♪ Gannon Zone, Auto Zone ♪ - Welcome to Auto Zone. What are you working on today? - I think my battery's dead. - With free battery testing and charging, we can help you get back on the road. ♪ Gannon Zone, Auto Zone ♪ - So what if I need a new one?

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My name is Joshua Sheets, I am your host, and today I am joined by Jonathan Harris. Jonathan, welcome to Radical Personal, or welcome back to Radical Personal Finance. - Thank you, glad to be here. - It's been, what, four years, probably five years, something like that, since you were last on the show?

I don't remember exactly, but I know that you have been on the show before where we talked about homeschooling. - Maybe five years. - Yeah, it's been significant. - Yeah, I think five years. - And so I wanted to invite you back today to talk about home education, talk about some of your experiences with home education.

And I think that you are uniquely positioned to talk about home education. Unlike many parents who this year, due to all the school shutdowns for COVID, unlike many parents who find themselves homeschooling for the first time, you've been doing this for quite a while. And not only that, but you've got children at every stage.

Your eldest is how old now? - My oldest is 22 now. - Okay, 22, and your youngest is? - My youngest is four. - Okay. - Four. - And you've homeschooled all your children on the way through. - So the last time I talked to you, yeah, the last time I talked to you, my youngest would not have even been born yet.

So, yeah, that's quite a span, actually. - It is. - Of ages. So I feel like we've moved from one decade of homeschooling into a new era of homeschooling. The trends move and you don't see it from year to year, but then when you look back and try to remember your youngest one, how you were doing it more than 10 years ago, and it's like, wow, things have changed.

- Right, right. Well, I think this is really useful because I admire you. I've admired you for quite a while. When I first had you on the show before, you were talking about 10K to Talent. That was your brand at that time. You and your wife were starting a new brand where you're just adjusting 10K to Talent into something called Parent Their Passion, which we'll talk about.

But when I first got to know you and I first got to know some of what you were doing, I started watching your children, watching what you were doing and how you were helping your children to learn. And I've admired that a lot of ways. - You know, and I have a four-year-old who's managed to get through two layers of protection to find me.

She's being whisked away. So it's real. I really do have small children. - Yeah, I've got dogs that bark at the neighbors whenever I'm doing this. So you've been doing this for a while, but you've done a really good job, I think, of making schooling relevant. And that's one of the things that I most admire about what you've done with your homeschooling.

And so I'd like you to start by sharing with me, if you were asked to describe your family's philosophy about home education, how would you describe it? - The approach we take is that we're trying to find a way to expand the child into a future that makes sense for them.

And what I mean by that is, when we first started off homeschooling, we had great success. We're following much more of a traditional approach as far as filling up buckets of knowledge, which in and of itself is not bad. And we still do that to a certain extent. You know, you start off, you say, okay, we're in fifth grade.

We wanna know this kind of math. We wanna know this kind of history, and maybe we'll throw in some extracurricular activities so we're not just sitting, you know, reading and moving around a bit. And we might throw in a hobby, but it's really in that sense, centered around trying to accumulate in certain buckets of knowledge.

And then we gradually switched to being more focused on developing an education that was looking to the future, that made sense for each individual child. So we're not talking really about tutoring. That's a separate issue. Tutoring is more, you know, you wanna fill up this bucket of knowledge so you might hire a specialist to go a little bit faster so you can accelerate.

But what we are really doing now is we're focused on having them create a kind of talent that they can bring value to other people in the longterm. So kind of create an identity for them that makes sense far beyond high school. - Do you think of, when you use the word talent, do you think of that primarily in an employment perspective?

How does that, 'cause, so if we talk about like the philosophy of school, you think about what we usually think of as school. We think of school, that school is supposed to position us to, position us for the real world, right? The idea is we're studying so that we're prepared for the real world.

Now, there are different roads that we could go down. Practical skills, employment skills, versus say the life of the mind. So when you use talent, are you primarily thinking about how that interacts with employment, or is there something else? - Both, actually. So especially for guys, I think that's really important.

As all men know, and sometimes wives can get a little depressed about that, but identities as men are so much wrapped up in what we do for a living that it becomes really important. So it's a combination of both. But a talent can also mean something that has real value that you wanna bring to other people that's not academically based, but you're bringing, you're creating a real impact on people with developed skills.

So a lot of times, as you get older, especially in the early 20s that I have noticed, people may be successful in academics or not, and then when they're outside of the controlled, artificial environment of a high school, let's say, then reality hits home. You may have some aspirations, but then you realize you're stuck flipping burgers 'cause you need the money, or you're back doing another six years of schooling when you thought you were finally out of that phase.

Or you may wanna help, in fact, we had a discussion recently with one of our older teenagers that wanted to do a little more of a kind of charity service. And as he was calling around, he quickly found out that really, if you wanted to have an impact because these charity services were quite developed, you had to have some kind of skillset that they could use, right?

So let's say you wanted to go help a family work on the remodel of their house. If you don't know how to do a deck or fix a roof, really, what are you gonna do? Sweep around the house? They already got that under control. And I think as people get older, they realize doing pity service activities don't really cut it.

So what I mean by talent is either and/or both, you develop a set of skillsets that can really take you in your career somewhere, so it gives you the freedom to do the things you wanna do, or you're gonna use it as an act of service of some kind, but you really need to develop that part to really have an impact.

If not, you're not really making much of an impact. - Tell us some of the stories of your elder children's talents and what they've been able to do with those talents as you've helped them develop them. - Yeah, so there are four kids out of the house right now, 22 down to 18, so I got a 22-year-old, and I have a 20-year-old, no, 21, he just turned 21, so 21, and a set of twins, a boy, girl, and they're 18, and they're living and working on their own, and they are all using the skills and talents that they've developed deliberately throughout their high school years in combination with their schooling.

And the oldest right now, he works on various big contract jobs that involve civilian drone work, usually for surveying special kind of equipments across the country, and he uses a lot of videography, he manages people, and that's something that he started back when he was in our home. He started helping us out with our photography for our home business, a completely separate home business, and we got him involved with our, I think our first digital camera at the time, and we needed to take more pictures of what we were selling, and so I was thinking, why don't we use him and put him to work on it?

So he started helping us in that area, and then over time, one thing led to another, and we met a friend who was one of the early drone adopters for civilian use, and he gave him one of his older models, and then he decided, hey, I could do this for real estate filming, and one thing led to another, and he just kept developing that, and eventually started getting work across the country, which he absolutely loved.

He loves to travel, specifically, he loves to see the wilderness in different areas, and the kind of work that he does often involves surveying equipment in remote locations for big companies that will contract with people like him. And then I have my 21-year-old, and we originally started, by the time I got to my second born, this philosophy, this method was really full-blown by that time, I had started experimenting with my first born, and by the time I got to the second one, I think I'd kind of figured out most of the kinks, and that way, locally, we have a gem and mineral club, which is very unusual, this particular club is very unusual because it was the center for a lot of the old gold rush days, and the equipment, over the years, I don't know, it's been around for 80 years, longer, I'm not even sure, and as the older guys pass on, whatever, they'll give their equipment to this club, there's a lot of people who know firsthand about mineral deposits and rock formations and stuff, and they love having young kids join in there and show 'em how to cut stones and things like that, so we started going there, I didn't have any knowledge in that area, but my son was absolutely fascinated by that.

That eventually led to him doing some metal work, because there was some metal work related to this skill set, and then from there, he got fascinated by making blades, he got very, very good at it, and when he left our home, he was still selling custom blades, Japanese blades, he loved to make those, he got very good, they were beautiful, it was beautiful work, and then he decided he, well, actually, I gotta get that back, no, then he went for a custom knife builder, and then from there, he decided he really wanted, he loved the machinery that they were using to make some precision parts for it, and then he decided he really wanted to go into CNC work or machining work, high-end machining work, and he was able to get an interview, I think he cold-called them, by then, he was already out of our home, working and paying for his own stuff, and because of his background and his passion and determination, he also had a great portfolio, he documented everything, so he was an early adopter on Instagram, showing all his work and how he learned, all that stuff opened up the doors, and when he came to one of these big shops that would be very hard to get into, they gobbled him up right away, and at this point in time, he's just absolutely loving it.

So the other two, I have a coder, and he's almost a stereotypical coder, with all the precision and some of the social skills that go with that, absolutely fascinated by how things work logically, and he was helping us in our business, the same thing a bit, he started getting onto some of these gaming sites, working just on the development side of it, and learning how to manage other programmers, at, I don't know, he was 17 or 16, and the beauty of that, and that will come up probably later, is that a lot of these skills you can do without people knowing your actual age, I mean, they know they're young, but they don't know how young you are, so if you can perform and deliver, they don't care, and I can tell you, that really boosts people's confidence, I mean, my child's confidence.

He's on his own, he's working full-time, he just codes from morning 'til night, we're trying to encourage him to develop some more hobbies on the side, so he's not always doing his talent, because he just loves it, and I think he's picking up, he likes taking apart motorcycles now, and all that kind of stuff.

