Let Him Go Barefoot is a podcast that dives into all things parenting and education through the lens of mindful awareness. Conversations aim to bring forward patterns, beliefs, and attitudes that shape our expectations and ideas about what it means to raise healthy children. With the blend of science, ancient wisdom, and intuition, we will explore ways to support, nurture, and connect with our growing children while also nurturing and expanding ourselves.
I am grateful you are here. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Let Them Go Barefoot podcast. Today, I am so excited to introduce you to Julie Bogart, the author of Many books, multiple books, but most specifically that I want to focus on today is Raising Critical Thinkers, A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age. I feel like it's a book that is...
important and necessary for the times that we are in and the direction that we're going as a society. So Julie, thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Absolutely. So let's just jump right in. Who is Julie? Who am I? That's the existential question of a lifetime. I grew up in Southern California. I was the oldest of three kids. My parents divorced when I was in high school.
years exploring all kinds of different ways of thinking. When I got to college, I went to UCLA, I actually became a part of a fairly religious parachurch ministry, eventually became a missionary. actually, and then started having kids, pumping out babies. I had five kids with my husband. My first child was born in Morocco. And then we moved back to the States after about a decade of that kind of work. And I...
began the journey of homeschooling and I did that for 17 years full-time. I have kids who've done full-time high school, some who did part-time high school in the public system. All my kids are adults now. Four of them are married. I have three grandchildren. I have a master's degree in theology from Xavier University and a BA in history from UCLA. And I'm a writer and an entrepreneur. I hope that gives you a pretty good overview.
Absolutely. It does for sure. So, you know, talking about the UCLA and then going to religious and the missionary side. So how did that sort of. form your lens for raising children and also homeschooling? Yeah, it's great. I don't talk about this part of my background very often because it can become...
its own sort of controversial experience for my listeners. But lately, it's been coming up more in podcasts, because I think there's a lot of curiosity around the homeschooling movement. And so when I first heard about homeschooling. It was 1983, no, 84, excuse me. And I wasn't even engaged yet, but I was already at a training center for the work I was going to be joining in missions. And I discovered that
People who lived abroad who did that kind of work often homeschooled their children because it was the very early 80s. They were wanting their kids to be raised speaking English and to have access to the kind of education they would get if they were. in the States. But the thing that really stood out to me when I first heard about homeschooling was the idea that we could tailor make the education to the specific child. What's ironic is when I heard that,
It made me think of my own public school education. I was raised in Southern California. My school district was based in Malibu Canyon. My teachers were like ex-hippies. They were all like Peace Corps volunteers, first generation. They were so innovative and creative with my education, and I have nothing but fond memories of immersive, curiosity-driven learning from my whole childhood.
By the time that I was in college and I was working as a teaching assistant in Brentwood at a school that had busing to desegregate, everything had changed. It was standardized testing. It was a lot of... It's sort of outcome-based education objectives. The creativity was gone. And I remember at the time, this was before I was married or anything, just feeling like what a loss that was for learning.
And so I went out. This is, of course, jumbling the timeline a little bit. But when I was in high school. Up until I was 16, I felt like I had an ideal childhood. In fact, in eighth grade in my journal, I wrote, I am having a perfect life. I hope I can give this to my children. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Wow.
Yes. And then my parents, my dad had an affair and my parents' marriage blew up. So up to that point, we had what I thought was an idyllic family. And then suddenly everything changed. And I like to say, I'm like... the exact representation of what it would be to be raised a boomer. and then become a Gen X overnight. Like I had a foot in both of those experiences. And that destabilization of my worldview first sent me into...
what some people would call a cult. I think it was more like a pop psychology movement. It was called EST at the time, Werner Erhard Seminars Training. And it was sort of like drawing on Zen Buddhism, Scientology, definitely cult-like properties all throughout. I started there. And that became toxic and sexualized in my... late teens, like 18, 19, and I left. And I found myself invited to a Bible study in my sorority. And the anchoring of that worldview and the feeling that we were all...
choosing to agree with the same morality. You know, my parents were divorced based on an affair. I was looking for like alignment. Like if I'm going to date people, I hope we all agree on the same rules. And I think that really drove my curiosity and interest in a religious life. And then, I mean. for people who've met me, I tend to go all in. So I found myself by the end of college, I had lived abroad, I had learned about Islam and different.
cultures and different places. And I found myself drawn to doing something that I thought would make an ultimate difference rather than just a temporary one. And that sort of background led me for... a long time, maybe another, I don't know, 15, 20 years. And during those years, the same kinds of questions kept coming up for me that were theological in nature. And the internet sort of broke out in my mid-30s.
Among homeschoolers, we were having online bloodbaths over theological positions, over whether or not to use cloth diapers, over V-backs and home births. All these people that I thought would be naturally aligned couldn't agree on anything. And I found myself plunged into, I would call it an intellectual crisis. I wanted very much. for the things I believed to have substantiation.
