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Sign up today at hackproofcourse.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host.

Today we continue our series on how to invest in children while they are young. And today we're going to be specifically focusing on childhood and adolescence. In the first two episodes of this series, I focused on things that are largely outside of many of our control at this point in time.

I talked in the first episode about the importance of being careful, who you procreate with. In the second episode, I talked about the importance of caring for a gestating mother's health, as well as supporting her and the child through childbirth. Now, in today's episode, we're going to talk about what do I do with the child?

How can I invest into the child? And I want to divide our thinking into investing into the body of a child, investing into the mind of a child, and investing into the spirit of a child. I think these are three useful distinctions that allow us to think clearly and holistically about how to invest into our children.

And we begin now with investing into a child's body. At its core, the health of your child is going to determine a huge amount of his long-term success in life on every level. In previous episodes, we talked about things like height, things like good looks, things like physical strength.

If you have a son who is tall, strong, and good-looking, he will go farther, faster, and with far less effort than your neighbor's son who is none of those things. Just like a significant amount of our success is driven by our ability to think well, i.e., our cognitive ability, our IQ, a significant portion of our success in life is simply driven by these external physical characteristics, many of which we don't control at all.

They're just simply genetically endowed to us. But what we can do is work with the genetic material that we have and teach our children to maximize their potential. And we are living in a day and age in which many, many children are out there who have significant potential, and yet their parents and the adults in their life are not helping them to maximize it.

So I believe that we can proactively approach this and think about how to help someone maximize it. How do you maximize the body of your children? Well, number one, we want to give the body the highest nutrition that we can possibly find, acquire, and afford. We want to give the body the best building blocks.

Human beings and their bodies are continually being regenerated, and they're continually being regenerated based upon the food that that person is eating. And the food that the person is eating can lead to a much healthier, more vigorous and vibrant and attractive body, or it can lead to a much sicker, weaker, and poorly functioning body.

This does not happen over the course of days and weeks. Yeah, you can eat a bad meal and you feel bad, but pretty well, a couple days later, that's out of your system. But over the course of months and years, you can make a huge difference in how your body functions.

And especially, of course, here we're talking about your children, how your children's bodies function. And so you want to give your children the very best nutrition that you have access to. This should be a continual study for you and for your children. Studying should include studying the generalized knowledge of what human beings need in general, and then studying on a personalized level, what makes this particular human body thrive and flourish.

I think we have a good understanding in our day and age about the nutrients and the macro nutrients and the micro nutrients that the human body needs to flourish and to thrive. And then within that, I think there's a high degree of variability among different bodies and different body types.

To me, when I look at the arguments and the debates around nutrition, I think this explains a lot of what we see out there. Some bodies just thrive on different sets of nutrients. Now, I'm not qualified to articulate a complete seminar and course on this. I quoted extensively from a book called Deep Nutrition in a previous episode.

I find the arguments and the data and the suggestions presented in that book to be strong and persuasive. Let me give you what that author, Dr. Katherine Shanahan, describes as the four pillars, the foundation of the human diet. And in her research, she describes that these four basic things are the wisdom of the ancients that we find encapsulated in virtually all of the world's historic cuisines.

The four pillars, the foundation of the human diet. One way you could reproduce a healthy diet would be to simply pick a single region's traditional cuisine and copy it precisely. The problem is we don't do that. When you get books on, say, the Mediterranean or Okinawan diets and use those recipes, rarely are you creating the same dishes as the people actually living in those regions.

Why not? Typically, the recipes are inaccurate. The authors reinterpret them, replacing difficult to obtain or unfamiliar ingredients with substitutes you can find at any Costco. Traditional fats, like lard, are replaced by government-recommended vegetable oils. Variety cuts, unfamiliar and often unavailable, are replaced with boneless, skinless, low-fat alternatives. Any meal that takes more than an hour to prepare is deleted from the list of possibilities.

And if the recipe originally required homemade components, like bone stock, fresh pasta, or fermented vegetables, the instructions are rewritten in the name of convenience and you wind up with instructions for making foods stripped of the very things that made them tasty, authentic, and healthy in the first place. You get American food with exotic spices.

I'm going to show you what all those cookbooks have been missing. Those components of traditional cuisine, removed from the typical diet or cookbook, comprise the very components that every successful traditional diet has in common. I call these components the four pillars of world cuisine. These fundamental foods provide healthy people all around the world the consistent stream of nutrition that, no matter the regional culinary peculiarities, adequately provides the nutritional input our bodies have been programmed to require.

Though each local interpretation appears unique, as far as your body's cells are concerned, healthy diets are all essentially the same, resting on the same four pillars. 1. Meat on the bone. 2. Fermented and sprouted foods. 3. Organs and other so-called nasty bits. 4. Fresh, unadulterated plant and animal products.

To our palates, the spectrum of regional cuisines is as diverse as the ecology of our planet. In Hawaii, before Captain Cook's arrival, the staple food was poi, a paste made of roasted and dried taro, a tuberous root vegetable, that could be stored for months, rehydrated on demand, and then, as a final step, fermented.

This staple was supplemented most often with fish, coconut, and banana. Interestingly, the ali'i, or royal class, ate less poi and more high-nutrition foods like fish and they were also taller. I suspect that, as with any society, the cause-and-effect relationship between height and access to the choicest foods went in both directions.