We have, the next after that, is our daughter, and she's always been super artistic, she started down the artistic path in the beginning, not because we had a particular talent goal for her at that time, but she had great difficulty reading, very serious reading problem, we tried out everything we could, and so at that time, as parents, we decided, you know what, we didn't want her to be constantly frustrated, and we decided we wanted to develop some kind of talent that she could look forward to doing during the day, and we, that was, she was one of the key people, and the children here, who helped me to understand that really, you could really use your talent to actually hijack your curriculum, and so a lot of the time, she had difficulty reading, let's say, a history lesson, without a lot of help from someone else, she has no problem now, but at that time, she did, and so we just started encouraging her, well, let's get some more books that show accurate illustrations of the time period of what's going on, and we encouraged her to kind of draw her way through history, draw her way through all sorts of things, and she, her talent just kept building, and building, and building, and eventually, that became kind of her identity.

Fast forward, she is, she has two part-time jobs right now, even during the lockdowns, and one is related to restaurant work, which has been good for her, a lot of social skills she's picked up there, and another one is actually related to her art skills, and so there's a company that is right now on the rise because of the lockdown, so providing a lot of club, academic, homeschool-related badges and supporting material, and she's working in that area, and she's, right there, she's learning how to move quickly in an office environment, so typically, and I think it is true, a lot of illustrators or artists have a hard time with time management in general, and it's kind of the reason why they're here now, and so this has been a good opening for her, she's found someone who can give her the mentorship she needs in an office environment, but that also validates her artistic skills.

- So, you have four, you have four older children, all four of them are out of the house, and is it accurate that, especially the older two, if not the 18-year-olds, but that they are able to use their talents to provide enough income for themselves, or they're able to support themselves, or at least mostly support themselves, is that accurate?

- Yeah, no, and support themselves entirely. - Right. - In fact, I think, in some ways, as the years have gone by, I realize that they don't have to be, you know, world-class level, 10,000 hours in order to be able to make a living with their talent set, so if I would tell parents, it's like, if they're on to something, and they're super passionate about it, and motivated, and they have enough of a skill set, so of course, in the popular literature, you'll see a lot of that, especially for adults, you know, saying you can't run on passion, and find a livelihood and a career, and I agree with that, too, in the sense that if you have passion, but no skill set, it's not, you're gonna set yourself up for frustration, so if you can get enough of a skill set together, and a passion and motivation to become really good at something, I think it carries its own momentum, so once you get out there, and you start, you know, delivering on the value, so like my oldest, he started doing some real estate work, he quickly realized who the big paying clients were, and who were not, so then the big paying clients, he noticed they loved it if you handled all the voiceover for them on their advertisement, so he quickly figured out how to find voice actors, charge extra for that, and one thing would lead to another, and so once you got out into the marketplace, that kind of helps drive the talent development further.

- Right, when you, one of the things that has inspired me from the past, and maybe I've projected this onto you, but we were talking, or I was watching some of your social media stuff, and I got the impression that you and your wife have worked hard to help your children to integrate their schooling with practical expression, so the examples that I've given, which you can correct the record here in a moment, but the examples that I've given would be that if your children are going to have a writing assignment to help with their writing, that you've encouraged them, well yes, you need to write, but what you need to write is you need to write an email newsletter to your email list, and so your son who did blade making had a blade making list, and your daughter who does art has her art list, and so it's not just an empty, dead writing assignment that the teacher's gonna read, give you a grade, and then go away, rather you're creating a writing assignment for a modern practical purpose that's infinitely useful, and then in the context of that, I think of course you're helping your children to acquire very valuable skills, to be able to run a newsletter, you're acquiring resources and assets and helping them build assets like an email list.

You mentioned that your son had a portfolio, which obviously can be seen on Instagram and probably other things as well, but he's got a portfolio of work, accumulated over years, and so you've got a resume that's very expansive, and somebody can look at his Instagram profile that he built under his Blades of Black screen name, but they can see that, and not only will they see his growth, they'll be able to look back to his early projects and see he started as an amateur and he had decent results, and then look, here's this fine work that he's producing years later, but they can also see more about him as a person.

They can see that he's able to punctuate sentences properly, that they can see the breadth of his vocabulary, and I just have such a tremendous admiration for that idea, and I think that that's my ambition as my children start to move out of the basic levels where we are of learning to read, learning to write, learning the basics of math, and we get to the point where they're pursuing those kinds of things.

I very much want their education to be integrated in skillset like that. - Yeah, the writing part has been amazing, and when I first started, I mean, I was willful enough that I was going to do it, I was gonna try this. I mean, I tried a lot of things on my kids.

Everything was safe. (laughs) There's no danger there, but all I have to do is, and I encourage other people listening to this, I beg them, just flashback on your days in junior high and in high school, and get a reality dose of what it was like back then. I mean, you can remember some great things, but there are a lot of things that were, I'm sure, very frustrating, and I remember, I wasn't a bad writer in school.

I didn't really have difficulty in that area. I wouldn't say I shined, but I was probably average, but I remember the frustration. You spend so much time, they'll tell you, okay, go research something, let's say, on George Washington and so you don't have, okay, you know it's history, you're gonna write something, but you know, as you put in that last sentence, that no one's gonna read it.

Your parents won't even read it. Seriously, they will not even read it. When they read it, their eyes are kind of glazed over. Your teachers, she's getting 30 of them at the same time. Everybody's written about George Washington's wooden teeth or whatever. There's nothing new that can be said, and you don't know enough about the subject, and so you get, I think people, teenagers, start getting that nagging feeling that a lot of what they're doing doesn't matter, and it is true that some things you have to do that don't matter, but there's plenty of things that you could do to make it matter.

- The question is just why bother wasting your time? If there's something that you can do that's gonna accomplish the same thing, and here's why I like so much what you've done with your children on Instagram. I admire the idea, we'll see when we get to it, but I admire the idea that students should write just a little bit every day.

There's certainly a big difference between a 30-page paper and the skill of creating a 30-page paper or a 300-page book versus something short, but in order to develop the skill, the muscle of writing, writing a little bit every day is ideal, and the thing I noticed, and I don't know if this is at your direction, but as I watch your children's social media posts, I notice that they write a couple of paragraphs.

They'll take an Instagram post and they'll write a couple of paragraphs, and as I see it, that's ideal, and it makes it a more practical way. I admired some of the results that Art Robinson got with his children. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but his basic requirement for his children was that they did an hour or two of math a day, that they wrote a page-long essay per day, and that they read off of a required reading list that he curated that would be a comprehensive reading list, and that was the basic outline of their educational format, and as I've thought about that writing requirement, I've thought, "I really wanna do that with my children," but I can just see them every day sitting down and making up some goofy essay that's not actually useful 'cause you know it's not gonna be used, but when I observe your children's Instagram posts and I see how they're writing about what they're learning, it's a useful piece of writing that actually has value, and because it's being seen, it's enhancing the desire and enhancing the impact as to why they should actually do it, so I think this is a wonderful technique that we can integrate to really help our children not only do their best work, but even get feedback on their work through some of the social channels.

- You know, I take our daughter to a local ballet school that has a very good reputation, very thoughtful school, and she enjoys it, and this is more of a hobby right now, but when I see there are some students in there that are very dedicated, obviously, and the parents are dedicated, they love it, they just, they have the energy, the motivation, and the passion to do it, and when situations like this, my thinking and my philosophy head comes on and I'm like, you know what?

I would love to go into these kids' curriculums and say, okay, they're writing about George Washington, you know, they're going, maybe they're even in a public school where you may don't have as much leeway to do what you want, but you could there, too, so let's say your child is passionate about ballet, they're doing George Washington, she's 12, and typically they might, I don't know what they do now, but back then they would give you two or three ideas to write about, or maybe you could go to the library, look up something, and it's something that's been rehashed before and you don't have much to say about it as a child.

At least nothing you know that your parents and your teacher would want to repeat and share, and you can't use it again as a portfolio because it's so meaningless to you personally. You're not gonna post it up anywhere, you're not gonna share it to your friends. You get the grade and you're done and move on.

However, if you had a different mindset, you could say, hey, it's George Washington's time, I wonder what they did in the dance world during that time. So just a barely a little effort, you'll probably quickly discover that there are particular dances that the upper classes did and participated in.

Wouldn't it be amazing, so instead of writing about George Washington's teeth or him crossing the Delaware, you write something about how dance was used during George Washington's time. And I think there's a lot of information about that. So you would obviously write something that you're already passionate about, you'd understand the terms that are being used, you'd understand new terms, and you'd be able to put it in a true historical contest 'cause that's the thing that you find out with talent and other things is that things that you study have meaning.

Dance, even at the time George Washington was a way for people to socially connect with each other. And they had particular techniques and things of doing things from a dancer's perspective could be absolutely fascinating. But it would also, and here's the interesting thing, it would also fascinate your teacher.

For the first time, they're reading something interesting that they never read about before. In a language where a 12-year-old is all excited about this, this is what it means, this is what they did, this is how it's different than it is now, this is amazing. You had all this ritual and courtship going on and you could talk about this.

And I tell you, at that point in time, that essay, that little essay by a 12-year-old about George Washington is going to be read. It's going to be read by grandma, it's gonna be read by the dad who's like, "Oh, wow, this is different. "My girl's pretty interesting." The teacher's gonna put this aside and say to her husband, "Finally, something new." And you can take that essay, same amount of time as you would researching something that they've already written about a million times, you'd gladly put that up on a little blog post.