Okay. And that led me into another, like a decade probably of reevaluation of everything. And that ultimately resulted in the book, Raising Critical Thinkers, that journey. Yeah. Well, that, that to me seems like an obvious trajectory, you know, I mean, and that's, that's life, right? You have this belief system and then it gets challenged or maybe even broken. And then you kind of look to get resettled and restabilized and maybe it happens. And I think, you know, what you're explaining is the.
exact human experience for all of us. It doesn't matter what background we have. There's some, at some point in time, our belief system is going to get challenged. And that's why I appreciate your book so much, because I feel like it gives us. Instead of being overly dramatic about the change or overly reactive, instead just taking a beat and a pause and saying.
what am I, what is going on and how can I get curious? Like you mentioned, you know, you got curious. It was like, what is going on? What's happening? So take us then to, to your college experience that you were saying. in college, I'm sorry, not in college, after college, where you were looking at the way you grew up and then how you kind of made the decision to homeschool. I know you were saying it was through your faith-based decision first.
Is that accurate? I would say no. Okay. It was the faith community that exposed me to homeschooling, but I was always driven by the educational motivation, academic side. I didn't, one of the things that I think was unique about me, even in my community is, and maybe it's because I grew up in an 85% Jewish area of LA. My entire step family is Jewish.
I always felt this kind of more expansive view around education. Like I felt like what I wanted my kids to learn was a variety of worldviews. I wanted them exposed to. a various number of perspectives. I wasn't trying to raise them to be soldiers for Christ. Like that was not my goal. So when I started on the homeschooling journey, it was really driven by my desire to give them.
kinesthetic, immersive, active experiences and learning. And that goes all the way back to kindergarten with my oldest child. I used to joke with everyone that the first curriculum I ever purchased was Family Fun Magazine.
became sort of the core of how I built their education because I loved that it was often giving me a set of activities I could do that would feature an aspect of something to learn, whether it was about gravity or birds or going to the zoo or, you know, they always had something very thematic and active and that set.
and a course for me. And then I would evaluate any other curriculum against that model. Like how does this get my child out of their chair into their experience? So that really was the foundation. I was introduced to home. schooling through the religious community, but I wasn't drawn to it because of that. Gotcha. That's good to clarify. Thank you. Well, you know, let's dive into the curiosity and the kinesthetic learning and the need to move our bodies. I think in this.
time in the digital age, social media, the internet, where it draws us to sit still and absorb and to consume. How have you seen it change since you were raising your kids? And also, what are some insights you can provide for families? You've had five children, and so you've been able to see them up through their adulthoods and now being a grandparent. What have, what are the change significant changes that you've seen and what are some.
some recommendations you can provide for families who are dealing with this right now? Yeah, so much has changed, right? So when I first began raising kids, there was no internet, but we did have computers. So my kids would play games like rollercoaster type. You know, these very, very benign, very delightful games. And there was none of this sort of community experience. It was just.
a solo experience with a machine. So it wouldn't be that different than playing Monopoly, to be honest. It was just a mechanism for playing a game. But it had a little bit more creativity and more agency than a game. play by yourself. So that was kind of where we started. I remember when the internet kicked off, my son Noah became interested immediately. His father was also kind of a self-taught computer guy. And they built a website together for World War II tanks on...
GeoCities. And this was the late 90s. Yeah. While we were still on dial-up. Yeah. FTPing pictures. Right. Exactly. So we really did have like early engagement on the internet. What I found really valuable about the internet for me as an adult were these long form conversations with people that I would never meet otherwise. Being able to eavesdrop on a community through a blog. I remember I followed a blog of someone who lived in inner city Chicago.
And they were an educator trying to decide if they could justify leaving the inner city to take a job in the suburbs. And this became a huge community conversation. And all I had to do was read it. And it's a conversation I knew nothing about. And I learned all about the cultural pressures of being Black, of living in Chicago, of what it was like to provide education in both those places. It was fascinating.
And I feel like at its best, that's what the internet was supposed to do. It was supposed to give us a window of insight. into the wide range of knowledge and experiences that make up our humanity across the globe. And so at its best, I think it still can do that. What actually occurred in the 2000s is the monetization of the internet, especially through social media. You know, MySpace was the beginning, but it...
really accelerated with Facebook. I think where we are today is because the algorithms choose for you. In the old days, everything was just chronologically released, so you just saw what you saw based on when it was posted. whether that was a blog or a comment in an email thread or a discussion board like Reddit. Today, things are upvoted or they are algorithmically delivered to you.
And so you don't really know who has the control over what you're consuming. And that consumption now has been reduced to certain character counts. It can be very public. There is the mob that can come for you. So I would say the way the internet has changed for the worse for us and for our children is that we have less objectivity.
I think it started with a much more, it's never objective, but it was a much less algorithmically controlled environment compared to today. And so for our kids, they have less skill.
They're just younger. They're being raised in this environment. They have less skill at sifting through the information that comes to them. But they may have more skepticism. I think kids today are raised to know that things can be manipulated, whereas... people my parents' age or even some people my age are still a little credulous around what they read online because they were trained in an era when the media was quote unquote trustworthy.
Yes. Oh, my gosh. That's so important to point out. And I have a couple of things I want to highlight. Number one, talking about the algorithm. So I saw a TED Talk the other day. that discussed how our society is organized. And then it went through like a historical representation of the rise and fall of different powers. And so now it was like we have an order.
internationally that's based on security and surveillance. Then we have an order that's based on the economy. And now we have an order that's based on the digital world. Instead of being nature versus nurture, we have nature nurture algorithm. And I thought that was so powerful. I was like, oh my gosh, that gave me chills because.
