it. But that also doesn't mean that everybody has to do it. I just... Yeah, I think that's good. Honestly, I think your kind of gentleness with homeschooling actually ends up being more convincing to people because it allows me to lower my defenses. So that's really good.

My wife and I are in our early 40s and when we were in high school, I don't know about you babe, but there was a huge emphasis on like, what are you going to do? Like, got to get you good at your math. You got to get it, you know? And I don't know if what I'm now doing is a reaction to that, but like, I don't care what they do. Well, he don't, okay, so isn't that weird though? Do you feel that way?

I did early on, I would kind of be like, oh no, if I don't check all the boxes. No, I meant the opposite. I meant, cause I'm at a place where I'm like, my son's like, I don't know what I wanna do. I'm like, who cares? You're so young. Just what do you, do what you love.

What do you wanna do? Well, also, your job, Matt, didn't exist when you were- That's what I'm saying. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if I was to say to my dad, I'm going to just do like this. It's like radio, but it's like TV. People are going to watch it on a thing in their pocket. Yeah. I'm going to have almost 500000 people.

He's like, OK, just calm down, champion. All right. None of this is going to happen. You know. But here's the other thing. And this is like in favor of home unschooling, like we were talking about before. What we find with homeschoolers is often you don't really know what your kids are going to need right for their future. So well, there's this is a vote in two different. Okay, I just need a few more minutes so I can get into this.

One is that when they need it, they'll be more self motivated to get it. So if you have a child who actually wants to be an engineer and they're at eight, you were like trying to drive math down, like spend so much, you're still worried about them getting behind in math. Well, by the time that they get older, they're gonna want it for themselves.

There's gonna be a different kind of motivation, which we all know it's so much easier to do something when you have your own internal motivation. Yeah. The other thing there is that you don't actually know what your particular kids are going to need. And so that can be very stressful. Like, oh, how am I supposed to prepare my kids

for what they're gonna need if I don't know what they're gonna need? Well, one of the ways you can do that is by reading stories. Because like we said before, every time you read a story, you're walking the mile in someone else's shoes, you're bearing witness, you're basically giving your kids practice at facing obstacles. Right. Your kid might be a Russian axe murderer, crime and punishment. You're welcome.

Read some Flannery O'Connor. This is what happens. When you turn away from Jesus. I like that. Yeah. But it's also too, isn't it? Like, you know, don't worry about trying to be happy. Worry about trying to be good because the better you are morally, the more likely you will be happier than you would have otherwise been. Which also makes me think, one of the things we hear a lot from homeschooling moms is like, but my kids don't like homeschooling or they don't like, like they don't seem to love learning, which I think can be a pressure, especially with like delight directed learning or like

unschooling. Because like, if kid's not really motivated by anything, you're like, yeah, this isn't really working. But again, if you don't worry, your job is not to make it so that your kid wakes up every day and is like, I can't wait to do school. That's not your job. That's not what you were called. It's not always gonna look fun and wonderful.

Some days it's gonna look messy. Your kids are gonna sass back. You're gonna be like, I don't know why I'm even doing it. Do you think I'm sitting here doing algebra because I thought that would be a good time? You know, that's just how it goes, but it's still fruitful over time. It's kind of amazing how it works out. But yeah, someone was back to this idea of when I say I'm not worried about my kids and what they'll do. It's not that I'm not concerned for them I just think that if they're virtuous people if they're industrious creative excited, you know, then all will be well I I forget who it was. I think it was the

York will correct me if I'm wrong with the founder of Jimmy John's He said he hires for attitude and trains for aptitude or something to that effect. Oh, wow. Yeah. Isn't that good? That is good. Because like anyone who has their own business, like a little coffee shop up the road, knows like what you really need is just someone who's joyful and humble and wants to help and is.