You'd take that to your teacher, your ballet teacher, and they would show that. So you get this amazing feedback loop that gets started in kids. It's like, "Wow, I have something to say "about this time period "through the lens of my passion and interest." And so that's really what I've been trying to do with my kids.

Like some things you may have to do, there are things you have to do that are sometimes difficult to hijack and take over for your own direct purposes, but you'd be amazed how much you can do. Just in that example, you got dance. How does that fit with George Washington?

And it's amazing the connections you can make. And so from then on, if the child wanted to keep going down, she could go in any number of directions, but she has a deep understanding of history from the perspective of her talent. And when she bumps into people who are much more advanced than her, she's gonna find that the doors are gonna open up.

- I think that this will help to remember more about history because my opinion is that I only remember the things that I've ever been interested in. I feel like so much of school was a waste for me because I absorbed information, but it was information that I wasn't particularly interested in, and thus I didn't retain it.

And I've not been willing to embrace the mantra of the unschooler of only study things you're interested in, but I like these ideas as a way of saying, how can we make this interesting to you because of your uniqueness so that you're more likely to retain the things that you're studying and the things that you're learning about?

I love the idea. If you were to talk about the focusing on passion or on talent, if you're focusing on that, do you feel like you had to give up something? Well, first, did you feel you had to give up something in order to focus on talent? If so, what was it for your children?

And if so, is there anything that you regret? Is there anything that you feel like your children don't have that at this point you're doing differently with your younger children than your older children because you were so focused on their talent? - The short answer is no. I really do not.

In fact, that kind of surprised me that I tried a lot of things, and some things just weren't worth it. I can't even remember them. I wrote them down somewhere. But I still had a pretty good instinct, and honestly, you read a lot of what other people have tried, so you know what can and can't be done.

You know what the limits of human experiments can be. And you also remember your own youth, so there's some things. I will have to say, and there is one negative that popped up more later that I'll address, but the one feedback I got constantly from other people, and that even shocked me, as to how amazing it was to me as an adult, as I'm doing it with my children, is how much passion, how much motivation.

I cannot tell you how many times. Our biggest issue is you gotta turn off the lights and get to bed, 'cause they'll be so absorbed in pursuing whatever aspect of this skill set that they're trying to develop. They're so engrossed in it, they can't stop. And we all know that feeling, right?

You're into something so much that you can't stop. And as a dad, I have to get in there and say, you know, they have limitations on their sleep schedules, 'cause they'll pay for it tomorrow, or mom and dad will pay for it. So it's like, okay, it's nine o'clock, it's time to stop.

It's time to stop programming. It's time to stop working on that blade. Please, it's midnight, I can go one more. It's like, okay, you know, let's cool it here. And so that is something that other parents want really bad. I want that too in my kids, and I will say that I think when you talk to the average parent, and that would have included myself, say, what do you want for your kids?

Say, I want them to be motivated, and I want them to be happy. And everybody wants that for their child. But the key to that being happy and motivated is not be motivated, just saying the words, be motivated, be happy, is they don't have a direction. And your happiness and your motivation comes basically in falling in love around creating and doing something that has meaning and purpose to it.

So in that, we were talking a little bit about some of the potential dangers of a more whole unschooling. And of course, it depends what you mean by the definition. But if by unschooling, you mean you're just going from thing to thing, one shiny new thing to another, you can't develop enough of a depth to start creating and doing something interesting.

So this is the example of someone who practices five days on the piano, gives up and say, hey, I'm not really good at this. Now I'm gonna become a soccer superstar. They go for two weeks at soccer, they realize they're not at the top, so they abandon it and they say, I'm gonna go into scuba diving next.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about latching onto something, even if it's a small thing, and gradually cultivating it into something amazing. And that's where, and the same, teenagers are just like adults. If you're doing work, you want to know that your work has some kind of meaning to the outside world apart from yourself, and you want to feel productive.

You want to feel competent. And those are important feelings to have. I don't think they're wrong feelings, and you just need to understand that that's what a young person needs. They are at that point, they're transitioning from childhood. It's not enough to give them hugs and say, you are loved, you're great.

Meanwhile, they're on the couch just playing video games, feeling bad about themselves, 'cause they have nothing to give to the world, and they know it, and they honestly don't. So they need to find something that they can cultivate. That's the secret. - That's a really powerful, that's a really powerful concept, Jonathan.

If you think about so many of the things that are affecting young people today, I see what you just said as having very broad application. I've never thought about it exactly the way that you just articulated it, but to me, that rings so dramatically true. What we've done, so I think most of us would acknowledge that we seem to have a significant cultural problem, at least or especially in US American culture with our young people.

Our young people are not thriving, broadly speaking. They are not thriving as they once did. They're not thriving, broadly speaking. And so if you trace this back in history, I don't know, of course, psychological surveys and whatnot, we don't have all of them throughout history, but if you trace these back in history, I don't think it was always this bad.

I think that children at one point in time had a much stronger sense of anchor, being of an anchoring place in life than they do now. And so as I see it from my perspective, there are a number of things. Number one is children need to feel like they belong, like they're in a family, and that family is a coherent, cohesive unit that's likely to last, now they feel that they belong.

And so ideally, we gain our primary sense of belonging and identity from our family. Ideally, our family should expand outwards to our clan, that we're part of a larger clan, and we know this is what it means to be a Harris, or this is what it means to be a Sheets, or this is what it means to be a McGillicuddy, that this is our clan, this is who we stand for.

Then that expands out into the community in terms of a very clear religious identity, a very clear geographic identity, right? We're New Englanders, or this is who we are, and we know that. And then it expands outwards. We're Americans, right? This is who we are. We're Bolivians, whatever the identity is.

And so there is a major component to that identity, and that identity itself has been very heavily fractured, that if you ask a lot of people, "What does it mean to be an American?" We're not really sure about that, and you see the problems of our lack of sureness.

If you ask, "What does it mean to be a Harris?" What does it mean to be a Sheets? Well, some of us are hardcore about this, but most families don't have a family mission statement. Most families don't have a list of characteristics that they put on the wall that says, "This is who we are, and this is what we stand for.

"This is what we're gonna be known for." And so a child is very unanchored, untethered. And so then, what other form of identity do you find? Well, throughout history, people have found meaning and identity in their work. Most of our names come from what we did. If your last name is Baker, it's usually because your family were the Bakers, or there's so many words that are traditional surnames that come from what you do.

Well, throughout history, teenagers and adolescents have always been anchored to, "This is what we do." And so there was the family farm, and there was work for children to do, or there was the family business. I labor in the carpenter shop with my father. But in our modern world, our work lives have so fractured that usually our family is not involved in our modern work lives, just because it's very, very difficult, right?

Your four-year-old wants to come in and see you, and it's a little hard for you to have her on the interview, right? If mine come in and see me, it's a little hard to bring them up and involve them into exactly what we're doing here. And so we put children into this school environment, but they're smart enough to know that the majority of their work doesn't really have meaning.

They're smart enough to know, "You're telling me I'm gonna use algebra, "but then I take my algebra homework home, "and I ask my dad for help, "and he says, 'I don't know how to do that stuff, "'and you're telling me it's supposed to matter.'" And so it's not anchored to it, and the work doesn't matter.

And so if you can connect teenagers back to the sense of, "My work matters. "People notice my work, "and I have something productive to do," it helps to start to facilitate a sense of identity. And that sense of identity is actually authentic, because it's related to who you are and what you do.

And so many people try to separate identity from what they do, and they say, "Well, this is who I am," without having proof of it, without doing it. I think it just tricks the subconscious. So I think that what you've said is really powerful, and a component of the piece to help a young adolescent to feel anchored to a sense of identity that can help to quell some of that teenage angst.

I think it's really profound. - Oh, I think it is. And I mean, and as adults, we feel the same way. I mean, can you imagine in the workforce, your boss comes to you, you say, "Hey, I'd like to take you these series of certificates." You're an Excel specialist at the corporation, you're doing whatever it is, accounting, and they say, "Hey, you know what?

"I know you're not an IT guy, "you hate computers and everything, "but tell me, could you take this certification on routers? "And when you're done with the certification, "we promise that you'll never use it again." How would an adult, they would have a mental breakdown, right? And by the way, if you don't pass this course, then 100% will fire you, but no worry, once you pass it, you'll never use it again.

That is Kafkaesque. That is crazy. And I cannot, I mean, I have met more than one person as an adult who's still reeling from the fact, I'll just use a fictional example here, just in case old friends are listening. But imagine you had a passion for Russian language, and you threw yourself into it.

You studied everything, you knew every bad guy in Russian history, you could speak it, you could speak it fluently, you wrote your essays, you knew all the dates, you knew the ins and the outs, you knew it all. And then at 18, they tell you, "By the way, for the rest of your life, "you're not allowed to speak it, use it, "discuss it with anybody." What kind of mind meltdown would you have?

Because you have genuine knowledge that cannot be used. And I see this people doing with music, for example. This is a really, not everyone, but a lot. I've met people, passion for some kind of musical instrument. Parents pay tons of money to go to a particular school, even after high school, they got top training.