I'm a psychology major, and I grew up learning about nature and nurture, and I've studied child development, and it has always just faceted me to watch, even within our own families, the differences between our children. growing in the same families you know like right totally living in the same house and you can see just how genetically different people are so you know talking about
trying to get consensus on the internet. I mean, we can't even get consensus with four people about what we want for dinner sometimes. So how are we, the idea that we can even make a consensus online is a false. You know, it's a false presumption to begin with. But the other piece of what you mentioned was the differences in the generations and how I noticed that with my own family and my grandmother. My grandmother was.
just honestly hell bent on anything the doctor said was gospel and anybody who challenged it was just. being ignorant and also not paying attention to authority, quote unquote. And so when I became a mom and was raising my son and I was like, no, we're not going to eat that because blah, blah, blah. She's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well.
you know, I'm just, we're just going to hold off on that for what, for now. And it was offensive to her because she was like, well, you know, I did it and I'm fine. And, and, you know, in fairness, she did live to be a hundred years old, but I also think so much of that was because she grew up on a farm. lived and grew her own food for two decades before she went out into the world. But anyway, all that to say how...
She was a hundred percent, whatever the doctor says. Then my mom came along and she was a little bit, you know, I don't know, maybe, you know, question, question. And then I came along and I was like. you know, in a way, almost to the extreme, I questioned everything. Right, right. And so it has been fun to watch my children. If I get up in arms about something, they're like, mom, you know, it was just kind of thrown out there to get you going. And I have just loved it.
I love that. I'm like, it's wild to see, even though I thought, okay, well, I'm from the generation, I'm Gen X. So I'm like, I'm from the generation where we do kind of buck the system and question things. But then to watch my children navigate this world. in a way that has surprised me, honestly. But I feel like we've had lots of conversation about it too. And I told them from the very beginning, early on when my son started.
being on the internet and interacting with YouTube or online gaming, I said to him, I was like, listen, we choose where we live. We choose the kind of car we drive because there's safety mechanisms about those particular things that we're looking for. And so when I put you on the internet, that's essentially like me dropping you off in the middle of some place that I've never seen before. I don't know who's there. and walking away and i was trying to give him that understanding that it's not
It's not somewhere you can go without having some sort of guardrails. And I feel like as your mother, that is my job, you know, to give you some guardrails. And it's not about being controlling, overly controlling or.
not allowing him to venture into different areas, but it's about recognizing that the internet does not have our best interest at heart. And it certainly doesn't for our kids. No, and I think what you just said about... your own child even having some skepticism is really powerful because
One of the things that these kids know because they know how to use the tools so well. I'm watching my granddaughter who's four. She knows how to open a phone, take a picture, zoom in, zoom out, edit the photo. She's four. Wow. This is like second nature to them. They're growing up. with it with a level of fluency that I'll never have because I grew up before the internet.
But they're used to these tools being manipulative, right? Like they know that in a TikTok, you can splice things in, you can alter what someone says, you can change the voice, you can. And with the rise of AI, which is another. discussion we could have. That's even becoming more of the future. We're going to have even more reason to doubt our own eyes and our own ears. Someone could...
Put words in our mouths that aren't accurate that happened with Taylor Swift where somebody created a phony endorsement of Donald Trump using her image But it can also be that people could pretend to deny that they said something by saying it was AI generated, something they want to distance themselves from. So we are entering a period already are in it where we can't simply rely.
on the information we're getting with our own eyes and ears. And that to me is the watershed difference. Like when you said, what's the difference between when you and I were kids and when our kids are being raised, we relied a lot. If I was there, that must be an accurate picture of what happened, right? If somebody with authority is telling it to me, it must be true. This generation does not have that certainty.
They are much more likely to distrust or be curious about or even be taken in because they want something to be true. the mixture that we're dealing with today and my kids who have children and who are in their mid to late 30s They've been telling me that they have a lot of thoughts about how much internet their kids, they're going to allow their kids to consume. So far, my two kids who have children.
have said that they don't want their children to have personal cell phones with internet on them until they're at least 16. And that was interesting to me. I didn't know how they would come down on that. My oldest son is literally a computer programmer. on the computer all day. So, you know, and then one of my kids told me that he thinks YouTube is very dangerous for small children. And he was my child who was on an international video gaming team and went all the way to Crow.
to meet a friend he met online. So for kids who had that level of comfort on the internet to have this kind of fear now is really interesting to me. It is so interesting. And I think it's worth paying attention to because I have a cousin who's a generation younger than me. And I will never forget when I, that sort of light bulb moment for me was. When I started texting, because to me texting was so fun and easy because you didn't have to.