Better foods made some people relatively tall. Being taller offered access to better foods. Until around 1940, the Netsilik Eskimo traditionally ate seal, fish, lichen, and not much else. In the Mongolian desert today, nomadic bands of camel breeders eat mainly dairy products, some grains, lots of tea, root vegetables, and meat.

In the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, one of the last surviving hunter-gatherer groups, the Kumbay, dine on fat grubs of giant flies, lizards, birds, pounded sago palm hearts, and, for special occasions, fattened pig. In West Africa, farmers known as the Mofu grow millet, beans, and peanuts, forage for insects, and raise goats and chickens, just as they have for thousands of years.

While each of these seemingly diverse diets contains foods that may strike you as strange, the nutritional content they represent is as familiar to your body, and to your epigenome, as salt or water. As far as your body's cells are concerned, vegetable oil and massive doses of sugar are downright bizarre.

If you've been eating a standard, food-pyramid-compliant American diet, any authentic regional diet, no matter how exotic, along with the abandonment of vegetable oil and sugar, would bring your body, your cells, and your genes a welcome and long-awaited relief. But you don't have to move to get the benefits of these traditions.

Simply include foods from each of the four pillars in your diet. Start with eating something fresh once every day, and you'll work your way up to using foods from two or more categories daily. And she goes on and discusses these in detail, but I repeat the four pillars. One, meat on the bone.

Two, fermented and sprouted foods. Three, organs and other "nasty bits," the awful of the animal. Fresh, and then four, fresh, unadulterated plant and animal products. So I would encourage you to consider including those kinds of foods in your diet, and especially in your children's diets, because all of them work special effect on the body over the fullness of time.

And if they are lacking, we are amazing creatures that we can make do on substandard, really poor quality food for a significant period of time. But over the course of years and decades and generations, it will catch up to you. Remember, when you are feeding your children, you are feeding your grandchildren's genes.

And so you want to feed your children with the highest quality nutrition that you can. Let's talk about macronutrients. Everything that I have been able to find leads me to believe that I want to provide a diet that is very high in protein and very high in fat. I don't consciously restrict carbohydrate consumption for my children.

As I'll talk more about in a moment, I think that we want our children to listen to their bodies. And as long as they're not consuming garbage, they should be able to listen to their bodies. And while I don't think that most of us need carbohydrates, I don't think that they're necessarily evil or something that has to be avoided hardcore.

But what we definitely need is very large amounts of protein and very large amounts of fat. It's my understanding that the body is largely built on protein and the brain is largely built on fat. And so I try to emphasize both of these two macronutrients. When I describe our family schedule in a future episode in the series where I go through on a day's schedule how I consciously include as many of these things as possible, you'll see that I have worked hard to increase these two macronutrients because I discovered that they were not enough.

There weren't enough of them. I thought that it'll start with protein, right? I thought that I was including plenty of protein in my family's diet. After all, we eat eggs in some way, shape or form or for breakfast pretty much every day. Eggs are high protein. We eat significant amounts of meat.

And then I went through a period of time and I started very carefully tracking my macronutrients. And I realized that even though I had this impression that we were eating large amounts of protein, I was just flat out not consuming enough protein. And I found that really shocking and have worked hard to change it in my family.

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A lot of times they're just not eating enough protein and they need this massively increase their protein consumption. So for our children, measure the grams of protein that you're giving per day and make sure that their diet is very, very high in protein. Offer lots of options for protein.

Similarly, fat. The human brain is nourished by large amounts of fat. And if you want your brain to work well and you want your children's brains to work well, you need to feed those brains lots and lots of fat. It's my observation that unfortunately in the low fat revolution, I think we've made a bunch of people really stupid by depriving them of necessary amounts of fat.

And so I try really intentionally to put as much fat into our food and as much fat into my children's diets as possible for optimal brain health. I always choose good dairy fats. I include butter whenever possible, lots of whole milk, lots of cream. So as much dairy fat as possible, as much animal fat as I can get my hands on.

And then fat that is from naturally occurring fatty plants, avocado, olive oil, etc. And I avoid all the fake fats that people make up. So anytime I can get my hands on those fats, that's what I personally introduce into my children's diet. And I try to get as much of it in there as possible for good brain function.

So I think, while you're working your way through adding in all those other things, just make sure your children are eating a diet that's high in protein and that's high in fat. The next component of good nutrition for the proper functioning of their body is they need to have sufficient food.

They need to have plenty of food available to them. And if you want your children to grow big and strong, this will be the key component, is have lots and lots of food available to them. Now what do we do about the epidemic of fat kids that we have all around us?

Well, it seems to me that that epidemic is largely caused by them having access to too much stuff that has loads of calories in it, but that's not actually food. And I think that the best way to change this for our own households and any household that we can connect with is to make sure that they have unlimited access to high-quality food, but not unlimited access to calories.

So my biggest fear as a parent is having fat children. I know it sounds silly, but I was a fat kid, and I think that it's a – again, hyperbole, as I always claim this, but it's what's in my head constantly – I think it's a form of child abuse to allow your children to be fat.

And I think it's the parent's fault for doing it and that we have to change that. So if I have fat children, that's my fault as a parent, and I take that responsibility very seriously. We harm our children when we allow them to be obese. And so how do we change that?

Well, we start by making sure they have access to lots of food, but real food. And I don't think that most people, especially if their brains and their bodies are not wrecked by the garbage calories that are all around us, I don't think most people are going to really overeat.

