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Join today for zero enrollment and $24.99 a month. See Home Club for details. 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 Josh Rasheeds. I am your host. And today I'm going to share with you the penultimate episode of my series on how to invest in children at a very young age. And in this particular episode, I want to walk you through a day in my family and how I myself seek to apply the basic principles and tactics and techniques that I have discussed with you in this particular series.

And so that's the plan. And by the way, I intend to do my very best to go through this day in exacting detail. So expect this to be very detailed. I'm going to share with you what I do and why I do it and connect basically a day, a day in my life, with what I have talked about.

A couple of disclaimers as we begin. Number one, these are my best ideas on what I'm currently trying to do, but recognize that we all as parents, we need to respond to what's working and what's not working. And we need to change and adjust our strategy accordingly. Next, when I present this day to you, I am engaging in some level of idealization.

Anybody who says, "Hey, here's a normal day in my life," we always engage in some level of idealization. Idealization means that we probably collapse a couple of days and we say what we want to do, but none of us are able to ever do on an ongoing basis what we desire to do ideally.

So while I'm going to describe what is a true and authentic day with the things that I do, recognize that probably at best we would keep to this 60 to 80% of the time. And so don't think that somehow this happens every day or that Joshua's life is just so buttoned up that he can do all of this crazy stuff.

It's not true. I can't. And also recognize that by the time you hear this, nay, even as I record this, this has changed. Here's why. I am choosing a day to share with you from the time where, a unique period of time, which was a few months back, prior to the birth of our fifth child and during the time when I was working basically exclusively with my family.

I wasn't working in my business. I was working in my family. Any time that we're expecting a baby, I do my best to help my wife have a little break, have a few weeks off where she can relax, she can sleep extra, she can just be in fighting form.

And so I took a few weeks off prior to the birth of the baby and I basically ran the house, ran the homeschool, ran everything with our children while she relaxed. I did all the cooking, did all the cleaning and everything, and she had a little bit of a break.

And so I'm choosing one of those days when I was directing everything. But even though I'm going through an ideal day, guess what? We had a baby. And when babies come, your whole life goes into chaos. 50 to 90% of your great habits fly out the door and everything gets disrupted and it takes six months to get your family back on track.

Trust me, been there, done that. I've learned to account for it. So when babies come along, everything goes in chaos. So today, as I record this, it's not this ideal day. I'm still working to kind of get back to this. But there was a window, there was a window in which I was able to do what I'm describing to you.

Now I'm back at work, my wife is running it, she has her own way that she does things. And again, dealing with the upset of the baby and getting everyone on schedule and getting everything back to normal, it takes some time. So with those caveats, I hope that you'll enjoy some of the way that I integrate these things that I have gone over in this series with you.

One final comment, please don't try to do everything that I do. Again, I don't even do everything that I do on an ongoing basis. It's more fits and starts and spits and spurts here and there. Just grab one or two ideas that you like and try to incorporate those.

That's always the key if you want to change habits in your family. Just grab one or two things and work on that over time. So let's begin first thing in the morning. If we're going to begin at the beginning with first thing in the morning, we can't actually begin in the morning.

We have to begin the night before. And so a good morning starts with a good night before. And that starts with a consistent and relatively early bedtime for children. For context, my children are ages 9, 7, 5, 3 and a new baby. So with that as context, I don't have any teenagers who are going to stay up till late.

I put all the children to bed at 7.30. And I do that consistently. It's recognized. It's normal. And we always do it. And that helps. That consistency helps a lot where they fall asleep quickly and are able to get a full night's sleep. And they get a full night's sleep and always wake up naturally.

Now each of the children will wake up at a different time of the morning. They all have their own kind of peculiarities based upon whether they nap or don't nap or the age, etc. And it's quite interesting that if you have a consistent bedtime for children, then their bodies will work out on an ongoing basis how much sleep they need.

And so you can be confident that if this child is sleeping for an extra hour or two, the child needs it. And if you start bedtime early enough, then you can still have productive mornings, which are my favorite time of the day, even though your children may sleep a little longer.

And so it's very important to me that children are not awakened, if at all possible, with alarm clocks or on schedules, etc., but rather that they get a full, restful night's sleep. So in order to help facilitate that, I do my best to make sure they have a consistent bedtime.

Now obviously 7.30 is a little early. If we're out at friends' houses or something like that, then certainly on occasion it's 8.30 or 9 o'clock. But I try to avoid that primarily because children, it's just hard for them. If they're used to going to bed early and they're up past their bedtime, they get miserable.

Everything gets difficult. And so I try to keep to a consistent bedtime. When the children are sleeping, I try to keep the room completely darkened, curtains pulled as dark as possible, no night lights, no flashing lights, nothing, and I keep the room cool. Those are the things that work to help adults get significant amounts of sleep, and they are similar for children.

And so the children all wake up at different points of time. Remember that sleep is the time that your body grows and refreshes and cleanses itself. Sleep is the time that your brain cements memories. Sleep is the time that your cells cleanse themselves. So sleep is one of the fundamental habits of good health and longevity.

And we want to teach children good sleep habits at an early age. Benjamin Franklin was right. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. So I say early to bed, good long night's sleep so that you can get a full, restful night's sleep is a cornerstone of good health, good brain function, everything.

When the children wake up, they are allowed to have quiet time. They can do what they would like to do. I don't direct their morning time. And so each of them has different interests. Sometimes they'll read books. Sometimes they'll play with toys. They have access to audio books, so some of them can read audio books.

And the only rule that I have is I try to keep them quiet. I have a few that are more rambunctious than others, so it doesn't always work. But that's the intention. It's that you can do what you like that is quiet. Sometimes in the morning they'll go play outside.

We have a great yard, all kinds of things out in the yard that they can go play with. And so they have their choices. Generally, I'm the one who makes breakfast, and so I will prepare breakfast. And my focus with breakfast is to create the highest protein and the highest fat meal that I can.

And generally we have just a handful of meals that we cycle through. I'd like to introduce some more variety. Not everyone is always super excited about eating the same thing over and over again, but I try to stick to those nutritional principles. I believe that when designing a menu or when designing a diet for children, if we can get high protein and high fat and cut out any kind of junk food, no bunch of sugar, no empty carbs, no junk food, then with that we offer children food, and they will learn to naturally regulate their appetite and eat what they need.