You could just get your point across. There wasn't a long conversation that needed to take place for just giving somebody a piece of information. So for me, it was like, you know, this is the date, this is the time, this location, blah, blah, blah. And he would call me and I was, and he's younger. And I thought. I texted you because I know I like conversation more. And I was like, oh.
really, you know, this is because you're the generation that grew up with texting. And he was like, yeah, no, I actually like hearing people's voices and having a conversation. And I started seeing that more with a generation. So it is neat to. to see how the different technology impacts the different generations. And, but, you know, so having said all of that, at some point people have to make decisions, you know, and they have to trust.
something. So what are some ways that families and parents can sort through the noise? And decide and make a decision. And I know, you know, in your book, you have so many wonderful examples and ideas. But just based off of, you know, kind of your experience and your gut, what are some things that parents can consider? So one of the ways that I talk about learning or mastering anything is through this lens of reading, experiencing, and encountering.
Most education that is traditionally delivered through schools and homeschools is through reading because we can amass the most content through a written. a written document or through a book. And so what will happen is we will read something, we will memorize the information, we might even be tested on it or write an essay on it, and we feel like we know it.
Reading gives you a level of confidence in what you know that is a mismatch for actually what you need to know. And I'll explain it like this. When you read, you tend to sort. It's an unconscious habit, but we sort for... confirmation bias. We're looking for information that reinforces what we hope to be true, what we want to be true, what we expect to be true. And when we come across information that contradicts it,
the first thing our brain does is to discount it or defend against it or to literally not see it. We might literally not even see the words. Later, we'll go back and say, I can't believe that was in the article. I don't even remember seeing that. Because our minds are so fixated on safety and security, and security comes from a reinforcement of what you hope.
will be true. So reading can be a way to get a lot of information, but it isn't always the most powerful way to challenge your assumptions or to come up with new ideas because... Like I said, our minds sort for this confirmation. So we read. It's a safe way to get information. Reading means you can sort for what you care about the most. And you'll notice it on Facebook, a way to check.
and see if this is true for you is scroll through and if you see a friend posting an article for a political candidate you don't support do you pause and read it to see what truths are in that article? Or do you look at it smugly and think this friend is kind of stupid for caring about that candidate? Most of us, when we see something that contradicts what we want to be true, start with a smug dismissal.
It's very difficult to simply open yourself and say, well, this person must have a reason that is logically coherent to them. that propels their desire to share this information and that shows them that this is a reality they want to be true. So you have this person sharing an article about a perspective you don't hold. The first question most of us don't ask is why is that meaningful and logical to that person? What need is this expressing? What vision of a beautiful future?
Is this person articulating? That's not where we go. We go to dismissiveness. We wonder why they're ignorant and stupid. We wonder why they haven't considered the position we hold. So reading is this very safe. sort of self-selecting way of gaining information. The second way that we grow as learners is through experience. So I like to use this example. If you read about a country like Spain, You might think you know a lot about Spain, but until you've actually been to Spain?
Everything in your head is just information that you are sorting through your experience of being an American. You actually don't know Spain. You just know information about Spain. But when you get to Spain, suddenly the smells, the temperature of the weather, the humidity or lack thereof, the way people dress, the way they speak, the taste of the food, these experiences, while not the kind of...
explicit information you might have gotten from that travel article, they shape what you know about Spain. You're going to have a very different understanding of Spain after having traveled there. But even travel... is meaningfully under your control. So you could read about gymnastics and then you could try and do some gymnastics. Those are both under your control. The third level of learning is what I call encounter. And that is when the authority or the power dynamic is upended.
When you read and have experiences, you have some meaningful control. Encounter is when you lose control. So it would be the difference between reading about Spain or traveling to Spain or moving to Spain. So now I've got to learn the language, rent an apartment, pay for things with their money, work in their economy, make friends with those neighbors. Suddenly you do not have meaningful control. The things that...
You expect to be true or not true. We had a joke when I lived abroad in Morocco that you know you're still in culture stress when you go to the post office to pick up a package. It takes 10 minutes to do that and you get home and need a two hour nap. Yeah. Right. Encounter is the feeling that you need a two hour nap to recover. It's the feeling that all the things you thought you knew.
you don't actually know as well as you thought. And this new information is actually upending what you counted on. And so for growth, It means we tolerate encounter. We don't dismiss it. We don't assume that it means the other people are wrong simply because I'm uncomfortable. We actually lean in to try and understand it better. We don't run away from it.
And that's, for me, the three levels we want before we form an opinion. If we don't have all three of those levels going in any area that we're studying, then humility is a requirement. You know, I read about Afghanistan and without ever having been there and without not having been in the military, here's the best I can do for an opinion. That's humility. Not, well, I've read four articles about Afghanistan and I know what the government should do. That's the difference.
Yeah. Well, and we need a lot more of that. We do. And I think that's the big, big issue with the social media world is that there's an issue at hand, whatever that issue is, and immediately. there are sides and immediately there are experts and immediately everybody has an opinion and um you know it's it's it's it's sad to watch sometimes because i see
How it can be a breakdown of trust amongst people or relationships get challenged and are lost. And why? Because people want to make a decision and they want to feel certain. that, you know, you made a point in your book to say intimacy over certainty. Yes. And I really appreciated that because it's true. And there's another statement that's floated out there and I wish I could.
I don't know if it really can be attributed to anybody particularly specifically, but it's hate can't survive proximity. And the closer that you get to something in someone, the. the more likely you are to be able to understand them if you want to. So that's the big open right there. It's like, do you really want to understand or do you just want to be right? Well, uncertainty is something we're trained in from the time we start school.