And I don't think that your children can actually overeat if what they're being served is real food. Just imagine that you – I'm going to make up a diet. Let's imagine this. Imagine that every morning when your children wake up, you offer them a wonderful egg dish mixed with a steak, right?

So they've got eggs and steak for breakfast. Then at lunchtime, imagine that they eat a great fresh salad paired with a pork chop paired with some yogurt on the side. And then imagine at dinnertime, you offer them as much steak as they want, and then there's sauerkraut on the side with fresh vegetables from your garden, roasted slathered in olive oil and butter.

I don't think any human being is ever going to overeat on that kind of diet. Because if you just allow yourself to eat to satiety and then simply – and you know that the food is there and you pursue that over the course of weeks and months, I think we naturally regulate.

But our bodies are so screwed up with our appetite desires based upon all the garbage calories that we consume as a culture, and all the sugars and all the seed oils and all of the garbage that they put into the fake food, that we hardly know how to listen to our stomachs.

So I think – and then with children especially, if a child starts to become fat, most of the time there's going to be a growth spurt coming and then very quickly the child stretches out. So if there's lots of quality food available for our children and they have unlimited access to sufficient levels of food, that will help them.

When children are undernourished, they don't have enough calories, it stunts their growth and it stunts their intellectual ability. Their brains don't work and their bodies don't work. And so we have to avoid undernourishment. And what seems to me is that in many corners of our society, we simultaneously overfeed and undernourish.

Meaning people have too many calories and not enough nourishment. So we can change that by focusing on providing lots and lots of food that's available to the child, and then focus on eliminating all the garbage calories. The next point is to eliminate toxins. And I think that as part of a nutritional approach, we want to work hard to eliminate toxins for our children.

Now I wanted to hurry to this because I think that there's a lot of stuff that we call food, that we buy at the grocery store, that is flat out toxic. It is toxic to our children. And one of the things that I try to do, and to be clear, my wife, we're not perfect in any of this.

In fact, I try not to be an extremist kind of health nut. I try not to set hardcore rules because I think you don't need to. I don't think you can say, "Oh, my child will never consume a soda," or "We're never going to enjoy an Oreo." I think that if you've got 80% or 90% of your life that is run to high standards, then 10% or 20% of margin so that you don't wind up an extremist, to me, seems pretty good.

So if there's 10% or 20% junk, okay, fine, as long as we've got the 80% or 90% there. But back to the point, one of the things that I've tried to do in my household is to eliminate all bad choices. So I don't want to have anything in the house that my children would consume too much of.

I want to have only good stuff and then not restrict access to that good stuff. So eat as much as you want, but eliminate the junk around so that there's just no junk available. And then it becomes something that is not expected and it keeps our bodies functioning fairly well.

Now in terms of toxins, I think that we need to eliminate toxic food. And the toxic food has a huge impact in terms of children's mood, their hormones. Everything is messed up by toxic food. So don't go on a binge to rid your house of plastics while simultaneously having it stocked with food that comes in plastic.

Eliminate the food toxins from your household and then go on and eliminate other toxins as well. So as part of nutrition, I think we need to do our best to protect ourselves and our children from toxic input. Chemicals in the household are a huge concern. Something is happening in our bodies and in our society that our bodies are breaking down.

Testosterone production among men is in horrific shape. And something is interfering with our normal human functioning. And so we should work hard to eliminate any kind of toxins that are coming into our household and protect our children from those. Because while one generation may be able to handle those toxins, it's going to get passed on.

That weakness is passed on over time. Or we can build up strength. So with regard to the body, start with nutrition. Lots of protein and fat. Lots of high quality food. Remember the four pillars. Meat on the bone. Fermented and sprouted foods. Organs and other nasty bits. I hate that term, nasty bits.

Fresh, unadulterated plant and animal products. Make sure your children have sufficient food so that they can eat as much as they want, but not too many calories. Just good quality food. And then eliminate toxins from their food and environment. The next thing we can do for children is help them to sleep well.

Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and SAFE. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. Sleep is a cornerstone of good health. And if you want your children's bodies to work well and to reach their maximum genetic potential, and you want your children's minds to work well, and for them to reach their maximum academic potential, it behooves you to ensure that they get plenty of sleep.

Our modern lifestyles make this very difficult. We require our children to get up, go to school very early. In some cases, our teenagers who need huge amounts of sleep to function well are often required to be the earliest ones into school. And then we create a lifestyle in which the norm is that they stay up late with never-ending flickering blue lights in their faces that cause them to be very difficult for them to fall asleep.

You and I, as parents, we have done this to ourselves. I find that for me, a cornerstone habit of personal productivity is I have to discipline myself to make sure that I turn off screens and I simply go to sleep on time. If I do that, everything else in my life will function and flow well.

But if I don't do that, if I sit in my bed and stare at YouTube on my phone, that flickering light and the engagement with the YouTube screen will make it easier for me to stay up two or three hours later than I otherwise would, and it'll wreck everything on a series, on a kind of a cascade of problems that comes down the road.

So establishing good habits from the very beginning for your children with regard to sleep is really, really important. Good sleep is one of the first medical conditions to check in many things. I've read books where people, it's a diet to lose weight, just said sleep more. People start sleeping more and they lose weight.

Sleep solves all kinds of things, especially for children. Children, they grow when they sleep. Their bodies get rid of all the waste when they're sleeping. Everything in their mind cements all of their long-term memories and everything in their brain, all the magic and the mystery of sleep, it all works during sleep.