The day they finished, they stopped using it. They just drop off, they just cease using it entirely. And 20 years later, 15 years later, I'll bump into a person like that, and it's like, "Do you ever use it for birthday parties?" "Oh, no, no, no." "Do you ever use it in your church environment?" "No, no, no, the music is too low, "my stuff is too advanced, I can't use it." "Do you ever use it for friends?" "Do you ever use it at a coffee club?" "No, they never use it again." And it creates a kind of mental anguish in people because they can't make sense of why they spent six, eight years, maybe more, pursuing something that had no way to bring value to other people.

So I'm not saying music is not important. I'm not saying Russian literature is not important. What I am saying is people will pursue, and these are kind of extreme examples, which I don't think is too far off the truth for some people, they'll pursue this type of knowledge and they haven't thought about the consequences of what happens when they can't use it.

Right, and you're creating some kind of crazy mental anguish. You can't share your love, you can't share your understanding. You can't even make a living with it. And this is what people do. They'll pursue, take years pursuing. Now this is one extreme, right, where people are pursuing an actual skill set where it takes a lot of work.

Not everybody's in that category, but there is a group of people who are super motivated. They dot all their I's, cross all their T's, and then they finish, they come with a finished product that makes no sense to their life. To me, that's a horror situation. If I were to write a horror movie, the Twilight Zone, that's what it would be.

Show a guy, but he can never talk about it again. That's the kind of mental hell. And then of course you have a lot of other people who are not in that particular category. You have other people who are constantly changing their minds, one shiny thing after another. They can't make up, and that's another issue that I feel like the philosophy I've developed addresses too at the same time.

So you want to develop something that is a genuine skill set, you're skillful at it. In other words, you can bring value. And then the second component of that is you need to bring value to people to find out how you're gonna change the world. You don't necessarily know that unless you start trying to apply it.

- Earlier you said that there was one issue. What was that one issue that you did? - Well, I found, yeah. Homeschoolers in particular are well aware that if you don't fit in the norm, many times you have to constantly explain what your kids are doing or not doing.

And I think we kind of got that, most homeschoolers have that down now. Plus there's enough homeschoolers out there that the social difficulty really isn't there as it was, let's say, even 15 years ago. But as they got into closer to college age, I did notice that even though my kids were really skillful and able to make a living on their own and so forth, they're in that in-between zone where a lot of their peers are actually just starting to go to college.

A lot of them are just frankly goofing off, floating around, living the good life, always available to go to the beach. Maybe I had not prepared my, I did tell them verbally, but that apparently wasn't enough. People are not gonna be able to compute that you're already successful at what you do, but you're only 20, 21, and you're not in college.

So their mindset is if you're not in college, you're a loser, you're not really doing anything with your life. If you're doing something with your life, then you must be in college. And so that was a difficult one, I think, for my boys especially to navigate socially, especially right smack dab when everybody's starting to go to college.

It's starting to get a little easier for them now. And this is just anecdotally as it related to me. I don't know if they would put it in so many words, but that is what I noticed. As they're, now that their friends are now starting to come out of college, it's not so difficult.

- Yeah, I could see that being a major challenge. I always, I reflect back on why did I go to college? And the reason I went to college basically was that only losers didn't go to college, and I'm not a loser, so I'm gonna go to college. In hindsight, I do think about what I could have done if someone had coached me in some of the interesting ways that some of the radical ideas, but I didn't have anyone who was kind of plugged in enough to coach me in that way.

But even so, there is still some social credibility. There is still something that goes along with college. And especially in that phase of your life, right? If you're in college and you spend 2/3 of your year goofing off, but you say, "I'm in college, "everybody understands." But if you're not in college and you spend 2/3 of your year goofing off, nobody understands.

Why are you being so irresponsible? And so if you have that veneer that you can put over things, oh, I'm in college, then everything becomes simpler, socially speaking. - Yeah, it does. And that's really hard to fight. And I guess it's the cost of being a pioneer in some areas.

If you wanna be on the cutting edge, then there are some social costs. They're not insurmountable. It's just, I think by the time the second born came along, I was a little more aware of it, that it was a bigger problem than I thought it was going to be as far as to how to navigate socially.

And I actually drilled him. I said, "What do you do? "What are you doing?" Pretending that was somebody, just met him. "What are you doing?" And he would say something like, "Well, I kinda dabble in this." I'm like, "No, that's not right. "You don't dabble in it. "You're like at this level.

"And you need to say, not arrogantly, "but have a certain sense of purpose. "You're not sleeping in your car under the bridge. "You're doing something with your life." And he'd be intimidated 'cause everybody else would say, "You know, I'm in third year of college. "I'm in second year of college." And he didn't have that.

He couldn't say it in that way. And so he had to kind of, now he's not, he's okay. But it did throw them off. - Right, right. In hindsight, one question I wanna ask you. I've had this idea where I think that, basically, my idea, my ambition, subject to needing to watch my individual children, right?

'Cause I don't wanna just impose my frame onto them. I wanna think and observe them. But if my children are academically competent, my basic framework is I think that an academically bright child can basically substitute a college degree for high school work. And so let's say, for example, you're taking an algebra class, right, as you're going to for math.

Well, I think that with just a little bit of coaching, that same student can go ahead and take the CLEP exam or the DSST exam for algebra one and thus start to rack up college credit. If you're gonna take a chemistry class, well, go ahead and just pass the chemistry CLEP exam.

If you're gonna study history, then prepare for the AP history exam. And so I think a student can very easily, with some coaching, accumulate 60 or 90 hours of college credit just simply through CLEP exams and their associated, and the other competitors to the CLEP exams. And it can map perfectly to a high school curriculum, a normal standard high school curriculum, but it results in college credit by quizzes at the end of the courses.

And then for, let's say, 30 or 40 credit hours of capstone courses towards 120 credit hour degree, I would encourage my children, I plan to encourage my children to go ahead and do some classes, might be some local classes at a local college, might be online classes, and go ahead and take those capstone courses so that they go ahead and finish a college degree by the age of 18 or so, maybe 19, maybe 20, but 18, something like that.

So I don't think that that college degree is as valuable as a very highly ranked college degree might be, it's not gonna open all the same doors, but I look at it as, it's good insurance, right? It'll allow that child to always be able to say, hey, I have a college degree, and if they want to pursue something at a specialty level, they wanna become an advanced engineer, well, then you just pursue that either with the degree at a certain university or pursue it at a master's degree and go ahead and get those really high quality credentials that you may need for some subjects.

My concern is that academics come easily to me, and my concern is I don't see a lot of the parallels between the necessity of academics to modern life, which is what you're talking about. You encourage your children, develop your skills, develop your passion, and I see that it's possible for that academic orientation to hinder a child from developing their skills.

You know, if somebody is very good at making blades or making art or making computer code, are they really served by being able to check the box over here for a college degree, especially if having to take all those classes and do all that studies resulted in them spending 2,000 fewer hours on their skill?

I'm not sure. So from your perspective, knowing what you know now, I gather that you didn't encourage your children to pursue a college degree, you prepared them, and they're all doing well. What do you think about, what do you think about for me as a young parent with that kind of idea?

- Well, no, I don't think what we're talking about is not mutually exclusive. What I would say is if you, so in other words, and I've told my kids, I'm not opposed to my kids pursuing a college degree. What I am saying is if you're gonna pursue a college degree, then you gotta have a plan for it.

So I happened to bump into a fellow here in Oklahoma in a community several years ago, and it just, it was a, we have a little lake here, and so when people are around the lake, they kind of relax. And anyways, this fellow turned out to be a surgeon or a doctor of some kind, and we just were striking up a conversation, and we had kids, and so subject of kids came up, and he happened to mention that he came up from a line of doctors, and he had, I think grandchildren, I think maybe it was grandchildren that were also either in college now pursuing a medical degree, and some high school students coming up, and he was extremely proud of this lineage.

So as I am, I like to quiz people to find out what they're doing. And he, if I were, if I, I don't know this person, never met him, but I would love to have interviewed him, he would have done exactly what kind of you're talking about, kind of my philosophy, but combined with academics, since they knew that the medical life was a passion for their whole family, they loved it.

From the way he talked about it, it was something his kids were good at, they were fascinated, they took academic camps, they did all sorts of crazy medical stuff, but they understood that that was their passion. And so once you understand that, let's say, you know what, we're really good at numbers and math, we've got an uncle, we've got a Nobel Prize person, we got it all, and everybody just gets excited about it, then I would say, well then, you do the exact same thing.

Every time, let's say you do George Washington, talk about the math developments during George Washington's time, because what that's going to do is create an amazing portfolio for you to really get into the top, let's say, learning institutions for a math degree or a medical degree, or you could do, like, if it was a medical thing, I would say, well then, find out what the medical practices were during George Washington's time, right?

That's the kind of stuff that will look really good in a portfolio when you're trying to get into a top-tier school. They're not gonna want it, they're gonna say, wow, this guy is committed, he understands the philosophy behind medicine, he understands the history, in addition to being able to take the math classes.