And I actually, one of my theses for the book, Raising Critical Thinkers, that I fully expected to be challenged by pretty much everyone I spoke to. And most people just... I guess, agreed. I was kind of surprised. The thesis is this, that school trains us in right answer thinking. Not in nuanced thinking, not in complex thinking. We have a room of 30 students, one teacher. There's a multiple choice test. There are right answers.
And those right answers have to be achieved by all 30 students. You can't say, well, I'm the outlier. When I read these multiple choice selections, I thought about it this way. The teacher is not going to say to you, oh. I love that you're thinking differently and I can see the logic behind your choice for answer C when the answer I picked was B. No, they'll just say you're wrong. And so what I think happened when we all hopped online.
is we were used to citing an authority and saying what the right answer is and assuming everybody would recognize that that's what we all needed to agree to believe. What we didn't anticipate... is that we didn't all have the same sources of authority. And so when somebody trots out a link and says, this expert says that, and someone else comes back with, well, I don't like your expert. My expert says this, and here's the link to what they say.
It was like a shock. I remember for me, it was like a cold water shock. I was on this discussion board for homeschoolers and they were all... christian right-wing heterosexual married homeschooling women right like pretty homogeneous group and we were having huge fights over you know, what age children should be baptized or whether or not to use cloth diapers. And I remember just thinking to myself, there's like no mutual respect.
Why are they so angry? Well, it's because the expectation was once I tell you the right answer and I cite a source, there's nothing more to say. Well, 30 years of the internet has proven there's a lot more to say. Everybody has more to say and more sources of authority. And once we get out into the world where we see that Sources of authority create communities, which create social bonds and cohesion and identity. It's very, very difficult to overturn those. We tend to cling to a belief.
that keeps us in our communities, even when that belief stops making sense. We do it because we don't want to lose our people. That's probably the biggest impediment to critical thinking. Yeah. Well, and it's, um, it's a danger, honestly, a psychological danger because we're built to be in community. So when we say we're, we're breaking off from the tribe, our bodies think we're dying.
And it can be extremely powerful to just stay put and put your head down and just deal with it. You know, it's the sad reality of why people stay in abusive relationships and why people. you know, stay in areas that it's very clear it's time for them to leave or in a job situation because it's so hard to see what the possibility can be outside of that. So, yeah. You know, I love what you said about the...
the generation of people who have gone through the school model and then hopped on the internet. So what. I cannot wait to see like 20 years down the line what it's going to look like, because I feel like there's such a huge growth in the homeschool world and the homeschool community. And I do wonder if there will be somewhat of a shift. in that kids who are raised in a way to question, to be curious and to see learning as lifelong, if they won't in fact respond a bit differently to the way.
we address critical issues. So I guess we'll have to come back in 10 years or 15 years and see. I mean, that's certainly the hope. I love that you brought up my quote about intimacy over certainty. I think if I had any wish for parents.
homeschooling or not, honestly, it's this, that you would learn to tolerate the dissent that your children naturally bring into the family. Because a lot of times what I notice with parents on... both extremes, whether they're fundamentalist, religious, or they're these hardcore sort of agnostic atheist, scientific materialists.
What I notice is parents want to protect their kids from quote unquote wrong thinking. So what they do is they spend a lot of time explaining why their kids shouldn't think a certain way and why this other way is superior. And what they end up with then is a child who descends. So you might have this family that's raising these kids to be scientific materialists. And a kid comes back and says, I actually love the Bible. And the parent is like mortified, like, oh my gosh, this child is.
thinking away from the critical thinking I've raised them in. But what is actually happening is the child is experimenting with critical thinking by dissenting. Right. With the family belief structure. And so I always say that the community is only as healthy as how well it tolerates dissent. So if you are in a family or a church or a political group or a community that gardens, whatever it is, if you are not allowed to talk freely.
outside of the expected dialogue and speech, you're in a bit of a cult. Yeah. And it's really important to make room for that dissent. I remember one of my kids, my middle child, who just for context today, he's a human rights lawyer. So he's always had a... a big interest in politics. And I remember we got into a discussion about a ballot issue on the Ohio ballot back when he was 16. So he wasn't old enough to vote.
So he gave me, you know, almost the equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation on why I should vote yes on this ballot issue. And I listened and he did an excellent job and he had wonderful support for his position. But I did not hold that position. So at the end, he said, so are you going to vote yes? And I said, no, I'm going to vote no.
And immediately, tears sprang from his eyes. And he said, Mom, I count on you to be logical. And I said to him, I said, you know, you did a brilliant job. That presentation was clear. Your side will probably win eventually. But here's what you didn't account for. These are the things that I'm worried about. And they're still important to me. And we don't have to have the same position to be in this family.
And for me, that's where we want to go. We want to create room for that dynamic. We do not have to be perfectly aligned with our children, but we also don't have to explain away. their reasons. They're at an age where they are starting to put together a worldview. How many of us still think about the world the same way we did at 15 and 16 when we're in our 30s and 40s? Very few.