And I've watched this with children, that sometimes they eat a lot and sometimes they eat less depending on what their body needs. And so what I try to do in terms of my theory and philosophy of food is keep the house full of good food so that I don't really have to say no to any particular choice.

I don't want a box of Oreos or something that there's going to be fights over. I want to make sure that all of the food in the house is going to be of acceptable quality, and then we eat meals regularly. And I don't entirely prohibit snacks or something, but we eat often enough on a regular basis that I don't think that that is necessary.

So for breakfast, the most important focus is, of course, eggs as a superfood that gives you high protein, and then I try to get as much fat in as possible. And so that fat involves olive oil cooking. If you're cooking scrambled eggs or omelets with olive oil, I try to get fat in with whole milk, et cetera.

And so this is my staple. Generally some eggs with vegetables or omelets in them and cheese on top, et cetera. But that's my focus is high fat and high protein in order to give the body the most important nutrients. The children enjoy bread, so a couple times a week I don't eliminate bread completely, but we'll have some toast along the side, bagels here and there, et cetera.

But I try to focus on protein and fat there. As I'm making breakfast, I will use the morning breakfast time as a chance for us to sneak in a little bit of something for the brain and the body. And so generally what I do is I call the children about 10 minutes before I'm actually ready, have everybody sit down at the table, and I use that time for something related to listening.

I'll serve a glass of milk. I have a great relationship with a local farmer, so I'm able to buy full fat raw milk direct from the farmer. The cows are all grass-fed, et cetera, so it's the best quality that I can find. And so that gives good dairy consumption, great fat consumption with the full fat raw milk.

And so I'll give them a glass of milk and encourage them to drink that. And then we'll use that time either in some listening time or some learning time. So last year we went through an audio Bible in a year, and so we listened to 10 to 15 minutes.

Those are daily recordings of the audio Bible every morning at breakfast. Right now this year we started learning ancient Greek, and so I'll bring the computer to the table and I'll put on a YouTube video that's ancient Greek. Right now I'm using Alpha with Angela, which is a YouTube channel, and also Luke Ranieri's Ancient Greek in Action series as a way of introducing ancient Greek.

And so I'll play a 10-minute episode or something while I'm finishing up the food, getting everything set. Recently we've been making a big focus on bringing our children up to standard with regard to chores. We've been really weak on them being useful and productive in cooking and in chores and setting the table and doing dishes, et cetera.

And so that's been a big focus of ours. For a time, because of having so many young children, we had a housekeeper who would come and who would work with us and do a huge amount of the work. And recently we've just said, "This is not going in the direction we want it to go.

We really need to improve the character of our children." And so I've also been, of course, engaging in character training at that time, and so focusing on teaching them to be useful, teaching them to cook, et cetera. We'll sit down to breakfast and we will eat. I generally eat fairly quickly.

They generally eat a little bit slower. So after I eat, then I will usually start reading. And basically if you've ever talked to a homeschool mom who has her morning basket, that's basically what I have and what I do. I have a variety of different books that I will read and a variety of different activities that I will do.

So we will often read some poems. I will read poems. I have books of poetry for children. I have books of poetry dedicated to character qualities. And then we do a poet study for a term during -- as part of our homeschool curriculum as well. So I'll read a couple of poems.

The children, I have some that they memorize. And so it's really fun. I say the poem. We say it together. And we just practice reciting poems. So that's one thing that we'll do in the morning. I will often read a -- we have a great catechism book that I use for religious instruction, and I'll go through the catechism questions and we work through that.

I also will read a lot of stories in the morning as well. And so I have several books on virtues and characters that have illustrative stories. William Bennett's book on virtues is really good. I'll grab a story or two from that. I have various other books on character qualities and virtues that talk about it.

So we'll take a moment and try to do some instruction in terms of character qualities and talk about those things so that throughout the day, if at all possible, we can catch each other expressing those virtues and doing them very well. I will also devote a little bit of time to foreign language reading at the breakfast table as well.

So right now, we'll do a little bit of Greek before breakfast, and then I'll usually read in German for 10, 15, 20 minutes at the end. And so the way that I do that, since I'm not particularly skilled in German, is I use my favorite language app called LingQ.

I bring the German stories into that. Any German story that I can get in a digital copy with no DRM locking it up, I bring into that. And then I use the sentence mode in LingQ to give me a sentence-by-sentence Google Translate translation. And then I stumble through with my pretty poor German pronunciation, but it allows me to read to the children.

And because they're into the stories, it's not a painful or difficult thing. So breakfast will probably take generally 30 minutes or so, 30 to 45 minutes, depending on how long those activities take. After breakfast, we quickly clear up, do the dishes, and then we try to get in some play in the morning.

And so exercise and play, I believe, sets the foundation for a great brain day. And so right after breakfast, we try to go for a family walk, go out in the sunshine and walk together. And it's kind of a quasi-exercise walk, quasi-nature walk, nature study walk, et cetera, and a lot of just playing outside.

So my wife and I walk together, gives us a chance to visit a little bit as we're able, get us stronger and get our hearts pumping, get some steps in for my step count goal. And it's just a good habit. And that play in the morning gets the children, gets their blood pumping, gets them ready for schoolwork.

Generally at this time, it's around 9 o'clock, is about when we start homeschool. And what I always do with homeschool is we always begin with math. And I was convinced years ago by Art Robinson that you should always begin your day with math. And that this training of starting your day with something hard and difficult is really powerful.

And so generally speaking, the most difficult thing is math. And so we begin with math. Recently, we've done a few different changes over the years. Normally, I have appreciated the Abeka math curriculum from the Abeka publishers. What I like about the Abeka math curriculum is it's a fairly effective spiral math approach.

And it is very full of drills and repetition, etc. But the amount or quantity of work that is necessary is a specific one page, front and back. One page, front and back is a lesson. And the amount, that volume has seemed like it's a pretty good fit for our children.

Colorful works, etc. It's not too many pages, etc. So I'm not saying that's the best math curriculum, but it has worked for us. And so we have continued to use it, generally speaking. I have not chosen to wait until the age of 10 to start doing math, like I discussed in the podcast.