So I would say it's that in-between, that mediocre average is like the killer zone. So if you're saying, well, I don't know, maybe college will or will not do anything for me, so then you run the danger, well, you could have developed something else that could have taken you somewhere.

But if you say, okay, academics is my thing, this particular specialty, which requires a certain level of math or a certain level of scientific knowledge, then embrace it fully. Start seeing things through those lens. So because it's a long ways away, I've met medical guys who, and I've, anyways, I have a friend who told me that, who had an older brother who went down this line, and sometimes it become almost suicidal because the amount of study needed and personal isolation for years on end was such a big disconnect between the final rewards and in the in-between stage, and not everybody suited for that.

So that'd be an example of somebody pursuing an academic field that was really not suited for their personality or for other reasons. But if it is, if this is something you want to embrace, then embrace it fully. And so I would say that's the same thing. You start, if you're a person, say, you know what, I'm really interested in the medical field.

I'm not sure exactly how or what, but I know it's gonna involve, I'm gonna need to have a certain level of math, I'm gonna need to have a certain level of biology, physics, and so forth. Then I say embrace it, start a blog. You know, start writing about it.

Every history class you get, find a way to talk your teacher into letting you write about something about medical history back in those days. Start taking your camera. I don't know if you're allowed to dissect and put that on Instagram, but throw yourself into it. So you're basically saying you own it.

And you start doing the same thing. You start writing about it. That'd be a good way, right? Start writing. Wouldn't you love it if you were a medical person? Say, hey, I'm going to write about, you know, George Washington and the teeth. I could take the George Washington teeth.

I have no idea what they did. And you could talk about abscess, the pain people had back then, the type of drugs that people did or did not take in order to get over it, how many people died. And I'll tell you what, your teacher is gonna be floored.

They're gonna love reading this. And it's gonna look great on your resume, and you're gonna be able to share it with all your relatives. - I'd like to ask you about some of your experience with your children and encouraging social media use and some of the modern tools that you've embraced as a family.

I see the tremendous power and benefits of many of the modern tools that we have. You and your wife run a successful product company using modern digital tools. Your children have used tools like Instagram very effectively. You use Instagram very effectively, right? Here we are talking, I watch you, I follow your stuff.

Dude, your Instagram profile, and you just do such a great job with it. And so I see without question the value of the modern tools. Simultaneously, I see the danger of them, very, very significant dangers, everything from dangers to a child's mental development, stunted mental development, because of the incessant distraction and perhaps even physical damaging effects of excessive exposure to digital devices.

I see the turmoil that happens when people, due to social media addictions, the turmoil that the average teen lives through where what was formerly a very difficult but navigable life of the social environment, of in-person social pressure, now has become this extraordinarily difficult and I think increasingly unnavigable life of trying to sort this all out through the other side of a screen.

Even just thinking about the challenges for parents. My heart has been broken the last few weeks for George and Kellyanne Conway with having this intense public spat where you've got George Conway with the political sphere, he's very much anti-President Trump, and you've got Kellyanne Conway who's President Trump's staff, and you've got their daughter now posting online and she posts something online and of course 50,000 people chime in and say this, this, this, and I've just thought what incredible pain that family must be experiencing right now.

And I don't want that. I don't want that for my children. I don't want that for me. I don't want that for my wife. And so I'm really, really nervous and trying to discern what's the proper way to bring these things in because my wife and I, we see the value.

There's no question. But we're concerned about making sure we do it at the right way and in the right time, et cetera. And so thus, so far we've taken the tack of no devices. We don't use any screens, no devices of any kind, and I'm really happy with the results that I see from that.

My son is, my eldest is almost seven. He reads fluently in two languages now. He has a very long attention span. He's got this tremendous diversity of interest. And so I know that sometime, probably fairly soon, I need to start to introduce screens and possibly some of these things, but I'm really nervous about it 'cause I don't wanna give up some of it.

So as an experienced father who's navigating this, what advice would you give to me and how would you coach me along this pathway? - Well, age obviously has a lot to do with that. So you have a seven-year-old and our seven-year-olds, I mean, they have access to screen time, but at that age, anything they sign in, it's usually actually under my name.

In fact, I was laughing the other day. I think some of the social media sites are coming up with solutions for that, but my daughter really likes, she's nine, she likes following one of the wildlife guys who goes on site and they find chameleons and all sorts of things.

And it's a great wildlife show. But she's, and it's on YouTube, and I think there's like a paid version. She wanted to use her pocket money, and I looked over and it's like, okay, this is good. And she blogs about it actually, 'cause she's very interested in that science part of it.

So I said, if we're gonna watch it, you're gonna blog about it, you're gonna have to summarize it. And, but in that case, she signed in under my name. I mean, the media, so I know what's being watched and not watched. So most of the kids are, if they're involved in that, they're under my name.

Of course, the site, they get comments every once in a while by kids saying, this is amazing. And of course, my name's on there. But I think they figured out, these are mostly kids watching, it's kind of kid-oriented. And I think they're introducing profiles for kids. So basically, it's all under my control.

I can see, I get notified. There are a lot of tools out there that are designed that way now. And even, so this is as a general principle. So I don't let them have their own account under a certain age. And sometimes that will, I will change that rule depending on the maturity of the child.

The other one is all of the passwords. And the login IDs, passwords, they're all written down. So we can at any time go in there, browse around and check to see what's going on. The other aspect is that I do have, and not everyone's in the same situation, but I do have a lot of kids in the house.

And they do spy on each other a lot. So if somebody's involved in something they shouldn't be, it's very hard to keep that a secret. And of course my wife and I work from home, so there's a double layer of that. It doesn't mean that every once in a while, I think recently one of our kids got into a chat line that was totally fine.

But teenagers being teenagers, somebody's gonna cross the line and start saying inappropriate things. A lot of them have now filters and blockers. But sometimes people are just out of control and will catch on to that. It's like, you know, you need to watch it there or we're gonna shut it down.

So my point is that as parents, you have a lot of control. We're not afraid to go deleting like Instagram. What do we have on? Okay, we just added our 14 year old. Let him have his own account on Instagram. Everybody else is out of the house. Some kids can handle it better than others, to be honest.

It's not straightforward. It's not like everybody behaves the same way. And there was one child in particular at one time that just had a hard time handling it. And I think if they post something that they shouldn't have, I'm not afraid to go in there, log in and delete it.

So I guess I've gotten better. I've gotten much better with the kids coming down. Kind of half joking, but half serious. I own everything you have. I own you, I own your accounts, I own your passwords. I own even the money that you made. And all of that will go away if you cross the line too far.

I mean, it's not something I say that often, but they get the message. So I haven't actually had to say it as much, but I think at one point, I think I did tell one of my boys, it's like, I don't wanna be embarrassed by having to tell you something I saw on your social media.

It's embarrassing and it's awkward for me and it's awkward for you. Let's not have that conversation. So I think that that is helpful. And usually I'm sure it's gonna involve boys or girls. And no one wants to have that conversation with their parent if they can get in there and monitor the conversation.

So I guess I have a pretty high tolerance and the fact that you can get into their accounts. And of course, wives are even more they're not afraid. I'm a little more embarrassed to go in and check. My wife is not. So I think that you just have to have that confidence.

So I think the big, when I hear horror stories, I'm baffled because like, well, how can a person get into a situation like this unless they're completely unmonitored? That does not make sense to me. So if a person puts something inappropriate on their Instagram and they're a child in your home, why wouldn't you as soon as you find out, which you will find out immediately, because people will ping you or let you know, or you can scroll through it quickly, you can delete it on the spot and block the account and or delete the whole account.

And that is a tremendous amount of power. They don't wanna lose that. So I think I had one child that was just hashtag crazy and they were very, very naive. They would put normal hashtags that were tied to very inappropriate stuff and this would attract all sorts of creeps and stuff and I'd have to go in there, delete all the hashtags and explain to you, can't use this hashtag.

And then I had to, at one point, we haven't had that problem in a while, so we must be doing things really well, but I had to go through, I'll go randomly through and look at all the profiles of people following them and I'll block them or report them.

But honestly, that has not been a great problem simply because the kids are aware of it, they tell each other, we're aware of it, we're social media savvy ourselves. So I'd say that that would be the, I didn't follow that particular scandal, but when you said the daughter posted, how old was the daughter?

- She's 15, she's 15, it's really sad. It's a political scandal because, and she's 15. - 15. - So I mean, I guess something like that, you'd probably know within seconds if you're a high profile person, if your daughter posted something. - It's international news. - I mean, it should have been deleted immediately.

- Right, it's rather evident that the parents don't have control and you have a fractured couple and the parents just simply don't have control. - Yeah, so that's maybe what I want, okay, maybe now that we're saying that a little more clearly here, I think that that's what happens.

I mean, whether it's social media or not, I mean, and social media will magnify the problems, I agree with that. But if you're taking care of your children, you're watching them and you care about them, then I think you will take ownership of it. And there will be some awkward conversations.

You know, we've had those where, you know what, you don't need to put that picture of you in such an undressed state on Instagram. I know you're getting a lot more likes, but let's have a conversation about why you're getting more likes. And it's not, you're not, they haven't really crossed the line as such, but you're getting early on the signals, you know what, this is something, you know, you can dress like this, you're in your home, you know, or in an appropriate situation, but when you're putting it on media like this, as you notice, there's already more people liking it and they're not here because of your intellect.