We need to give them the opportunity to experience owning a viewpoint and living it out. So if your daughter says she wants to be vegan, that's incredible. She's about to align her behavior with a worldview. and see what that's like. That's reading experience and then encounter all together. They will learn more from putting that belief into practice. than you talking them out of it because you think you know better. And so to me, dissent is the most important value to uphold in a family.
I love that. I love that. And it makes me think about a post I wrote years ago about supporting our children's no. And boy, the blowback was hard. Oh, interesting. Wow. And it was like, what do you mean your kids tell you no? That's ridiculous. You're the parent. You put the rules down, blah, blah, blah. And I, yeah, I was surprised. And I was thinking to myself, well, I thought people, this is a good.
example of how, you know, catering to your audience, like I was like, well, I just thought everybody who followed me would be like completely supportive of this idea. So it was, it was interesting to go through the questions and it was a pretty widely shared. post as well and it was just essentially saying if you want your children to
confidently say no to people, situations or activities that make them uncomfortable, then they must be able to safely practice that skill with you. Yes. And I thought that to me, that seems so logical because. Yes, you're right. It's easy as parents to feel this. you know, cockiness, honestly, about our, we're older, we're the parent, we have all the answers. You just listen to what I say because I'm, I'm supporting you and caring for you.
my rule is law. And then our little ones come back and say no. And then they say no again. And instead of reacting, it's more like, wow, what, what is going on here? You know, maybe I'm looking at this wrong or I'm. expecting too much from them. You know, there's so many different ways it can go, but at the very least, just saying, oh, well, tell me more. I think, yes, tell me more is such a key. And also... Just the humility to recognize that...
you don't know what the world looks like from behind their eyes. I think there's a belief a lot of times that parents feel like been there, done that because they've already been teens or they've already been 10, but they haven't. This is an entirely new world every year. It's a radically new version of itself. And our kids are dealing with it in their own way.
that's different than how we could have dealt with that same set of circumstances given what our world was at that same age. So being curious. trusting your kids, but also being vulnerable and honest. Like, wow, I'm a little uncomfortable. I remember I had a son who wanted to play video games, you know, all night long and he was homeschooled. And I was like,
You're supposed to get up in the morning and do schoolwork, not save it for the afternoon. And then he retorted, but I'm homeschooled. Why does it matter what time of day I do schoolwork? You know, knowing that that was like a memory from my own background that you do schoolwork in the morning. And so finally. I just kind of whittled it down. I'm like, what is it about playing in the middle of the night though?
And then that's when I found out he had a friend in Croatia who was available at that time of day. And that child didn't have the flexibility that my child had. And he wanted to be able to play with him. And it turned out to be so reasonable. You know, I had assigned all these nefarious things to it. And I know today that parents are going to say, but I don't know what else they're seeing in the middle of the night.
And I want to say, you also don't know what they're seeing in the middle of the day. Teenagers actually have access to the internet that you don't know about. You can't control all of that. So part of what we're trying to create is a... sense of agency where our teens can actually have regrets and feel comfortable saying, I made this call. It was a, it was a mistake to come back to you and let you see what their.
interested in what they're thinking about so that you can be a part of their lives. Now, I'm not saying there aren't moments where intervention is required. You know, if you find out that your child is like learning how to shoot up drugs on the internet. that's something to pay attention to, to be interested in, not just to ban it or be angry about it, but like, what's driving that? And you as a parent have the right to shut that down. But I think we...
mistake that extreme for what garden variety curiosity is in most of our teens. I think it's worth it to be interested with them, not explaining it away to them. Right. Yes. Right. And I'm really glad you brought the point about intervention because in the information age, there is, and can be in some circles, the idea that the kids know. The kids get all the freedom. And this idea that, you know, child led learning specifically, that's something I love and I.
definitely cheerlead in terms of their interest as far as like, what are they interested in and allow that to be a guiding light. But I think sometimes people take it a little too extreme and child-led being. child leading everything and it's um and then of course
what ends up happening is there's a bit of chaos and parents are now thinking, what have I done wrong? We don't have this, we don't have a system or a rhythm or a rhyme to our day. And it's just, I'm always chasing people. So it, it, it.
kind of begs the question of, you know, where are those lines? And, and I think, you know, for me personally, I just know that as a family unit, every family unit is different. And so you have to look at what your moral compass is and what your value systems are. And use those as your foundation. And then that will allow you to have guardrails that, you know, once your kids bump up against them, it's time to do something. And you want to make those.
I think one of the things that is missing, and I felt like I really had to learn this, and it was a lesson I learned with my oldest child in particular, but I have to have some humility as a parent. We don't know everything. I have this phrase that I like to use in my community. I think a lot of parents prophesy doom over their kids when they're teens. They say things like, if you don't get a high school diploma, you'll just be flipping burgers for the rest of your life.
say things like, you hang out with those people, you'll end up in this bad situation. Those kinds of prophecies are... absurd, first of all, because you don't know the future. I know with my oldest son, Noah, I basically said if he didn't complete certain coursework, he'd never get into college.
He decided not to complete that coursework and he got into the very college that I thought he would not get into because they made an exception for him because he was homeschooled and they liked who he seemed to be. I think we make the mistake of assigning ourselves more knowledge than we actually have. So if we go in with some humility, like, you know, you want to stay up all night. For me, that feels really uncomfortable.