And children need huge amounts of sleep. Estimates, at least 10, in some cases as much as 12 hours a day for children pre-adolescence is necessary on an ongoing basis for some children. Of course, everyone's body needs a different amount. But once you start to get into the world of sleep deprivation, then students and children will continue in that for a long period of time and sometimes they never recover.

And they think, "Well, I just don't need that much sleep." But you don't know if they need that much sleep until you've established a good solid baseline. And for all of the functioning, especially when it comes to academics, school, etc., you want to maximize as much sleep as possible.

In order to know if a child is getting enough sleep, the way to make that happen is to make sure that the child is going to bed at a very early time and then waking up naturally without any interference. And this is a habit that can begin at a very early age.

It should begin. Babies, of course, naturally sleep quite a lot. But you want to make sure that from the earliest ages of your children that you establish the precedent that we go to sleep at a significant time, at an early time. Now, you'll have to figure out what works for your family.

But if you're people who like to get up and go in the morning or who, by circumstances, are forced to get up and go in the morning, your numbers need to be a lot earlier. If you want your child to wake up by 7 a.m., getting your child to bed at 7 p.m.

should be a high priority. There's a good chance that over time your child might not need 12 hours of sleep. He might need 11. Okay, fine. So we can adjust and say we'll get him to bed at 7.30 and then he'll get up at 6.30. That's fine. But if you're putting your teenager in bed at midnight and your teenager is sitting there goofing off on his phone, listening to music and chatting with his friends or whatever he's doing and then expecting to be at school at 7 a.m., you're headed for disaster and it's on all levels.

People are killed every single year from sleep deprivation. There's the funny--I think this is true. I've seen it but I didn't go fact check it before this podcast. But the thing about daylight savings time and the accidents that occur right after the daylight savings change happens, sleep deprivation causes all kinds of errors, dumb errors.

The data on this is irrefutable in terms of how disruptive and damaging sleep deprivation is. So here are some habits that I think are really important. Number one, from the earliest of ages, establish good, consistent bedtime routines for children and stick to them the significant majority of the time.

Those bedtime routines, the most important thing is that they get huge amounts of sleep before midnight. And set that up as a consistent thing in your household. When I was younger, I admired people whose lives weren't driven by their children's sleep schedules. I thought, "Well, how great is it that this person can be out till 11.30 at night hanging out with their kids?" There's some cultures, you know, Latin cultures, where this is just the normal and expected thing.

Listen, you do what you like. It's your family, your kids. But I care a lot about the health and well-being of my children and I want to maximize that. And becoming a bad sleeper contributes to a whole lifetime's worth of issues. So set a consistent bedtime for your children that is expected.

I think that bedtime should be a lot earlier than most people think. My children's bedtime right now is 7.30. Obviously, as my children age, it would be abnormal for an adolescent or a teenager to go to bed at 7.30. But I'm not sure it's a bad thing. Almost nothing good happens after sundown in teenagers' lives.

There's really nothing good that people should be involved with. There's really nothing good that happens late at night. And so just having a family culture of early to bed, early to rise, Ben Franklin was right. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. And so I didn't appreciate it as much when I was younger.

My parents were consistently in bed 10 o'clock. I now am consistently in bed before 10 o'clock. And I find that it's just a wonderful habit. Again, nothing good happens at night. There's nothing that you need to be involved with after dark, generally speaking, the vast majority of the time.

So as a general habit, being in bed when the sun goes down is a smart move. You figure out what that means in terms of your latitude. But doing it consistently is important. Make sure that your children wake up naturally. You should not need to wake up a child.

When I was younger, I had this idea that it was virtuous to set an alarm clock early in the morning and then force yourself to get out of bed. There may be a time and a place for that, but it is not virtuous. It's stupid. You should wake up naturally before you need to get up.

So if you want to wake up by 5 o'clock, figure out how many hours of sleep you need at this point in your life and go back and get it. And make sure that you get to bed on time. So if you need to wake up at 5 a.m.

and you figure out your body is a 9-hour sleep schedule where you consistently wake up after 9 hours with no intervention, then that means your bedtime is 9 p.m. 9 p.m., you'll wake up at 5 a.m. I'm telling you, I haven't set an alarm clock since 2014 with the exception of, of course, early morning flights and things like that.

And facing your day with a good, clear mind, you get far more done than you do sitting up with a brain not functioning and a body not functioning, et cetera. Sleep is the cornerstone of good health. So consistent bedtimes. Enforce strongly no computer screens, mobile phone screens, movie screens, et cetera, in the evening on a consistent basis if you want your children to sleep well.

As adults, you and I have -- all of us have all done this stupid thing of sitting there staring at our phones for hours late at night. And the phone is keeping you awake but you can't put it down, video after video, swipe after swipe, whatever it is. And then the rest of the day and the week is screwed up.

So don't allow your family to be any different. It's much better for your children if they skip their homework. It's much better for them if they don't do the stuff that they need to do -- they're supposed to do and that they get their sleep. That's going to pay off in the long run far more than anything else.

Also, with regard to children, I would encourage you, be a stickler about maintaining naps for a long period of time. It will make everything better. Sleep begets sleep. Good nappers are also good sleepers. And you want to make sure that your children sleep well. If you allow bad habits in, they can suffer a lifetime of insomnia, of all kinds of issues, and you don't want them to face that if it can all be avoided.