But if I had a child who it didn't seem like math was working well, I would drop back until the child had reached that point of maturity. And it's not that I don't agree with what I said in the show, that caution against doing math too early of an age and the benefits of the alternative.

It's just that we had started on the normal tradition of doing math at a fairly early age. And so we've kind of just continued. But I don't want math to be something of tears and frustration. I do want it to be hard, because the reason we do math is to get smarter and to do hard things.

So in terms of my observation of various philosophies related to schooling and homeschooling and unschooling and all of the various flavors, I desire for there to be a lot of pleasure in education. But I want to make sure we have some good character-building exercises where we do hard things simply because they're hard, because we do hard things.

And I want there to be opportunities to do things with a good attitude that you may not necessarily want to do. And I feel like mathematics is ideal in application for those goals and for those outcomes. So we always begin with math. Now, one comment. Recently, as I record this and release it on April 20, 2023, a couple weeks ago, a listener called me on a Q&A show and asked me if I'd heard of Math Academy.

I looked it up live on the air, and I wound up at a website called mathacademy.us. And I read just a little bit about the curriculum, which basically indicates that students are doing very advanced math in high school. What I did not get to on air was the proper website that really the listener was asking me about, which is mathacademy.com.

I later went and looked at mathacademy.com and was very impressed by the idea of what they are trying to create. Immediately that weekend, after the Friday Q&A show, I signed up for a couple of accounts on mathacademy.com, one for one of my children and one for me, and I started using it.

And it is fantastic as a math curriculum. Let me explain why in case this is of help to you. It starts at so-called fourth grade math. And I think that based on what I said, I think it would be fine for a student to just wait and then start directly in fourth grade math.

The basic idea is that they have taken math curricula and broken everything apart into separate discrete lessons. And they are using various algorithms to choose how many problems and which problems to show to the student. So the way I described it to a friend that I was telling about it.

Imagine, so I'm a fan of, let's say, John Saxon's textbooks. He's dead now and they're different now. But when John Saxon sat down and wrote this great textbook that is used by many students, it's the textbook that I used when I was in school. He was creating a textbook for the classes.

And that was great. It's a great curriculum and going through it, you can learn math very effectively. The question is, which would be better, John Saxon's textbook or John Saxon himself? Now for a limited time at Delamo 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. What if you had John Saxon standing next to you and after every single problem, he reviewed your work and then he chose you the next problem set to give you based upon whether you needed more practice, less practice, you could move faster, you could move slower, etc.

That is what they're trying to build at MathAcademy.com. So I've signed up for it and I have been using that for my eldest and I really, really like it. I'm using it for myself as well. I really like it. Because it allows you to go through the curriculum and do the practice problems and the algorithm is systematically choosing what you need to practice and what you don't need to practice.

And I'm very impressed. They've also incorporated a lot of up-to-date learning methodologies and best practices into the curriculum. I'm very impressed. And so thank you to the listener who called me up and told me about it because that is quite useful. So we've used Abeka Math, I'm using Math Academy now and also I'm also using Life of Fred books, which I really like because it's an interesting way.

Now there's many great math curricula out there. If you're looking for a good overview of math curriculum, I would encourage you to check out probably Susan Wise Bower's book, Well-Trained Mind, and her discussions of math curricula are useful or just go and find whatever works for you. So we start with, I aim for about an hour of math first thing in the morning.

And to connect this back to the reason, math is good for making people smart. It makes you do hard things, makes your brain work, it builds day by day, lesson by lesson, you get better, faster, stronger. And so we begin with math. After about an hour or hour and a half, we take a morning break.

And what I will do during the morning break is I make a protein shake. And so again, I make a shake with fruit, frozen strawberries, blueberries, etc., pineapple, bananas, whatever we happen to have. Then I will add quite a lot of protein powder with a few other, sometimes spirulina or whatever other supplements I have.

And then a bunch of raw milk to make a protein shake that has lots of protein and a decent amount of fat from the full fat milk. And so I'll call the children for a break and we will sit on the front porch. And during that time, I read to them.

I try to develop habits around a specific time that we read in a certain language or a specific time that we read a certain book. So at the 1030 break, they drink protein shakes and they have a break. Meanwhile, I read to them in Spanish. So they think it's a break.

I think of it as Spanish class. They think it's fun. I think of it as school. And it works pretty well because they're excited about it. So we have a break. Then they run around for 10, 15 minutes, have a recess, play in the yard, come back to school.

And we proceed through school. After the morning math, then we get into a lot of reading. And so as a foundation for our homeschool, I primarily focus on using the book list and curriculum at Amblesight Online. There are many good book lists and curricula to use. I'm very impressed with Amblesight Online.

It's a remarkable free and -- I guess we can call it free and open source project put together by some very caring homeschool moms that have done a great job. And so I use that as our overall spine. And then I add to and take away, et cetera. But the idea of a Charlotte Mason approach is generally that in the curriculum, there's quite a lot of reading.

Most of the work that is done, especially in the early years, is never done with textbooks. It's always done with living books. So a living book is a very carefully written book by somebody who has a real passion for his or her subject, somebody who knows a lot about it and who can write in an inspired and enthusiastic and literary manner about the subject.

And so there's a variety of styles of books, of course, based upon the specific subject that is being covered. What I love about this approach, though, is that it's an extremely efficient way to learn because all of the various important components of learning are wrapped together. In a literary education, you are simultaneously receiving instruction in good writing as well as good reading, grammar, in addition to all of the subject-level instruction.

And you're doing it in a very memorable way. And so the bulk of our schooling approach is simply to have reading lists and read them. In the younger years, we do a lot of read aloud, and I make good use of the opportunities to read aloud as well as audiobooks.

I neglected to say that during math time for my older children, I try to practice what I preach in terms of word exposure by encouraging my younger children to listen to some audiobooks. I have some very active young boys that aren't super interested in sitting still and listening to audiobooks, so I encourage it, but I don't require it.

The key metric, of course, that we talked about in terms of developing the mind, the key metric that we want to look at is number of words for developing literacy, number of words that a child hears in his life. And so what my younger ones do really love is to read books.

They love it because it's a whole experience, meaning snuggle up with dad on the couch, etc. So I'll try to do that, but when I don't have the ability to read books, I'll often encourage them to listen to an audiobook. I also encourage audiobooks in foreign languages. Their comprehension of those audiobooks seems to be fairly low, but I don't require them to understand, I just require them to listen, and I try to break it into very approachable segments.