In my head, I think the best work for school happens in the morning. I'm nervous about you being on the computer when I'm not there to supervise. I need to hear more about why this is good for you. That's different than... You shouldn't do this. The best work is in the morning. I don't like that you're staying up so late. It's coming from a place of humility.
where you're curious, but you're also laying out some of your concerns. I don't think we have to hide our concerns, but I think we need to be humble about them. Yes, absolutely. The idea that... we get to show our kids how to be human. We don't have all the answers and it's okay. And I think maybe, you know,
We all, well, I know that people run up to against the fact that if they don't have the answer as a parent, then they're somehow failing. And instead it's more of a symbiotic relationship. It's not a, you know, I'm in control and I have. I can pull all the levers. It's more, I am older. I do have more experience. I have something to bring to this relationship that is a little bit different, but I also am here to learn as well.
Correct. And I think some of what I hear from parents is there's fear around... the way that kids are forming their identities today. There's a lot of turbulence in the teen space around sexual identity, gender, all of those things, religious beliefs or non-religious beliefs. What I notice is this sort of like doubling down on the fantasy.
child that you think you have versus the real child standing in front of you. And in my book, I wanted to read one quote to you because for me, this is really the core of what I think. helpful as a parent of a teen. Our students need to believe that they can rely on parents and teachers who will stand by them not abandon them even when we find their reasoning incomplete.
Let me be blunt. You can't be the community that ejects them from membership. Your child's pursuit of intellectual honesty deserves to be honored by you. Or they will learn to be propagandists for a position. Or worse, they will secretly hold their subversive beliefs until they are out from under your control. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. It's true. And it's the opposite of what we want to happen. Right. And I do think that.
A lot of how we get there is because we are scared. We're afraid. Things are so different now than they were in our own childhood. Or we see all the ways that it feels like life is going off the rails. Not just individually with our children or with social media, but also in the bigger picture of the world of being a citizen of the United States. I mean, there's all these mechanisms at play. And sometimes we feel like the only way.
only thing we can control is our own child. And that's true. And I think it's that the child is also an extension of our identity and our egos. And so we're expecting them to carry forward. You know, I noticed this with my own father. He looks at me and I think at times, I mean, I think he's proud of me. He says it all the time, but he also, I think, thinks he's failed in some way because we don't share the same political views, right? And he wants his ideas to carry into the next year.
generation. And I think that's a very instructive thing to realize is that at the same rate... that you didn't agree with your own parents, your children will not agree with you. The most healthy adult child parent relationship is one where we're actually... and trusting the future to the people who will be in charge of that future we don't have to agree it's not my job to ensure that they protect the world i live in
Because that world is going away and the world that they will be running is coming and they get to decide. You know, parents often ask me, are your kids going to homeschool their children? And I said, I don't know. And I also, it doesn't matter to me. I made the decision I thought was right for my kids when I was raising them. And now my joy is to watch them go through that same wrestling.
What kind of education do I want my children to have? And whichever one they choose is the one I'm going to celebrate with them because this is their turn. They don't owe me anything. It's not their job to prove that homeschooling is better. It's their job to enter into adulthood and make decisions they feel excited about.
Right. Right. Yeah. Because it's like, if they do homeschool, then that proves that your choice was better. Right. Right. But that's not what it's about. Just like I look back on my childhood and I think I had a great education. and it didn't have anything to do with homeschooling. We can be flexible in our own minds. Our job is not to prove that everything we think is the best way to think for everyone. In fact,
just a little political moment here. When we talk about writing policy around these complex social issues like gun violence or abortion, what I notice is missing is that most of us talk as though we're missionaries for our position our goal is conversion we're like i have the right view i'm going to convert you but what if we took a completely different approach and said
I want to include you in my solution. So if we were talking about guns, what if we took the perspectives of people who've been victims of gun violence, hunters, military, police? garden variety homeowners who own guns, people who've been a part of the, you know, peace movement who don't believe in any weaponry whatsoever. What if we brought all those people together?
actually paid attention to their chief concerns and created some kind of policy that accounts for as many of those positions as possible. That's what we can practice in our families. You've got a child who wants to be on the computer, a parent who's afraid of that kid being on the computer, another child who needs time that he's not getting. And we actually account for each person's need.
And we try to problem solve, including as many of those as possible. That creates the strongest policy and does the best job of taking each person seriously. Instead of just this back and forth conversion, bash each other over the head kind of mindset, which we all know doesn't work.
Well, and it's like, you know, with social media, it's like the train wreck scenario. It's like you can't stop. You can't not look at the train wreck. And that's kind of what what people are doing. It's like, let's make this as dramatic as possible. And we'll get more views instead of let's have a nice, calm.
back and forth, respectful conversation. Let's actually hear what you have to say. Let's dig deeper under the why for that reasoning. And then, you know, maybe we'll come up with something that's actually pretty amazing. But it takes time to do that. And it's challenging. It does. And you can't do it all day every day, but you can do it with some of your key relationships. So if you are worried or distressed by a viewpoint a child has or your parent has.
your sister has, one of the questions I like to recommend asking to help stay out of this contentious kind of behavior, you can say this to the person that you disagree with. You can say, Tell me the story of the beautiful life we'll have based on that viewpoint. Like if you hold this view, I assume it's because you think life will be better.
if we all adopt it. So tell me the story of that beautiful life we're all going to share if we adopt your viewpoint. What that does is it puts the person in their best non-defensive vocabulary. and helps you see the need that is being expressed by that view. So if a person is going to tell you, well, we need background checks on guns and red flag laws and all that, and then you find out that...
they have a family member who was a victim of gun violence, you have a very different perspective, right? Or if it's somebody who's, you know, whatever their story is. it will start to become clear when they explain why this viewpoint ensures a better life for all of us. And what I have found is that then you can ask follow-up questions to help them.