So yeah, that's what I mean by having those awkward conversations. So I guess you gradually groom and it's like, oh, okay, I get it. And rather than this one big, you know, thing where you didn't know that your daughter has been posting, you know, half nudie pictures for the last six months.

I mean, how can you not know that? And how can, and usually by the time you get to that point, things are creeping up. So I want to tell, I guess what I'm trying to say is that good parents out there, don't be so scared. 'Cause I think half the time when you hear these stories is 'cause parents haven't been to the task.

And I mean, to the task, I don't mean you need to be a wizard. I mean, just be a normal mom and dad. It's like, hey, those shorts are too short. You know, you're around your house, around the family, fine. But you can't go in public like that, okay?

And you know, well, I don't understand, you know. Well, it doesn't matter if you understand or not. Picture's going down, you know. And you don't wait for things to build up to that point. So I guess I want to tell people you don't have to be that scared. It can be scary, but you don't have to be that scared.

I think it's just like other things in life. You're monitoring, you know, I guess you hear horror stories. We didn't know our kid was on drugs for the last two years. And I'm like, well. (laughs) Everybody else is seeing that he's out of it. He's missing school. He can't concentrate.

I mean, did you even take him to the doctor if you didn't think it was drugs? You know, and then it comes out, of course, well, no one was home. He was a latchkey kid. Okay, well, then that's the underlying problem is that there's no one supervising someone until they get to that level.

So it's not, in other words, it's scary to think of the end result of someone who's left to their own devices, but that's the whole point while you're the parent. So have courage. You can make a difference. - And I would buttress what you're saying with a simple observation that I think in many cases it can be more damaging and more harmful to have a zero tolerance policy because what happens is your child may not develop the appropriate skills of learning how to handle something.

You know, if you say, no, you're not gonna have any social media, and then all of a sudden your child turns 18, and then they've gotta go out as an 18-year-old and figure out, starting from zero, how to handle it, they can make a lot of mistakes. This is actually one of the things that really bothers me about American drinking culture that in my observation, like in the United States, we don't have a healthy way of teaching children about alcohol, and it's especially hard for those of us who try to be very thoughtful of the laws, but because children are artificially excluded from the consumption of alcohol, I'm convinced that in some way it leads to excessive consumption of alcohol once they reach a point where they can do it freely, whether they're underage and just out of the house or of age, and it leads to excessive levels of alcohol abuse.

And so I think that in a lot of things, I wanna be the one to teach my children about alcohol. I wanna be the one to teach my children about social media. Everything that's touchy and difficult, I wanna be the one to teach them about, and I wanna do it in an appropriate way where when they fall, they fall early enough and they fall soft enough while they're part of my house that I can lift them up and I can teach them, okay, that's what it feels like when you fall.

That's not good, let's avoid that in the future. And so I'm not an advocate of a no social media, no anything policy. I think that would be harmful. But I do think that obviously it's a subject that needs to be considered really carefully. So you said you're a 14-year-old now.

And by the way, we didn't clarify, you have, is it eight children or nine children? - Nine. - Nine, okay. So that's what's so beneficial about, I've learned over the years, when I had one child, I was the king of giving out parenting advice. I was like, I got this all figured out.

And since then, having had three more, I have learned that I don't know much of anything. And so I've come to the point where it's very hard for me to listen to parents of one or two children about anything because they just don't have enough diversity in their families to understand that children are different.

So I appreciate the fact that you've got the perspective of nine children to share that perspective. So with your 14-year-old, you said, Dodd, now you're 14-year-old to have an Instagram account, but your younger one's not yet? - Well, and I should add, in this particular situation, it's a private account.

- Okay. - So it's an Instagram private account, and he's very social, he's very intelligent. So I'm not worried about the naive part where predators find him. But at the same time, in this particular situation, he has a public blog that's related to writing about his talent. And that one's totally public.

And no creeps are coming there, 'cause really no one wants to know about podcast editing unless they really want to know about podcast editing. So that's a whole other strategy, by the way, in terms of talent, we can discuss that. But if you get involved deeply into a skill set of any kind, whether it be hot rods, or whether it be math, you're going to start gravitating automatically socially to people in those same circles, which is gonna give you those social boundaries automatically.

The danger is when people are just sort of randomly roaming. I like to give the analogy, when your wife goes shopping, even if it's in a big city, we all know there are some dangerous parts of the town, and then there are some completely acceptable parts of the town.

And if she's gonna go shopping in this particular area, she can get her latte, she can do this, she can do that, she's gonna be safe going to her car. But if she would go to another part of town, you'd be afraid of her walking on her own, and people avoid that.

So I liken it to, it's like with teenagers, like if you say, "Hey, just go into the city, "but just randomly stop anywhere," you'd be afraid, and you wouldn't tell your teenage daughter. It's like, you always ask that question, "Where are you going?" A grown adult knows that instinctively, a teenager doesn't.

You know, "Oh, somebody's calling me over there. "Oh, they think I'm pretty." And you're like, "Oh my goodness, "tell me where you're going. "I'm going here, there, in the city." It's like, "I'm fine, I'm relaxed." When they go there, the social environment is gonna provide that protection. People are there usually for a purpose.

So that's the analogy, a little bit I like to think of. If your child is really into math, they're gonna join math forums, they're gonna join math clubs. All that is going to help give those social boundaries. It's when kids are just sort of bouncing randomly over the internet, going from one thing to the next, that's when they expose themselves to danger.

So that's the way I like, and we do that instinctively in real life. There are parts of our nearby city that I'd be very afraid for my wife to walk around just casually for just strolling. But when she goes, I never worry about her going to town 'cause she's either going shopping, she's seeing a friend, you're going to a park to meet other moms, and so already the other moms have determined that the park is safe.

You know, that's what I mean by the social boundaries are done for you automatically. But with our 14-year-old, it came because he went to a special choir camp. He wants to develop his voice. He likes voice acting, and this came up. He had enough money saved, it was expensive, and we wanted to develop his voice a little bit more.

He went to a choir, he made some fantastic friends, friends about his age, they were very motivated. Parents were very, very motivated, and then after the camp, everybody wanted to stay in touch, and he sold me on it. It's like, I like to have my Instagram account because all the guys at the choir camp were there, and we wanted to stay in touch, and I'm like, no, it's about time for him to start, but I didn't, I was kind of like, I was like, oh, okay, but is this really, you know, gonna get you, and he says, well, I can make it private, sold.

(laughs) So, you know, that might change at some point. He's not really doing his talent on Instagram. He's got a blog for that. I'd like to see him do that eventually on Instagram, and at that point, I might make it public because then the social field is narrowed to people who are interested in this specific topic or subject, and I lost track of what I was trying to say here, but I guess-- - You were saying that 14 feels like about the right age, that, okay, this is a reasonable age.

- Yeah, to start experimenting, exactly, but in that case, he's even on a private status, which means people can't randomly find him unless he's invited them specifically. - I like what you said about going to a specific part of town, and what that makes me think of is that it's a good way of staying busy, right?

Idle hands are the devil's playground, and recently in our family's extended family, there was a really tragic story of a young teen who went down some very dark and very, very difficult paths that have inalterably affected her life with physical illness at this point in time due to some of her poor choices, and when I talked and kind of gathered information on how did this happen, a lot of it just happened, I think, with idleness online, and you follow this down, and then just idleness, and so it just reaffirmed in me as I was talking about it with my wife, I said, I want my children to be busy, busy, busy, never, you know, work, work, work, because that work gives all those positive psychological benefits, and it serves as a good safeguard, and so if I'm going to the internet, I know this is where I'm going, and I'm busy with all of these forums that are related to my passion, my talent, and then we'll expand out at some point down the road, but I think that's a really valuable point that you made, where it's not just, and I think it's also a really valuable point of bringing out the talent, you know, in my mind, back to the academics that we talked about, in my mind, I don't see why there has to be a conflict.

If a student has 168 hours in a week, that's a lot of time. You take out a good proper sleep schedule, it still really is a lot of time to go really deep and develop a talent and a passion and something that's useful to the world while simultaneously being a rockstar academic as well.

I see no reason why they have to suffer. The other things can give way, in my opinion. To kind of start to wrap up here, Jonathan, I want to ask you about your family business. How you and your wife run a family business, which I'm blanking on the name of, even though my wife loves your stuff.

- Oh, it's Madeon. It's okay, yeah, yeah. - Madeon. Madeon Lotion, okay. - Also known as Hard Lotion. - She loves your stuff. She uses all your skincare stuff. It's a line of natural, very super, uber crunchy, natural beeswax stuff with good skincare products. And your wife is very good at running that.

How have you involved your children in the family business as part of the talent? Has that been a factor or not really a factor? - Yes, actually it's been a big factor. One of the part of my philosophy is that families have a lot of assets on their hand.

I don't mean just physical assets like a car or a chainsaw. But you also have social assets, business assets, a way of thinking, a way of life that sometimes can be pretty advanced. So in our case, because we are a home business and trying to keep the cost down, and since we switched late in life doing this, so we didn't do this for too many years before switching to this, so we had a lot of things to learn.