And then you can learn the rest. Because at Read A Lot Revival and Wax Wing, we've hired now two Franciscan graduates, English degree graduates. My daughter's one of them. And then another one we hired this last year is our new editorial assistant. And it's so interesting because nobody's gonna come in knowing how to do podcasting and all the things that we're learning about publishing now

because we're doing that and we're printing with a big printer and trying to get into distribution and libraries and all these things that I don't know how to do. No one's gonna have those skills. I can train those skills, but to have somebody and trying to get into distribution and libraries and all these things that I don't know how to do. No one's going to have those skills. I can train those skills, but to have somebody that comes in who can read, I mean, who is, who does read, actually, that's his one piece, but who can write and who can think, that's

totally different. And that's not like skills that you're going to get by following whatever they're doing at the schools. You know what I mean? Those are things that you do by learning together over time, like by, I don't know, something you just said made me think they're the unquantifiable things that add. What did he say?

The Jimmy John's guy that he hires for attitude, trained for aptitude. Yeah, yeah. We focus so much on like, like, like, again, that empirical data, like skills, like, can your kid pass this level test? How are they gonna do on their SATs? I don't know. I just don't know if it matters that much Yeah, and I wonder if I don't care because what we just said like these shops didn't exist five minutes. Yeah. Yeah, I would just much rather my children be honest and good and repentant when they're wretched and But you also don't have control over but you can you can at least model it as much as you can.

That's right, that's true. Although I do feel like one, you can't control it, but I think you can encourage it. Like one thing we've tried to do ever since our kids were young was just to like shower praise on our kids whenever they admitted to do something awful. Like our kid once, he took a coin and he scraped a big lion knot, remember that?

On our car But he told me he did it and I just hugged him I mean I didn't say good job do it again. That wasn't the lesson you understand. Yeah lesson was I love you so much Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with me. Yeah, don't ever do that Not ever do that again No Did he Yeah, yeah. No. Oh, did he? Oh, dear. No, I don't. But it's like, I think what you're saying is like, you can make it more likely, which is I think, okay, so if we go back to that idea of the catechism teaching that parents

are the first or primary, primarily responsible for the education of their children, then we're all responsible. Whether you put your kids in public school or put your kids in private school or your home school, you're all responsible. We are all responsible for the education of our children. I just think it's a little more likely that it will, that I can present the things that I wanna present

if I have them more for the day. That can be a way to think about it too. It's like making it more, it's why my kids go to France, a couple of my kids go to Franciscan, right? Like, yeah, kids can be a way to think about it, too. It's like making it more. It's why my kids go to France to couple my kids go to Franciscan. Right. Like, yeah, kids can make bad decisions in college anywhere they go. But I can put you in a place where it's a little more likely that you'll probably make good decisions with a peer pressure is to be a saint.

But you don't have to. But come along with us. All right. Well, this thank you so much for coming on the show. What way would you point people to? I mean, your excellent podcast, Read Aloud Revival, but is maybe, is there a specific video or podcast you might say, I know you said that was your favorite with your daughter, but that they might listen to if they want to kind of get their feet into your world? Yeah, if you're considering homeschooling, I think that one with my daughter is helpful

because we talk a lot about the different... What was the episode? Episode 209. Okay. If you're wondering about reading aloud and the impact it can have on your family, you want to get inspired or you want to maybe convince, especially maybe that handsome person that lives in your house, that reading aloud is as good of a use of your time as you now know it to be, then you can go to readalouderevival.com slash Y, W-H-Y. And we have an episode there on, in a little cheat sheet that's really handy.

That's like, this is all the really good stuff that happens from reading aloud. Because like I said, it's not just us that's skeptical. It's other people as well who are like, wait, you're doing what all day? Cause not every homeschool dad is like you, Matt, where you're like, I just love it. My kids are like being read to for hours

and listening to audio books and climbing trees and some some Especially men. I think they want to know why is this how is this helping? Yeah, right? Yeah Yeah, which is a fair question because you were all responsible for the education of our children. So you're right. Yeah, good Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Cameron. Thank you, Thursday That's how we end