Now, I have had to change some of my opinions in the fullness of time. Here is what I have learned as a father of young children. When my children were very young, my theory was this. If children can nap and adults can nap, then why shouldn't children nap all of the time until they're adults?

I was consuming information and advice which was saying, "Hey, adults should go and should take a nap, right? They should go take a 15-minute nap or a one-hour nap or a power nap, etc." And I thought to myself, "Well, if children nap naturally and adults also can benefit from napping, then we should maintain that." So I said, "I'm going to be hardcore.

I'm going to maintain good sleep patterns in my house. The children are going to nap all the way through." And what I learned with my first couple of children was we did hit an age, and our household is basically around six, where if the child napped during the day, then often he would have a hard time falling asleep at night.

And so it wound up being kind of one or the other. And so I had a choice to make. Either I keep the older child, right, the six-year-old or the seven-year-old napping during the day, and I move bedtime back, or I skip that nap and I keep bedtime early and consistent.

And what I have chosen to do is just to keep bedtime early and consistent. But don't give up naps at three just because your child doesn't fall asleep a couple of days in a row. As a parent, if it is your will that your children will nap, then you can carry out that vision, and you can make sure that happens.

All you have to do is require your child not to sleep. I don't require my children to sleep. I require my children to lie in their bed still with their eyes closed, and lo and behold, when I can accomplish that, they continue to nap. Now, if and around age six, when that starts to change and they will go for weeks of just lying in bed with their eyes closed and still and not sleep or wind up having messed up bedtimes and whatnot, the nice thing about that transition point is that's a point at which a child has a long enough attention span to be required to either read quietly or to listen to audiobooks quietly.

And so you can still, as a parent, as a mother, as a father, you can still get your rest time during that time. So we do every day at one o'clock, we do rest and reading time. The older children read, the younger children rest. And again, as you'll hear when I go over the daily schedule, I think that's a big, big deal.

Everybody needs downtime, needs rest and reading time, and your children need sleep. If you just keep your children sleeping well, that's going to help them massively in terms of their lifetime of good health. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Continuing on in this theme of how to care and invest into your children's body. We've talked about nutrition. We've talked about sleep. Now let's pivot to movement. If you want to invest into the good health of your child, if you want to invest into the good academic and intellectual performance of your child, you need to invest into the movement of your child.

Let's talk for a moment about the skill of movement. I am convinced that if we can give to our children the skills of movement, we can make it massively more probable that for their lifetime, our children will continue to move. Again, in the same way that sleep begets sleep, movement, physical movement, exercise begets movement.

Children who are good at moving, who are skilled with movement, like to move, like to exercise because that movement feels good and makes them feel good. On the other hand, children who are unskilled with movement don't like to move because it doesn't feel good to them. But if they don't move, they don't ever build the skill of movement and it doesn't feel good to them.

Having been a fat kid, I have a unique personal insight into this. When you recognize that, "Hey, I'm not very skilled. I'm not very coordinated. I don't really feel good with it." If running hurts or you recognize that you trip over your feet all the time because they're too big and so-and-so can just run circles around you, etc.

If you do less of it, you never build the basic skills that you need to build. And so with our children, we need to help them to acquire good basic skills of movement. And if we can help them to acquire and to hone those skills to the highest level of their genetic potential, then we're setting the best chances of them continuing to use and enjoy those skills of movement throughout their lifetime.

To me, it's obvious that different children have a basic genetic disposition to be stronger or weaker at various skills. I have watched a lot of children. I've watched cousins of mine very closely. And you can see that one brother is just athletic and the other brother is not. I was in my family.

I was not the athletic one. I have a brother who is extremely athletic. And you can just see everything about it, the way he runs, the way he moves, hand-eye coordination, etc., just that the physical ability expresses itself in an obvious way. So we're limited by our genetics, our genetic predisposition.

But we should enhance that genetic predisposition to the highest degree possible. And we should help our children to build the skills of movement so that they feel good moving. And when they feel good moving, they will move more. And that movement is fundamental to their good health. Movement is fundamental to longevity.

Movement is fundamental to the years of your life being filled with pleasure. Movement is fundamental to your intellectual academic ability. Your brain thrives on exercise. Exercise brings oxygen to the brain. You get smarter when you exercise. That exercise should be appropriate exercise for your skill, for your inclinations, etc., but the brain thrives on exercise.

And so we owe it to our children to make movement something that is fun, that is rewarding, that is a fundamental integral part of their day on a day-to-day basis. So I would love to have a complete model to present to you of how to do this. I've been trying to get a friend of mine who's very involved in kind of formal exercise science to give me a complete model, to write a book, to create a course on all the basic skills because I'm convinced there are just some basic skills that encapsulate most athletic endeavors.

But here is my list up front. The first thing, and these are in no particular order, the first one, though, that I want to talk about is the importance and the skill of balance. Good balance is one of those fundamental athletic physical skills. And so we want to help our children to develop good balance.

Balance is, again, I don't need to extend this, it's fundamental, whether it's balance on a surfboard or whether it's balance as you're juking through a football field. You want to have good balance. And balance is something that can be developed and improved consistently through your lifetime. And so I'll tell you what I try to do is I try to provide opportunities for my children to improve their balance.

Specifically, I have in my house, I have one of those balance boards, the little, basically the little foam pipes, although mine's wood, I bought it, it's a commercially built one, and then a balance board on top of it. And I have that in the house and I encourage the children to stand on it.