We needed our kids. And a simple example is a lot of the products need stickers put on them. It's a simple job. You need to have clean hands. You need to get it centered, and you need to move quickly. And when our orders come in, a lot of times they will come in in bursts.

We'll have seasons of sales and seasons where it's slow. So typically in the fall, which will be coming up here, the sales will come in fast and furious. And so we may, at the end of the day, maybe at six, seven, eight o'clock, we'll say, "Okay, kids, we need to put some stickers "on all these boxes.

"We'll throw in a few bucks, "whatever it is we agree." Usually they want snacks instead of money. And we'll play a book on audio that they all like to listen to. And they just love that. And so as we have done that kind of stuff, as they've gotten older, sometimes they'll get a little more complex.

One of them has gotten into shipping. They've really, there's all sorts of issues with shipping packages. There's a, you get software, and it weighs it for you automatically. There's all these little details that need to be worked out. And we've had quite a few of our teenagers work that process, and they've been very efficient.

And in the process of doing that, they understand cost and the details of shipping and the problems of things not being tracked or customers being upset because the wrong order was put in the package, the importance of cleanliness, of speed, why, for example, we're waiting to buy this particular tent or toy that we've all wanted, but I'll typically say something like, well, not yet.

We've got to wait until the sales campaign is over. And then from this, we'll have enough money then to get that. So they've been conditioned, gradually over time, to associate work with reward and not to have rewards unless there is work, as in a general sense of the word.

And that has really been effective. I see that as the kids leave. I see that more as when they leave the household, all these little things that they do on their own just blows me away. I didn't do that at that age. They're very aware of how to save money, how not to get into debt, how to negotiate.

They're just super savvy. I didn't quite see that when they were under my household simply because we control everything. But once they left, they just completely took those habits with them. So I would say that that has been a huge benefit to them. It's just the practical details of running a small business that they've taken with them.

- Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think that, back to that sense of meaning and purpose, to me, one of the most valuable reasons to have some kind of small family business, even if it's not the primary source of family revenue, is so that children have a chance to understand how money is made, how money is managed, how to, just all those little lessons.

And to me, that's definitely a really crucial part of what I want to be present in my children's education. And I like how the talent gives them even their own thing that they can do and generate real money from a very early age. I think that we're living in a time where for parents with wisdom, with foresight, with perspective, there are more opportunities available for children now than there have ever been to produce things that are genuinely useful to the world.

If I think about the scope of human history, there was a time in which children's labor was helpful to the family farm. But then we moved out of the farm into an industrial age. And so society took that idea that children would work on the farm and they put it into factory work.

But factory work wasn't a great environment for children. Lots of dangers, et cetera. And so you had the imposition of massive child labor laws, et cetera. Well, what those laws had the result of doing was taking children out of the workforce and putting them into the school environment. I'm not sure that was much healthier for them, but at least they probably lost fewer arms and legs, generally speaking.

So then what happened? Well, then work for children became stupid work. You couldn't really well take your child into the office with you. And so your child did something that was relatively modest. And I shouldn't have used the word stupid. That was wrong. 'Cause it's not stupid to learn how to provide good customer service working at an ice cream shop.

It's not stupid to learn how to be an effective lifeguard. I wish I hadn't said that word. But it just largely became very limiting, especially very intellectually limiting. And we created these massive hurdles for somebody to access the labor force. And if they can access the labor force, they need a college degree from this institution.

And they need this number of years of experience. And so the marketplace of ideas, sorry, the marketplace of work became an adult only zone where maybe there was one day a year when you could take your child to school, but that was it. But what's happening, especially now that we're all sitting in our houses, working in our houses, all of us, that now I think that there's something more coming back to that.

And it's exciting. I think one of the good things that I'm hoping comes out of this environment is fewer latchkey kids and more of an ability for children to be involved in the work of their parents, for them to see what their parents do, for them to listen when dad's on a conference call, for them to say, "Mom, I can help you "with that thing that you're working on.

"I can do that." And to start to develop useful skills again that can be useful. And then as work is more dispersed, it opens up the opportunity for young people to access the labor market. Your daughter can sell her art projects on Etsy just as well at the age of 17 as at the age of 37, in some cases better at 17, because there's a market that a 37-year-old might not be tuned into.

Your son, when he was selling knives on Instagram, he can access a global marketplace just the same as anybody else. And so one of the things I'm happy about is that there's this crumbling of these walls that have been erected so that now children can see the fruit of their labor and actually be able to access it.

And I think this is really a good thing for our children because, like with my children, when I encourage business things, especially since they're not online yet, it's very limited in terms of what they can do because you're very limited to the markets that you can access. I've encouraged my son and helped him with a little bread business.

Well, he can do that, but he's not gonna be a baker necessarily, I don't think, at this point in time. So you've got a little bit of local access. But after a time, maybe your neighbors don't really care to buy your bread anymore. But when you can cross over and move to the digital platform even if you're selling physical products in the digital world, it opens up the world to that individual entrepreneur, which means that now your 15-year-old, your 17-year-old, your 20-year-old has the ability to access the world's marketplace, which is really exciting with regard to their ability to actually generate good money for themselves.

And then that means that when they're 18 and they finish up and perhaps move out of your house, at that point in time, they're not going into the world as an unskilled laborer making $7.50 an hour, dipping ice cream at the local ice cream shop. They're going into the world as a skilled craftsman, as a skilled professional, and they're able to generate massive levels of income or at least significant levels of income with the potential to lead to massive levels of income quickly.

And now when you take even that head start, and I've run the calculations on this, and you say, let's say that my 18-year-old can save $15,000 a year because they're earning a good amount of money. Maybe they could save $20,000 a year. That 18-year-old by the age of 30 can knock the socks off the guy who's sitting in college now for four years, earning nothing, extending adolescence unnecessarily just to come out and get that entry-level job.

So it's exciting that we can use these platforms to help our children access a global marketplace and build real, genuine businesses at a young age. So, Jonathan, I've covered most of what I wanted to cover. As you think about giving advice to me, to a young father, to my listeners, who, again, many of whom are homeschooling their children for the first time, take a few minutes and just walk over an overview of your philosophy and what you would say a parent needs to consider if they really wanna help their child to develop their talents, to pursue their passions, so that they can bring something useful to the world.

Walk us through just your general overview of advice that you would give to me, a young parent, as we go. - Yeah, I would say, from until about the age of 12, I think you are best concentrating on the old traditional basics, and which is a lot more nurture-oriented.

A lot of the stuff that you're learning in your school program is gonna be very basic. You're gonna learn your alphabet, obviously you're gonna learn how to read basic books, your basic math, and so forth. And about the age of 12, give or take, depending on the homegrown maturity, the parents' approval and disapproval is really what's going to motivate them to go forward and make all the difference in the world.

What the rest of the world thinks about really does not affect them. And I think that's, in our household, that's typically where mom has a bigger role. It's gonna be a lot more of the hugging and encouragement and the typical things that we think about where we have to be pretty gentle with them.

But starting around age 12, you know, between 12 and 14, all of a sudden you see this awakening. Some people see this awakening, it almost seems like a rebellion. It could be, it could turn into a rebellion, where they start becoming headstrong. They don't want just a hug. They don't wanna just say, "Because mom said," or, "Because you like it." They wanna know, "Do other people "care about what I am doing?" And they'll start thinking big thoughts.

You know, "Do I care about what I'm doing?" Big thoughts. You know, "One day I wanna become this." And they mean that seriously. Excuse me. And that's a sign there that they have a need for something bigger than themselves. And you need to tap into that. So what I would do, especially 'cause they're still young, even though they have big thoughts, they still need their family's encouragement.

It's hard to break into the world without being crushed. And what I would recommend is you look for something in your environment, your family environment. Maybe you live in an unusual part of the world that has, you know, you have access to something unusual that no one else, very few people do.

Or maybe your grandpa lives next door and he's got this amazing workshop. Or maybe your dad, like Joshua Sheets, he's got a podcast studio. Maybe you could start by using some of those tools and explore an interest that you have. And then as a family, as parents, you start giving them a chance to showcase that interest, right?

So just to use an analogy, if I were you, Joshua, and you had a child who's starting to become 12, 13, maybe you have a precocious daughter who likes to chat a lot. She likes to chat people up. You say, "Hey, have you thought of interviewing "Grandma so-and-so or Uncle so-and-so "who was, you know, in World War II, "he's getting really old.

"Maybe you could interview him and ask him how it was." And she's like, "Oh yeah, I'd love to do that." So in one shot, she's connecting with a relative. She gets to use your tool. She doesn't really have a long-term plan. She does it, and then you listen to it, and you know, it's a little disjointed here and there, but there's some interesting moments in there, some tenderness, and you could take that, for example, and say, "Hey, let's just edit this a little bit.

"Let me show you how to edit it here. "There's this part, the big coughing spell here "with Grandpa, let's edit that out a little bit. "I'll show you how to do it," you know, simple stuff. "And then let's load that up to Dropbox "and send it to all our relatives." And that would be fairly easy to do.