10 or 15 minutes doesn't seem unjust to me to have a child listen for 10 or 15 minutes, but I'll often let them play, of course, while they are listening. I believe that even if they don't have a high degree of understanding in a foreign language, simply hearing the sounds is useful.

There are debates about this in language acquisition circles. I don't take a position on those debates. I just figure it can't hurt. Your brain has to get used to the sounds of a language, so even if you don't understand it, still hearing it can be useful, and it builds a habit that can continue on for time.

So in the morning we will spend a lot of time doing reading, but I don't generally hear narrations in the morning. I save that for later, as we'll talk about in a bit. When possible, I want to incorporate what Charlotte Masoners call "the riches." That's the composer study, the picture study, all of the artistic stuff, drawing classes, etc.

I'm not as strong as this as I would like. My wife is more crafty than I am. I am not a crafty guy. I don't have the passion for it. I recognize it's important, but I'm often more of a "read the books, read the books" kind of thing. So I try to temper my instincts and try to bring it in when possible, but we have some room to grow in terms of bringing in more art study, more artistic expression, and more composer study.

So I'd like to see more of that in the future. This brings us generally to about noon, and noontime, of course, lunch. I don't have much to say at lunch. Other than that, I try to use lunch in basically the same way as I do breakfast. Generally, we don't consume much food for lunch because I've done the protein smoothie, but we'll have food, and the specifics aren't important, other than what I've said of maximizing wherever possible protein and fat, and then just simply allowing the children to follow their appetites and to help them to learn to self-regulate.

I think that's something that is important. When I was a child, I was encouraged to finish my plate, and I think that because I was encouraged to finish my plate, I didn't learn to listen to my stomach and my appetite, and I kind of just learned to eat automatically.

And it's something that I think has harmed me as an adult, that I'm not super in tune with my stomach. I can eat or not eat, but it's not like I listen to my appetite. And that's probably one reason among many for my lifelong obesity. And so I want to avoid that with children.

But I just try to provide high-quality food with no junk so that, hey, you can eat as much as you like, and then you're not required to eat, but if you're hungry, here's the food that we have. And that has seemed to work pretty well. And thankfully, we don't have any food allergies or anything that makes things super difficult.

You never know what works and why. I used to think, oh, we could have the perfect technique to expose our children to all the foods and they'll have no picky eaters. Well, you have enough children and you realize they're all different. And for all I know, this child's a picky eater and it's a genetic thing.

I have a lot more sympathy and a lot less -- how do you say it? When I had one or two children, I was sure I knew it all. And today I'm pretty slow to say what I know because they're just all so unique in and of themselves. Back to lunchtime, basically I'll repeat the same thing.

We have a fairly short lunch. I'll read. I try to read in a couple different languages, as I've said, but I also have a list of English books that we read to as well. And I want to make sure that the great pleasure of reading in your native language is still a core component of our life.

And so I will have the children. I'll read a chapter of a book. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes while they finish eating and then send everyone outside to play. And that play, sunshine play, out in the yard, et cetera, is really useful. Now what I have tried to do is I have tried to get some various pieces of equipment that would help in all the stuff that I said about the body of movement.

So, for example, I have a 30-foot rope hanging from a tree and I encourage the children to go up it. All of my older children can go up to the top of it and I encourage them to go up a couple times a day. And it's play for them, but that's a great way to build strength as far as I can see.

I have a trampoline and so I encourage them to jump on the trampoline. That can help with various things. I have a balance board. They climb trees, all the stuff, and I just encourage them to be outside and children naturally play. So I try to provide some equipment that handles those or contributes to the acquisition of those athletic skills but without it being anything that is forced or regimented.

I hang up a slackline and hope that they climb on it. And some things work, some things don't, but I figure in the fullness of time, access to the stuff, it all works out in the fullness of time. And that has seemed like a good option. After lunch, it is 1 o'clock.

I call the children in for 1 o'clock, put the younger ones in bed for naps. I, again, think that rest and naps are really important. And so what I have generally successfully been able to do is to extend after lunch naps at least to the age of 6. I don't have any children that have stopped before the age of 6.

And the nice thing about that is if you can maintain naps until the age of 6, then you're dealing with a child who can then entertain himself rather than needing to be entertained. If you stop naps when a child is 3, then you don't get a break as a parent.

Mama doesn't get a break and mama needs a break. And so by requiring continuance of naps until, again, what has been for us generally about age 6, when children seem to naturally go through a change and they just don't need the nap anymore and they have a hard time falling asleep at night time, then at least if you stop naps, then you can transition from naps to audio books.

And that's generally what we have done. So if a child turns 6 and is not yet reading, then that's fine. You don't have to nap, but we're going to have rest and reading time. And so reading time for a 6-year-old is audio books. And so I require an hour of listening to audio books.

And the books are generally engaging. The children enjoy them. But by 6, at 4, the child doesn't have enough of an attention span to listen to an audio book by himself for an hour. By 6, that can probably be a reasonable expectation. And so I put the younger children down for naps.

That gives everyone a break. And the older children have reading time. And, again, varying different ages, sometimes the reading is assigned reading. At the moment, for example, for my 9-year-old, I have a morning schedule and an afternoon schedule. So we do 3 hours of school in the morning, an hour, hour and a half, 2 hours in the afternoon.

That seems reasonable. Sometimes I cut it short. Sometimes we don't generally go much longer than that. It's not necessary. And I don't want there to be too much formalized school. I just want there to be lots of healthy options for all the rest of it. And so I'll go ahead and give my eldest some assignments.

For my next eldest, who is still cementing reading skills, although they've advanced dramatically, that's when I do voluntary free reading or sustained silent reading. When we talked about literacy, and I shared with you how to develop literacy, I don't think I labored on this, but one of the things that is very important to help a child to engage and be a skilled and competent reader is to have significant opportunities for sustained silent reading or free reading.

The idea is the child chooses the book to read, and there's simply an environment where that's what everyone is doing. Everyone is reading. And so this rest in reading time is a good way for us to incorporate that into our household. And so the rules are you can read anything you like for an hour.