They just play, they just think it's fun. But I have them just stand on the balance board. And then I use this as a tool for any time I am assigning an academic something that is not particularly engaging, then I assign the child to stand on the balance board while he's doing it.

And so if I'm doing, you know, Latin grammar or something like that, then I say, "Here, take this, listen to the lesson, hold the paper in your hands, and then stand on the balance board." So I use it as kind of bringing the two things together. But having the balance board has been a good way to just help the child develop balance.

Another application I have in my yard is slackline. And children haven't taken to that like I hoped, but in the fullness of time I think they will. But a slackline I think is a good option, right? Grab a couple of trees, set up a slackline, and just make it a common thing that we play at these balance games.

Anything else, right? Teaching anything that you can perceive that will help to achieve the skill of balance is valuable. Just nail up a 2x4 on some fence posts and they'll stand on it and walk across it. And so I encourage any kind of play that can lead to balance.

So think about what toys can you bring into your household, what things can you do that will help your child to develop balance. The second thing is coordination. Hand-eye coordination and basic skills of coordination. I don't know what the best skills are for this. Maybe it's throwing balls and catching balls.

Maybe it's--I don't know exactly what it is. This is where I'm weak in my own household and I need to keep on bringing in more things. But how do you build in that coordination, that hand-eye coordination, that coordination of feet, of hands, etc.? Just think about coordination because the ability that someone has to be coordinated in his physical movements is really important.

Again, I don't know how to do that. I'm trying to get my friend to write the course for me. But that's one thing. The next thing is strength. So basic physical strength. Strength is something that constantly needs to be built. And the amount of muscle mass and the amount of strength that a person has will make a big difference in his life continually.

A man who is strong will live longer. The evidence on that is pretty strong. Peter Atia has a new book coming out. He seems to be one of the loudest of promoters of longevity research and I've been learning from him. But he talks about just how important strength is as a marker of good health and longevity.

And so we want to build strength. But more importantly to success and to the success of your child, a child who is strong is going to have an easier time of it. A child who is strong is not going to be picked on. My entire life I have been large and strong.

I have been fat much of the time. But I've also been strong. And that strength, I have never been bullied. Quite simply because no one ever dared. And being strong makes a big, big difference. Being strong affects fundamentally your core psychology. In the times in my life in which I am physically strong and I feel good, I feel like I can go out and conquer the world.

And the times when I feel weak, I feel like I can't get up and do anything. And so being strong is a major life hack to motivation and to success. Being strong also helps your children to rise to the top of pecking order in society. All societies are stratified based upon various factors.

And strength is a consistent factor. You want your children to be physically strong. And so I try to put games in place and make it physically strong. Obviously, there's a point, there's a time and a place for just being in the gym all the time. That's great, right? So getting your adolescents in the gym consistently, obviously a smart move.

But with children, it's harder to know exactly how to do that. Do I put my children doing heavy barbell squats without my being there? Well, certainly not without your being there. You need some instruction. But there's a lot that you can do for strength. And so strength building exercise, if it's having a family calisthenics routine, I think that's really good.

We've been making progress in this, my working out with the children and just basically using bodyweight calisthenics. A big winner is some months back I was finally able to get a rope hung up in my yard. I've got a 30-foot climbing rope in my yard, and that has been a real winner.

That every single day I've got all of the older three children, they're the ones that are capable, up the rope. And it's wonderful to see them do that. And they don't know how important it is to be able to go up and down a 30-foot rope. It's just fun.

But they go out and they play on the rope, and they climb the rope and do it consistently. And that upper body strength, the ability to do pull-ups, et cetera, is super important. My next house improvement for my own family is I'm building basically a -- call it a jungle gym, but it's designed around calisthenics equipment.

But I'm building calisthenics equipment right by the door of the house, right next to the house, where the children can climb. We can do pull-ups. We can do all of the calisthenics exercises, the dips, et cetera. And having that available there, if you just do it consistently, it builds up over time.

And for the children, it's fun, right? Making it into competition, see how many pull-ups you can do, et cetera. But that basic strength is fundamental. And so what I look for is things that don't require special equipment, if it can be avoided. And, again, I'm not saying that that stuff is not important, right?

If I've got a 14-year-old son, then obviously being in the gym, lifting weights, that should be the core. But I'm thinking a lot of the stage that I'm at in life with children, which is I try to keep the physical movement as a basic component of play and keep the equipment available so they can do it all the time.

Because as children, they kind of flit in, do four or five minutes, and then move on to the next thing. So I don't want to have a structure where we got to go work out, we got to go work out, we got to go work out. Rather, I just want to have the stuff available constantly.

So I'm building a basic, again, jungle gym, a calisthenics gym right outside the door of the house so that it's available and they can use it consistently throughout the day. So strength, right? Next thing is speed and stamina. And here I'm just combining a couple of things, speed and stamina.

Speed, obviously, things like running, being faster, and then the ability to run long distances, walk long distances, etc. It's super, super important to build that good cardiovascular health underneath a child's body. And so finding ways to make it a game to see who can get faster. All of us can get faster.

All of us can build more stamina. So how I'm doing this is we take a family walk every morning and go out for about 45 minutes, and then I race the children up the hill. And so we do hill sprints and see who can go up more times and who can be faster.