It goes out, and sure enough, we did something like that for friends of ours, and this friend came back, and he says, "Oh, I had ants that were crying of joy "because they had heard this thing." I was a little taken aback that they were moved by that, but the point was, this was something important to their family, and it was easy to do, and all of us have something like that in our lives that seems so, you do it every day.

And as you do podcasting every day, you can almost think, "Ah, it's no big deal." It is a big deal, but if you could tie it into your child's, a little bit of your child's strength, like she's a chatter, let's say, then have her chat with all these great relatives.

Ask them about their stories, put it on a little website. All the relatives will go bonkers over it, and she'll get massive feedback. You know, maybe everybody, and then she finds out, oh, everybody wants to hear about war stories. So, you know, at first it was about swimming in Wisconsin, and she gets okay feedback, but the war story, all the relatives light up, ask them what happened about this.

So she says, "Wow, people like war stories." So then she starts graduating until she finds out neighbors have war stories. So I'm just fantasizing here a bit, but the point is, you want to find something, 'cause you're young, right? They're young, you want them protected. You don't want them just randomly going on the street, interviewing homeless people who are former veterans.

You don't want to do that. You want to find something in your environment, trusted friends, circle of friends, tools, and that, you start building that little fire up, and that little inner motivation's gonna come up. And in the process of acting that out, you're gonna find, your daughter, for example, would find out where her weaknesses are, and she can decide, you know what, I want to strengthen, I want to get rid of those weaknesses.

Or she could say, you know what, I don't want to work on those weaknesses, I want to work on these strengths. And so you can go in different directions, and you as a parent can kind of guide them, kind of open up the doors. You know what, I have a really good friend at work.

Yeah, you know, he's a safe guy, I know he'd be gentle with kids. If I talked to him, he'd probably let you interview him. So you can start opening doors for your child to step out just a little bit further. And then you just build and build on that, and maybe you as a parent, you start realizing, okay, she's having a great time, but you know what, I'd like her to develop her writing skills a little bit more.

So now you start saying, hey, maybe you should write a little blog summary of the interview, you know, and the first ones are a little awkward, some key points are missing, maybe you just start, maybe just do a key list first. And you get her to write about that.

So little by little, you start developing this stackable skillset, and you pivot a little bit, you find a little bit where her strengths are and interests are, she starts getting feedback. Pretty soon she starts having ideas of her own, and you're thinking, well, I don't know if that would work.

But you know, let's try it, let's give it a try. It's not too risky if it fails. And what you do is you start encouraging them to buy their own tools of this skillset that they have, so I'll do this with my kids a lot. They'll earn money from working in our home business.

And like my 14-year-old, he's been podcast editing for several years now, and he's done voice acting gigs on his own, he's very confident about how to answer people back and how to explain to them it's gonna cost more for extra words. But he loves spending all his money on microphones, and in fact, the one we were working on just before we started, I realized it's so sensitive, I'm like, oh my goodness, I normally don't use with this.

It picks up everything, it was great for him as a voice actor, he's starting, that's the tools he want. He spends tons of money on it. In fact, I have to calm him down, it's like, don't spend so much money on these tools, you know? It's the ones you have.

But that's what I think you're gonna see this sort of fire build up in your kid, and I love, this is my personal satisfaction, I love when a kid comes to me, or teenagers maybe, they're starting to get older, and they have some crazy idea about where they want to take their talent or tool they want to buy, and I'm like, I don't know if that's gonna work, honestly.

That's a lot of money, or I don't know, this might fail, what you're gonna try to do, and you might be socially embarrassed. I'll say something to that effect, and he's like, no, no, I think it can be done, you know? And it's like, okay, you know, I think, give it a try.

I really, honestly, I honestly don't know, I don't have a crystal ball, go out and try it. And they'll go and try it, and sometimes it won't work, and they'll learn something from there, or it'll work, and then next time around, they know how to do it better. So I would say it's a discovery process.

You embrace who you are as a family, embrace your family culture as a platform for your child to start finding their own unique identity. So you're not cloning them, but you're giving them a leverage, a chance, your family is a chance for them to come on stage and start doing their thing.

And if you try going, if you try to bypass that, a lot of times they'll just freeze up. They won't, they're too scared. They can't put themselves on a platform out there, figuratively speaking, without being shut down too quickly, because honestly, they're not that good, and they will get shut down, so people get scared.

They might eventually get good enough and strong enough, but by then they're 17, 18, and they've let four good years go by, too much time has gone by. So you as a parent, you use your family, you use your assets, and then eventually, they're gonna start breaking off into their own little orbit, they're gonna start doing little paid jobs for friends, or maybe on the internet, they're gonna start going bigger, and then at some point, they say, wow, they start having a real big vision for themselves, and then that's where the conversation starts, you know, maybe I should take these extra courses.

Like my daughter said, I wanna pay for this paid subscription of this top artist that I want, and that made a huge difference for her. But she wasn't ready in the beginning, but she got all this feedback from relatives, wow, this is good, you've got something here. And then at some point, she got so frustrated, but my, the children I draw, they always look like old adults, old men, and so there was this one artist, the lesson was how to make your babies look like babies and not like old people, right?

And so there's a whole thing, but you had to buy his paid course, she had enough money saved up. She got it, once she got into that, all of a sudden, a whole new world opened up, here's somebody super professional, super kind, could explain themselves, they explain how it worked, and as they were drawing and teaching, they would also explain how it worked to sell your art, and things like that, you got socialized into it.

So you have this momentum that just takes you forward. But in the beginning, you start with your family, start looking around what you got, start looking at relatives who can help you, or who have an asset, or a dad who has a microphone like Joshua Sheets, and say, is there something I can use here, right?

And then you start discovering that, and you morph, and you morph, and you morph, you have to make money off of it, if at all possible, and then you have them use their money to build more of their talent. And then you have the conversation as they get closer to 18, you know what, if going to college you think is really going to make you go forward, and that's the direction you want to go, then go for it.

But if you think going in a different direction, now they have an idea of what they want to do, and become, and that helps guide and makes the decisions for them, and gets you completely out of the anxiety zone. So that's my speech. - I'm excited, I'm looking forward to, you know, especially now with an almost seven year old, it's so fun.

I never had a vision for what to do with babies, and so now that my children are reaching an age, though, I'm just so filled with, where they're more than babies, we can talk about adult level things, I'm just so filled with enthusiasm and passion about all the neat things we can do together, it's so exciting.

And I love these ideas even that you're saying. I'm looking forward to the day when I can help guide one of my children down some of these paths, and help them get some failures under their belt, help them get some wins under their belt, and I'm excited. Okay, so Jonathan, you and your family, you have, or you're starting a new program, parenttheirpassion.com, right, and I know you're just starting that as a list, so I've got it here on the screen, but you want people to, if anybody's interested in that, that's the best place to do it, to check out more, right?

- Yeah, there's a, if you go there right now, it's, you can sign up, just put your email in there, and I'll send you tips. You can also email me directly if you like, jonathan@parenttheirpassion.com. There's two Ts in there between parent and their, so parenttheirpassion.com, so you can email me, ask me a question I love to answer back, tell me the ages of your children helps me figure out what it is you're asking, and I got tons and tons of tips, and some tips work really well for certain type of children, some for others, so I love getting questions.

- Awesome, and then you've also got your older site, 10K to Talent, that I know you're moving on from that particular brand, but there's a bunch of resources and information. - Yeah, I'm leaving it up. It's still available. It's available, you can go there, 10ktotalent.com. You can browse many, many blog posts that I've written over time, and it's all in there, and what I'm trying to do now is to make it a little more, when I talk about these methods, I try to pivot a little bit so that it's expressed more in what the parents want, so, you know, like we were talking about is, you know, the way a lot of times to find that inner motivation and happiness for children is to find a passion or a skill set, but of course, what the parents want is more than anything else for them to be happy, so I'm trying to match up the method to the result that you're gonna get by doing this with your child.

- Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today, Jonathan. I really appreciate your time. - It was my pleasure, thank you. - So in closing, what I would encourage you is definitely check out Jonathan's resources, but most importantly, I think, think carefully about your own child, and recognize that if you're a parent, it is your responsibility as a parent to help your child to develop the skills that they need to succeed in the modern age, and maybe, maybe there was a day and time at which you could take your children, drop 'em off at the local school, and come back and pick 'em up, and magically 12 years later, they would be prepared for life, maybe.

I'm skeptical, but maybe. If there ever was such a time, it ain't today, and so what that means is that if you're going to help your child to be more effective, you're gonna help your child to do what your child is going to need to do to be able to succeed in the modern world, then it's going to require more thought and more input, and if you reflect back on even what Jonathan said at the beginning of what do we want for our children, we want them to be happy, and want them to feel fulfilled, and to motivation, to be motivated, those are his two things, be happy and motivated.

I think that would be satisfying, but there's very little in the mainstream education system that's gonna result in happiness and motivation. Very rarely do we give our high school children a course on happiness, very rarely do we give them a course on motivation, and so these are the areas that we as parents are responsible to fill in.

So look at your children, engage with your children, and help your children to discover some things that they're interested in, discover, start to develop some skill in those areas, and you'll put them light years ahead of where many of their peers are. Thank you so much for listening to Radical Personal Finance.

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