You have to read for an hour. You can't go out inside and play for an hour, but you can read anything you like. And so we have a large library of options, and you can read everything from picture books. You can read to hardcore. You can read anything you like.

And so in the beginning, that often starts with lots of picture books and pictures, and then naturally over time, children just develop more skills and they naturally read other things, and they gravitate towards things that they can read and the things that they can't read. So in order to encourage reading, what I try to do in addition to the formalized instruction and lots of reading aloud -- and by the way, the way that we do a literary education for someone who's not a skilled reader in the Charlotte Mason philosophy is you do lots of read aloud.

So you read aloud or have an audio book to read with it until the child is a strong reader. But during rest and reading time, then I require you can read anything you like, but you do need to be reading. And that is really important. There's good evidence in the reading research circles that if schools would just incorporate sustained silent reading, then the levels of literacy go up significantly.

And so what you need for that in a school setting is you need a library with a variety of books, lots of different books to appeal to different people at different levels based upon different interests. And then you need a quiet environment and you need an example set. So the teacher, for example, should be reading during that time, and this is the time that we're going to read.

So take 30 minutes, teacher reads, children read anything they want, but that's what we're doing. And so I try to incorporate that principle at home with rest and reading time. Works very well. It's really interesting to me. So I try to look for series of books and books that I think will be interesting to the children depending on what age they are, and then buy them and fill the library for them.

And it's fascinating to me to watch. I'll take a book, I'll try to introduce it, and it doesn't stick. So I just leave it on the shelf. And then three or four months later, during sustained silent reading, child comes meandering across it again and says, "Oh, I'll try this," and now the child's ready for it.

So I let this be undirected because that allows the reader to choose the books that are appropriate at that time of day. After lunch, or after this nap time and rest and reading time, of course we just have the afternoon. And my general focus with the afternoon is that the children have time.

I think that children need time, and I don't want to fill up the day too much with school. I think that it's really important for children to have abundant free time to play, do projects. Sometimes those are fun, sometimes they're not for us as parents. Sometimes your house is a wreck, sometimes it's not.

Probably more uptight than I should be. I aspire to be one of those happy-go-lucky parents, but I also can't abide a mess, and finding the right balance is challenging. But I try to make sure that children have lots of time to play, lots of sunshine, lots of physical activity, just play.

And that's one of the great benefits of having a bunch of children, is they always have playmates. And that is a lot easier than if you have only one child and you've got to continually either play with the child or you've got to go and find continual playmates and playdates for children.

And so play is, I think, a cornerstone of what is important for a child to develop social skills, to develop conflict resolution skills, to develop imagination, etc. And of course the children are allowed to read as well or play games. So those things change. What I have tried to do is make sure, in the same way that food-- it seems to me a lot easier just to eliminate all junk food from the house and then allow children to eat whatever they would like.

It seems the same thing I can do with activities. So I'm not saying video games are bad, but I don't want my children sitting around playing video games at 3 o'clock in the afternoon when the sun is shining. Maybe if it's a rainy day, you can't go outside, etc.

But I think children need to be outside, playing in a physical world primarily outside. And so we just don't have any. We don't have TV, we don't have screens or computers that we can use on occasion, but the children have zero access to them. So they have audio books, they have real books, and they have outside.

And to me that seems really healthy at this stage. I, again, noticed the ages that I said my children are. At an older age, I think there needs to be more opportunities for some of those skills that are necessary. So whether it is playing games, whether it's working more on the computer or engaging in those kinds of activities, that's fine.

But I have young children, and I believe young children should primarily be playing outside in the 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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So I live on a very large property. I have a huge outdoor area with abundant space for the children to run and to play. And so that makes it relatively easy for me to chuck them outside and say, "I don't want to see you for an hour." Whereas, obviously, if we lived in a small suburban lot or if I lived in an apartment or something, it's much more difficult.

So that has been an intentional decision because I don't see how we could go and take our children to the park every afternoon. It just doesn't seem to fit where we are as a family. But it has been very useful to be able to chuck the kids outside and say, "I don't want to see you for an hour." And that's how I grew up.

That's how a lot of us grew up. To me, it seems super healthy and really valuable. And so that's a choice that I have made is to try to live on a property that facilitates that kind of lifestyle, that kind of vision. When it gets to about 5 o'clock to 5.30, somewhere in that range, depending on what's happening with the games, then I will end playing and send children to go and get a shower and get their pajamas on.

This has helped quite a lot to have less work after dinner. We've been in the world of young children. And those of you with young children know you often--as a parent at least-- I am often pretty tired by the time you get to dinner time. And I don't look forward to bath time, etc.

And so by doing it before dinner, it leads to a more peaceful evening. And that's generally been a good winner for us, at least at this stage where we are currently. We'll have dinner. Similarly, at dinner time, what I try to do is to enjoy conversation. And with young children, it's been challenging to facilitate productive conversation.

You spend so much time as a parent training-- don't touch your food, use your fork and knife, lips closed when you chew, swallow before you speak, etc.-- that it's hard for my wife and I to have really good conversations. We're working and not interrupting, etc. You can imagine if you have a bunch of children come over to your house, you can imagine that it gets pretty loud.

And so we work hard at that stuff, but it just doesn't facilitate a lot of long, drawn-out conversations. I'm looking forward to older years when we can have hour-and-a-half long dinners and have conversation. But it has been hard at this stage to make that a reality. What has been effective as a conversation starter is when I switched to hearing narrations of the children at dinner time.

So if you think back to what I shared with you about narration as a preparation for writing, the basic idea is that your children read something and then they tell you about it. Now, interestingly, I would call this a form of a memory technique called free recall. What narration does is to help a child to remember what he has read.

In order for proper narration, the reading is done one time, and then the child has to tell you about it. And so the child needs to remember what they have read and then compose the thoughts, compose the speech of what you're going to speak about. And it's basically a practical technique that we have implemented.

I've been disappointed, generally, with the quality of our narrations, so I have tried to give more focus to it to improve them by practice. And so hearing narrations at dinner time has been a winner. Because it allows me to go around the table and have a chance to ask, "Tell me about this chapter of this book that you read." And for the older children, it is something that was on their school checklist for that day.