And I can still beat them barely. Some of them are getting faster than me, and I want to encourage that, obviously. But just making a game out of it and making it to see who can get up the hill the most times, who can get up the hill the fastest.

And then if you are more skilled or you have better coaches and you can do drills and things like that, wonderful. But putting in place things where there's ways to see who can build speed and stamina. I don't have a complete repertoire of all of the games that are appropriate for children in this.

Again, if you can build it, my friend is lagging a little bit, but if you can build that, great. I think there is a world-class opportunity for somebody who is skilled with exercise science and skilled at approaching it analytically to create a course, a workbook, etc. To lay it out and say, "Here are the basic components that are common to all athletic pursuits.

Here are the basic skills." And then here is how you can bring those things into your life on a daily basis. So I've shared my ideas of what I've figured out myself. My climbing rope, the balance board, the slackline, etc. These are the games that are just now part of my children's lives that they just do every single day because I got them started and now it's play.

But I know that I'm missing things. And so if you tell me the list of equipment to buy, great. If you want to take that course, you write to me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'm happy to pay a couple hundred bucks to take your course and I'm happy to promote it if you've created it.

So there is a business idea for some of you guys. This concludes movement. So again, we've talked about nutrition, sleep, and movement. And the idea is we want to build a lifestyle for our children where they get the highest quality nutrition, the highest quality and the best sleep, and that movement is a fundamental integrated part of their daily routine.

Now we go on to sunshine. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

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We want our children to spend several hours per day in the sun on a continual basis. Harder when you live at the Arctic Circle, easier when you live at the equator, no question. We all have to deal with our individual things. But sunshine is so important in the basic functioning of your body.

Vitamin D production, clearly on a physiological level, is super, super important and is a proven way to enhance your health. Vitamin D supplementation, especially if you don't get enough naturally, is a really important and obvious thing that you can do to improve your health and your children's health. But I think it, I myself think it goes far beyond that.

I think that our children are meant to be outside playing in the sunshine on a continual basis. And so bringing that into your life and making sure that it's an integrated part of your life is, I believe, fundamental. It's core to the good health of our children. And so look at your day.

Now, here's where, as we'll talk about, I love having the flexibility of a daily schedule where the sunshine is a natural part of it. The way that I do it in the daily schedule is we do, well, again, I'll go through in detail, but I make sure that we finish up breakfast around 8 o'clock and we start school at 9 o'clock.

I make sure that my children are outside playing outside from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock. So there's an hour in the morning. A significant portion of their book work is done in the sunshine. So we have all kinds of sunny outdoors porches and things. And so they can take their books outside and sit in the sunshine and read.

We'll often do, we do a mid-morning protein drink where I read to them and they always sit in the sunshine. And then at lunchtime, we take a break from noon to 1 o'clock and we eat inside for a little bit of that time, but they get good 30, 45 minutes of sunshine then.

And then after nap time or after afternoon reading time, from 3 o'clock till about 6 o'clock when we eat dinner, I want to make sure they're outside in the sunshine. And so we want consistent lots and lots of sunshine in their lives so that they can maintain a good strong body and good health.

All of these things contribute to health, which contributes to looks. All of these things contribute to health, which contributes to energy and vitality. All of these things contribute to health, which contributes to success. Somebody who is healthy, physically filled with vitality, filled with energy. Somebody whose body works well and whose brain works well will have a never-ending array of opportunities to go out and improve his life, to go out and do more, make more, accomplish more, achieve more.

Somebody who doesn't have health is just running behind in every level of human endeavor. Obviously, we should just admire people who have achieved tremendous outcomes even with poor health, but that doesn't mean that we desire or wish that poor health on our children. We want to make sure that they maximize their abilities.

I think there is a broad array of options available to us as parents to invest into our children's bodies. Again, I've divided it into nutrition, sleep, movement, sunshine. But there are infinite variations of these that as a parent you need to look around and say, "What do I have access to?" If there is a gymnastics gym that's two blocks away, but there's a soccer field that's 10 miles away, regardless of how good soccer is or is not, obviously gymnastics is going to be the solution.

I think this is a good place for sports. I think this is a good place for organized sports. There are certain organized sports that I don't think are particularly useful. I think that in many ways individual sports are more important than organized sports and team sports. People make a big deal about the lessons of team sports, but I think individualized pursuits are probably superior to team sports in terms of long-term potential of a child's success.

I also think that when we are choosing sports and activities, etc., if at all possible, it's better to choose sports that can be enjoyed by a child for life. So, an example, American football, I think, is a very poor choice of a sport. Obviously, it's fun for some people, but I think it just doesn't do well.

Number one, because of the basic structure of the sport, it doesn't encourage strong, varied athleticism. There is a high tendency towards football players being far too fat, far too big, etc. Obviously, you'll have certain athletic positions in the sport, but there's just too much of a predisposition towards extreme eating, extreme things.

The physical damage that can occur, although it's pretty tempered in the younger age, I mean, just blowing out your ACL for a brown ball seems dumb. The head injuries and whatnot are significant over time, and the ability to enjoy that sport for life seems to me completely non-existent. Now, compare that to, say, something like swimming.

Swimming is a sport that has the benefits of being accessible either on an individualized basis or on a team basis. You have the camaraderie of the team environment, but you have the individual performance that relies exclusively on the individual, unlike football. In addition, swimming is something that has very low impact, very low injury potential compared to American football.