For the younger children, it was something they listened to, and I try to let them be involved as well, and they enjoy that. Interestingly, this has also been useful of having children at different ages. So we have children of different ages who are going through the same curriculum. And so one benefit of doing this narration in a public format at the dinner table that I've observed is that my eldest will be reminded of a book that he read two years ago, which is different than the next one down the line, etc.

And so that's been a neat thing to see work. And so that gives us a good topic of conversation from what has been read. And then this is also helpful because as a father, I'm looking for chances to engage in instruction, moral instruction, discussion, etc. And that's where we get over into the world of logic and philosophy that I talked about.

So if we're reading a book, and I have read it or not read it, at least if I have a narration, I have a sense of it, so we can talk about it. What do you think about these actions? Why was this right or why was this wrong, or what was happening?

This is a huge value of having a literature tradition in your family. Many times there are lessons that you want to give to your children, but those lessons can be quite awkward if you try to give them based upon real people. I read an essay from a mother who was talking about teaching her daughters about interpersonal relationships with women.

And she was talking about how although technically she could tell her daughters, "You know that bitty in the church pew over there? Notice how she is always doing such and such to try to get that man. What do you think about her actions?" That would, of course, be inappropriate.

That would be gossiping about a person, and it's a person that you know. You don't want to put those thoughts in your children's minds. But if you read your way through Pride and Prejudice with your daughters, you have all kinds of opportunities for fruitful discussions about interpersonal relationships among women and women and men and them snagging each other and all of those things.

So this is something that I greatly value because as parents there's so much that we need to instruct our children in, and yet it can be hard to remember it all. But having a literary tradition where we're reading books that are challenging books, and then talking about those books in the form of narration gives me a chance as a father to say, "Well, let's talk about this.

Was this right or was this wrong? How was this person looking at it?" And then doing this in a historical context is very, very valuable. They do this in schools, by the way, obviously. You read about a historical character and you discuss it, but I think that's only maybe 20% of the value.

If you were an English literature major, you have a lot more of this in college at a collegiate level. But this is so limited in high schools and elementary schools because, number one, there's not enough time for reading literature. There's too many textbooks, not enough literature. In the textbooks, life is presented and situations are presented as black and white rather than the many nuances of gray that exists in real life.

And you have too many students and one teacher to have a really fruitful, productive conversation. I don't know what the max number is. Perhaps those of you who teach English literature or French literature and have discussion groups can tell me, but I would guess it would be 5 to 10 would be the maximum number of students that you could have in a really compelling discussion group.

So it can't work in a class of 30, especially when the students haven't had enough time to read it. But I've really been enjoying the use of narration at the dinner table and a literary form of education because you get those benefits. When a child is reading through the form of a biography-- my eldest is reading the biography of George Washington Carver right now-- and so you read a really beautifully compelling biography, and not only does that biography interlace with a biography of General Grant and a book about Abraham Lincoln and history understanding of what was happening during that era of history, of the Reconstruction after the Civil War in the United States, not only does that help with history knowledge, but of course you start to grapple with those great moral questions, those discussions that were running through society and continue today.

But instead of reading about them in the form of a dry textbook saying "here's what happened," you're reading about them through the struggles of an individual, through the exact experiences of an individual. And I find this really useful, to have fodder for good conversations and to help somebody wrestle with those things that they are encountering.

Then at dinner, sometimes if the conversation is not flowing, I'll often read again. I get concerned, I don't want to read too much, and so I want to teach conversation. I believe that teaching children to be skillful conversationalists is of a high priority, and if you're just sitting around listening to reading all the time, that's not going to accomplish it.

So we want to have good opportunities for conversation, but I will often take 15 minutes and read a little bit more after dinner. After dinner we clean up, obviously clear the table dishes, etc. And then in the evening, it depends. I try to make it a point to have some form of family together time, so reading is an appropriate thing, but sometimes it doesn't happen, especially with babies and such.

And so they'll have another 30-40 minutes after dinner where they can engage in sustained silent reading, play with toys, play a game together, etc. Just basically quiet activities before bed. And then we have bedtime. And then in bed, a couple things that I've tried to do to nurture the spirits of my children is it's a special time to look forward to, to snuggle, to read together.

I read often from the Bible or a storybook of Bible stories. For those of you who would like a suggestion, my favorite book of this genre is called The Child Story Bible by Catherine Vos. It's a really beautifully done story Bible where she is faithful to the original account, but she adapts the scriptural text into more of a literary format that is appropriate for children's stories.

Really, really excellent. And so that's what we'll often use, and the children enjoy that. They enjoy the stories. And then we sing together several songs. We do hymn study in Charlotte Mason approach, so we sing those hymns. Also I teach them other hymns that are from my personal history and songbook, and they really enjoy singing together just as a time of being together and snuggling and singing and reading.

When I was a boy, that was my favorite thing. My dad would come in every evening and he would sing songs with us. And so that's one of the things that I value from my childhood, and you pass these traditions along on a generational basis. Obviously when I'm reading, it's always lights out, totally black room.

If I'm reading, I read with a flashlight. Or if I'm singing songs, I just read the words on my phone at a low brightness. So this allows children to get calmed down, get ready to go to sleep. Sometimes the littlest ones or the most tired ones will drift off to sleep.

And it's a great way of calming them down and just having close time. And the nice thing about it is once they're calmed down, then that can often lead to better discussions with little children. Often at the table, they're all wound up, they're all arguing over each other, talking over each other, don't want to listen.

But that time at night is a really nice way of having conversations. And one of my primary goals as a parent is to maintain a closeness with the hearts of my children. I want to always be tightly connected to them. And so having that built into the routine is ideal.

It's not ideal for me sometimes because I lie down, I get tired, and my evening work often suffers. I want to go to bed quickly myself instead of being bright and energetic. But it's something that's important to me that the children value and of course I value as well.

There are many days where just last night I didn't sing with them and I didn't read to them. I just put them to bed quickly because I couldn't do it. I was too tired. But I do remind myself that these days are very short. And when you come down to, you hear the advice that I give often about parents and starting businesses and such.

I'm at the point in my life where if I were going to start working 70 or 80 hours a week on some new sideline business, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it without giving up this time that I value. Now clearly, what I've described about this ideal day, as I said, this doesn't involve my working.

This is totally different now. Not totally different, but it is quite different now that I'm back to work. I'm still there for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I still do what I've described at breakfast, lunch and dinner, but I'm not there in the morning and I'm not there in the afternoon.

I come home at 5 o'clock, a little after, and grab the baby and basically do the same things I'm saying, but I have more time to work. But if I brought in, instead of working a 7 or an 8 hour day, if I brought in and just went back to a 10 hour day or a 12 hour day, then you can imagine how that would disrupt some of these things that are important to me.

And recognize also that if you're a parent, that this time of your life is very, very short. So what I've described to you is appropriate for younger children, but if you've got a 14 year old, then now social activities become much more important. My wife and I, we have tried to minimize as best we're able to a lot of extracurricular activities.

So our children aren't on the sports league, they're not in symphony or anything like that. We don't leave our house much during the week, but that will not always be the case. Your children at 12 have an entirely different set of needs. They need different relationships, etc. So when we get into that stage, then the stage that I'm in right now will be gone.

And so I'm not going to go and start working 80 hours a week at this stage, because the price would be all of these hours with my children. The price would be snuggling in bed with my children. I used to work in the evening. I used to read, I used to be productive, I used to work.

I'm behind on lots of projects now because I go and snuggle with my children for 45 minutes, and I get up and I don't want to go back and face work again, because now I'm tired and ready to go to bed. And so I'm aware of that. If I want to work in the evening, I can't go and snuggle with my children, because I know that I'll be sleepy and won't really want to get back to work in the evening.

So recognize that this is what I'm trying to do is in practicality mention to you this stuff in detail, so that you can recognize how it plays out. It's not that you can't go and build a great business when you've got a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old and a 5-year-old.

You can. The cost is these hours that are gone. And there's a pretty good chance that your 15-year-old is not just going to be thrilled about snuggling with you and singing songs for an hour at night. He's going to have other priorities. And obviously you still want to engage with them, but it's just different.

But at 5, treasure those moments, because they're here and gone before we know it. Last thing is, obviously I pray with the children, and then in terms of nourishing the spirit, one of the things that my wife and I have done, she was the one who did it first, and now we've worked together, is we've written songs for all of our children.

I'm not willing to share them with you, because they're quite private and personal, but basically the songs are super simple. I'm talking 30 seconds long. I'm not serenading for 3 and a half minutes, 30 minutes. But basically, to tell my children, "I love you," and to talk about my ambitions for them.

My children mostly have some form of virtue names, and so those virtue names fit into their character, my hope for them. And so that gives me a chance to make sure that at least every day I know that if I didn't tell them I love them separately, at least I sang it to them.

And they don't go to sleep without their song, without hearing their song. And so you build a habit into your child, and then you have the accountability of we don't leave without saying, "I love you." And when I think about that, it makes me really happy, in terms of knowing what that can do in the heart of a child, to know that every single day I've said, "I love you," and I've talked about who you are going to be in the future.

I've given you a vision of who you are to be. And these are virtues and character qualities that are important for you to fulfill. This is important to me. Years ago I heard about... I never bothered to go and research if it was true. It was probably Zig Ziglar.

He would tell this story about this tribe in Africa that would name the children based upon the days of the week that they were born and their names. And one of the things that was remarkable is their names would have different meanings, and yet there was one name that was super negative, that would be the children that were born on Wednesday had this super negative name.

And a dramatically, statistically important population of the people who are in prison shared that name. And the idea is not that names are determinative, but that your name is something that you live up to in many ways. And so I want to give my children ambitions about, "This is what your name means.

This is who you are to be as you grow and mature." And then finally, one of the things that I try to do, even in saying it I realize I've been lacking recently, but one of the things I want to do is in addition to saying, "I love you," that's easy, but I try to say every day, "I'm proud of you." And what I find that does is more for me than for my children.

Obviously, I want my children to know that I'm proud of them. But in the hustle and bustle of life, it becomes easy to focus on everything that's wrong. If you've got a five-year-old or a nine-year-old, you know, right? There's so many things that you can pick on. And by the end of the day, as a parent, sometimes it's hard to remember that you're proud of your child.

Of course you're proud of your child. But sometimes it's hard to remember that you're proud of your child because of all the things that you saw that needed correcting. And so one of the things that I try to do is I try to make these positive statements. "I love you" is easy because love, of course I'm going to love you.

I love you both emotionally but also as an act of the will. You're my child. I love you, period. But if I say, "I'm proud of you," it affects me in a different way. And so it forces me to turn aside from all of the needs that I see and the work that I have to do as a father, and it forces me to focus on the areas that my children are excelling.

And I find that to be really helpful. I've instituted this in a few other areas of my life as well. For example, a number of years ago, I made the decision to stop saying, "You're welcome," as a response when somebody says, "Thank you." And I made the decision myself to start saying, "My pleasure." And it wasn't just because I ate at Chick-fil-A, although I probably did eat at Chick-fil-A or something.

But I realized that if I said, "My pleasure," it caused me to reflect on what I had done in a different way. And my brain started searching for a way to make it true. I don't want to lie. And sometimes I don't want to say, "My pleasure," but if I say it, then my brain looks for a way to say it was true.

The other night, I was in bed, and my wife was in bed, and then she remembered that there was something that was undone in the other room. I forget what it is. You know how it is. You're lying in bed. You're all ready to go to sleep. You're snuggled up, and your wife says, "Joshua, I forgot to do such and such.

Would you go do it for me?" The answer is, "No, I don't want to go do it for you. I can't you do it. You get out of bed. Your legs work, don't they? Come on. I don't want to get out of bed, but I, of course, yes, I'll go do it." And so you go and do it, and you come back to bed, and she says, "Thank you." And I forced myself to say, "My pleasure." Now, it wasn't my pleasure.

My pleasure would have been sitting in bed and making her go and do it and get out of the nice warm bed and go and deal with the thing that got forgotten. But it wasn't a big deal, and it is my pleasure, and it forces me to take the actions when I don't often feel like them, and it reinterprets them to my brain.

And so that's been something I've been doing for probably four or five years now, and it continues to remind me every time someone says, "Thank you," and I say, "My pleasure," my brain always is searching, "Is that true? Is that really true?" And it finds a way to make it true.

So after that silly example from whatever it was a few days ago, when I got back in bed, it was my pleasure, and I was thinking, "No, it's not my pleasure," but no, really, it is. If my wife weren't here and she was dead and gone in some tragic accident, what a pleasure it would be to be able to get out of bed and go and do something on the other side of the house to serve my wife.