Swimming encourages all of the healthy things, right? You don't want to be a fat swimmer. You want to be a lean and strong swimmer, and swimming is one of those skills that can be enjoyed throughout a lifetime with a lifetime of application. You might be a competitive swimmer, but just simply being a skilled swimmer opens up triathlons when you're older.

If you can participate in those, it opens up. It's useful and helpful in terms of many water sports, just one of those things that can go with you throughout your lifetime and be foundational to a lifetime of enjoyment around the water. I think a lot of things have this kind of benefit, simple things like bicycling or mountain biking.

Mountain biking certainly has significantly raised risk potential. But I guess my point is that if you choose sport and athletic endeavors with a consideration of how can this athletic endeavor stay with me for a lifetime and how can I do it for a lifetime, I think it opens up far more opportunities to engage with it for decades and decades rather than just kind of some of the short-lived stuff that you do in school.

A few other closing thoughts. Make sure that your children have at least one area in which they excel for their own good self-confidence. It's important to help children have at least one area in which you know, "Hey, I'm really good at this. I've worked hard at this. I've accomplished something, and I have external validation that I'm really good at this." That doesn't have to be a physical pursuit.

But most of us have some physical pursuit that if we were coached into it, we have an area in which we can really succeed. And so if you're big and strong, there's a whole menu of choices in which you have a higher chance of success because you're big and strong.

If you're small and slender and wiry, then you have a whole different set of athletic endeavors in which you're likely to excel because of your physical characteristics. And a child who just has some physical prowess where he's good at doing something will give him significant levels of self-confidence and will cause him to be a more attractive person.

I observe this with my children. My children, again, my nine-year-old, seven-year-old, and five-year-old, my children are good at going up a rope now. And they have varying levels of skill. I've got one son who's very athletic. I've got a daughter who is pretty athletic. And I've got a son of those three who's not very athletic.

But still, the basic skill of being able to go up and down the ropes when their children – when their friends come and their friends can't get up the rope as fast as they can or as many times as they can, it's a shot of self-confidence. But it's something that they've worked for.

It's something that they've engaged in. So, it can just be simple and silly like going up and down a rope in your parent's yard, or it can be reaching a significant level of achievement in a physical endeavor. But you want to have a physical endeavor and help your children to cultivate a physical endeavor where they are skilled and where they've worked hard at it, where they enjoy it, and that becomes part of their identity.

And that psychological strength, that self-esteem causes them to be attractive. And that physical sculpting, that physical shaping causes them to be attractive. If you have a strong and attractive body because you're at a proper weight and you're physically strong in an appropriate way for your body shape and your athletic endeavor, it just causes you to be an attractive person.

You emanate that energy that attracts people to you. Men and women, they want to be with you. You have the positive, radiant energy, etc. And so, don't neglect the physical bodies of your children. Invest into them. I am avoiding talking about medical intervention because that is so specialized. I think all of these categories that I have discussed here thus far are universal.

But I do want to comment on medical intervention. If your child has a medical condition, obviously search high and low for a way to heal that medical condition. And if there is no healing available, then invest everything into helping your child to be the strongest version of himself that is possible.

And there's no downside. Although each child's growth rate will be different, each child's maximum potential will be different, it is your job as a parent to help your child maximize his or her potential. You must invest into maximizing the potential that the child has. And if you'll do that, you're fulfilling your role as a parent in, I think, the most beautiful way.

And your child may not appreciate it now, but in the fullness of time, he'll look back and he'll honor you. And society will honor you. And you'll be able to honor yourself. You'll honor yourself for your effort. So, if you face medical challenges, search for solutions. And don't ever stop searching for solutions.

And then seek to enhance and emphasize every outcome that you have access to. That concludes my comments on investing into your children's bodies at a young age. This stuff, for some of us, is low-hanging fruit. Just a few basic changes over the period of months can make a remarkable difference.

Invest in the very best nutrition that you can afford. Emphasize protein and fat. High protein, high fat diet for your children's development. Moderate to low carbohydrates. Emphasize high quality, sufficient food. Plenty of it, but not empty junk calories. Eliminate toxins, both dietary toxins and environmental toxins. Encourage sleep. And put in place the simple habits that make it normal in your family to get a full and restful amount of sleep.

Human beings should not generally need to wake up with artificial alarm clocks. Set up a schedule in which you and your children can manage your morning responsibilities, having awakened refreshed and awaking naturally, preferably with the sun, but waking naturally without the need for alarm clocks. That's how you know you're getting enough sleep, when you do that consistently.

Movement is a skill. It's a skill that can be nurtured and developed, even though all of us have different genetic abilities. So find games and apparatus and just things that help your children to build their balance and their coordination, their strength, their speed, and their stamina in all of the different domains.

And then work with, if at all possible, to help your children find a couple of sports or a couple of areas in which they really excel, where they derive enjoyment from them. And if possible, coach them into things that can be lifelong pursuits, rather than just something that you do in school.

Make sure your children get lots and lots of sunshine on a continual basis. And if you do that, you'll enhance their bodies for good health. A strong, active body sends tons of oxygen to the brain and makes you smarter, keeps you healthier, helps you live longer, and causes you to be more attractive in society.

Tall, strong, good-looking people have an easier time. They gain access to the highest echelons of society and have an easier time succeeding in the long run. And since there are many things that you can do to enhance those, spend the money, invest into your children to help them on that fast track, that easy path of success.

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