I'd rather be here and do that than not. And of course, two minutes later, I was asleep, no big deal. But I try to use a few of these tricks, and so I'm just sharing some of the things that have been helpful for me. One of those things has been for my children to--just for me to say, "I'm proud of you." And again, it's for me, even more than them, because it forces me to find a way to make it true.

And even if it was a difficult day or a frustrating day or whatever it was-- and it's great, obviously, on the easy days. There are some days where it's just easy. Of course, I'm proud of you at a fundamental level. But it forces my brain to look for a way to justify what I have said, and I find that useful.

That concludes my commentary on a day. If the children are in bed by 7.30, that gives me an hour, hour and a half with my wife before I go to sleep, and the process repeats. And of course, this stage of life is pretty much a whirl of day after day after day.

But I hope that gives you an idea here and there. I think that if I look at my list of the stuff that I've covered--let me just review it. We talked in the very beginning of the show about nourishing your children's bodies. The first couple episodes in this series were focused on preconception and pre-birth stuff that can be done.

That's a separate thing. But in terms of nourishing the body, nutrition is important. So I've tried to do my best to provide high levels of nutrition. The best quality food that I can have--I go to a farmer's market and I buy most of our food, our eggs, directly from a farmer with pastured eggs.

I buy milk directly from a dairy farmer with grass-fed milk. Best quality I can get with the most fat in it. I try to encourage other high-fat foods--butter, cream, etc.--where appropriate. I try to minimize--make sure that there's no junk food, minimize any kind of junky stuff. Most of our meals--again, we're not perfect.

I'm just telling you my philosophy in case it's helpful to you. If you think I'm wrong on something, feel free to let me know. But virtually all of our meals are cooked from scratch. We don't really buy--we don't buy anything pre-prepared, so that cuts out a lot of the junk chemicals to try to make sure that we eliminate toxins from the food.

Obviously, we can't be perfect, but most of our food is cooked from ingredients. We're not foodies. We would like to be--neither my wife or I--or gourmet as we would probably like to be. Hopefully in 10 years we can have gourmet foodie children that do all our cooking for us.

But at least we try our best to get high health. So I buy vegetables from a farmer. My dairy comes direct from a farmer and eggs come direct from a farmer. And then I buy meat directly from the farmer as well as much as I can. I get some organic pastured chickens and beef is--anyway, the details aren't important.

But I try to get the highest quality nutrition and try to make sure that there are abundant levels of protein and fat available so the body has what it needs to grow very large and very strong and as healthy as possible so that even the epigenetics of my children are as well cared for as possible.

Sleep. I try to make sure with what we said, good sleep, lots of movement. Most of the movement that I encourage is in the form of play. I don't have--maybe in the future I'll be able to lead my children in a daily workout, but at the moment that's not a skill that I have yet developed.

But in terms of lots of play, children are active, and so I've tried to focus on providing equipment that they can build strength, build stamina, build coordination, and et cetera. Sunshine with the playing outside, and then good looks. That's just a matter of doing our best to help them accentuate their positive features in the fullness of time.

In terms of the mind, I think that I'm doing my best to fill them with as many words as possible through conversation, through reading. We do that reading in many languages, so multilingualism can help. Writing ability, generally weak at the moment, but getting better on narration. Art, music, weak at the moment.

Hopefully in the coming months and years I'll be able to introduce more of that. Memorization, mostly casual, but we're making progress, and as the children get older and I can require more memorization and recitation without my involvement, I intend to do more of that. We talked about studying formal logic, studying philosophy.

That's not something we're doing yet, but in the fullness of time we will do more of that. And then in terms of investing into the spirit of my children and nourishing it, doing my best to provide an environment of stability, an environment of love, give my children a vision for what I expect from them, and teach them explicitly, as I said at the breakfast table, about character, virtue, have ethical conversations as we read these books and discuss about what happened, why, what happens if you hang around with stupid people who do stupid things, what happens if you work hard and go in other directions, try to fill their reading lists with aspirational biographies of good men and women so that their ambitions can come from the greatest of the giants who have come before us rather than from just whoever is randomly stuck in a seat next to them.

And then in terms of success skills, I focus on doing my best to teach those lessons in the way that I talked about success skills, and then also I have a success curriculum that I impose upon my children as well. So I read to them how to win friends and influence people.

In the fullness of time, they'll read mindset. In the fullness of time, they'll read some of the basic success literature that I consider to teach those lessons. And I wish there were a high school class in success. Goal setting is not something that we formally do at the moment, but in the fullness of time, as they can be more directed, I want them to engage in systematic goal setting, etc.

And so that concludes my day, and I never get all of that done in a day. There are many days things get mixed. After this perfect day that I have described to you, we had a baby, and everything gets upended. But a few of the basic things always happen.

And if you have some of those basic things, the basic things like meals together, at least two meals a day, basic things like good habits, basic things like no junk food in the house, and no junk food for the body, and no junk food for the mind, just productive activities, basic things like a simplified schedule where you're not running here and running there and driving all over town and grabbing fast food on the way, etc.

I try to focus on those basic things that keep things mostly healthy in the family so that when there is a new baby or when there is some crazy event that happens that knocks us off course, then we're not off course for too long. And that's the idea. Being a parent or having a bunch of children, it's not easy.

It is very draining. It's not easy. And for you parents out there, I want to encourage you, as I've said in other circumstances, I think that in some ways being a parent today is harder than it ever was. We struggle just like you do to find enough children in the neighborhood for the children to play with.

We struggle just like you do to find children who have free time. Everyone's in school all day, and so having time to play is not much of it. It's very different than when children had time from 1 o'clock to 5 o'clock and they had 30 kids in the neighborhood they could play with.

And it's very different when communities were closer, etc. But we can't lose heart. We have to be intentional about the work that we do within our own nuclear families, and we have to be intentional about the type of community that we build around us in order to pave the way.

And I hope that a few of my ideas may be helpful to you. And if you have great ideas, I would always love to hear those ideas. Call me up on the Q&A show and tell me about them, and let's talk about them more there. Thank you so much for listening to today's podcast.

I'll be back with you very soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's, with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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