Try to include your perspective in their solution. So once they've shared that, you can say, I get it. I see how you are making that connection. I had not thought of it that way. I'm wondering. How does your view account for this? And you bring in that little piece of dissent, that little piece that maybe represents your viewpoint or the viewpoint of someone not included in their solution.
And that's a moment where they get to actually inhabit your view for a flickering second. It's not that they'll adopt it, but they're in their best vocabulary right now. So when you say, how does your view account for this? They have to explain that to you. And a lot of times you get a much less defensive.
answer. I went through this with my own father. He was very worried about freedom of speech and Twitter back when it was Twitter, and he didn't like that there were regulations being set up by Twitter. And so I said to my dad, well, I really hear why you're all about the free speech part because you're feeling like the views you hold aren't being allowed to be expressed there anymore. How do you feel about this since?
Twitter is a privately held company. It's not a government organization. So do you feel okay about restricting the right of a company? to have its own set of guidelines. And he said, yes, I do, because they're like a media company. And I said, well, how big does that company need to be? And he said, it could be very small. And so I said, okay, listening to this.
How would you account for my social media platform that I built for my membership community? Am I allowed to eject somebody who is cruel? Or should I be required?
to allow them to speak however they want to the members that have paid to be there because of free speech and it stopped him in his tracks because up to that point we had talked about things that we could both understand together but this was a factor he had not considered and in this case it was his own daughter and it didn't change his perspective but it forced him to include mine.
in the conversation. And that was a change from how we used to talk, which was more like, I'm right, you're wrong. No, I'm right, you're wrong, right? So that's kind of what I think about when we're talking about critical thinking. We want to ask people to account for our perspectives, not argue for our perspectives. And we want to do it after we've given patient attention to the best version of their viewpoint. Yeah. Well, and it also...
requires you to have walked it out. Whereas a lot of people will just be reactive. No, this is right. This is wrong. This is right. This is wrong. But if you ask them to. dig deeper and explain it and do a logical sort of conclusion to this thought, it makes them really dig in. That's right. And that's, I would like to believe that's the goal of most big issues.
and desire to support one another and to raise kids is to get to the underlying ideas. You know, you mentioned the thing about earlier with your son and playing games online and. I have run into that multiple times with my son too. He was very much into gaming. And what tended to happen, not just with that, but other things too, was I would have a belief about what I saw.
And then once I asked those questions and got a little more curious, I got a bigger piece of information that totally changed my understanding. And I was like, isn't that the way it should be? You know, we all have this immediate reaction, maybe even a knee jerk of like. this happened therefore this is true right and instead it's like
Well, yes, that would be the case if that was all there was to it. But if you get a little bit more information, it's like just, you know, putting more into the recipe, the recipe of understanding. I saw this quote also in your book that said, anytime you think you're certain, you can be sure that someone somewhere uses the same words you use and mean something entirely different. That's so true. So true. The vocabulary doesn't always.
mean the same thing to each person. That's right. No. And especially now that we're a more international community in terms of being online with other people, there are words and terminology that we use in the United States that mean something totally different somewhere else. So that's something to keep in.
keeping the front of mind as well. Well, we're coming up on an hour and I appreciate your time so much. And I, you know, please tell everybody where else to find you because, you know, we talked about your book and we talked about your social media presence, but you also. have a company and you do amazing things for families and children. So can you share a bit more about that?
Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. My company is called Brave Writer. I am a freelance writer. I was a ghostwriter, editor, magazine contributor back in the 1990s. And I saw that in the homeschool space, a lot of the writers... materials were just ineffective at supporting kids in particular who struggled with writing or hated writing or resisted writing. And so I took the professional skills.
that I had and drew on the books that had helped me with my writing career to create a program that would actually take the drama and trauma out of writing for kids. And I did it in a way where I'm training parents to be the writing coaches. their children need. So if you're looking for curriculum or online classes for writing, Brave Writer is a great place to go, bravewriter.com. I also have a book out called The Brave Learner, which is sort of my...
you know, I don't know, my thesis on home education, right? With all of the ways that I think about learning. So if you're interested in home education, that's also a great place to start. You can find me on Instagram at Julie Brave Writer or on Threads, same one. And I have a podcast, the Brave Writer podcast to support homeschooling parents. Yeah, that's great. And can you mention... us a little bit more about threads. That's not an area of...
I've gone into yet. So what is that like? Threads is like the alternative to X or Twitter, what used to be called Twitter. And it is built from the Instagram community. So it's a place where writers, especially people who like communicating by rather than video or images can participate in social media. And I've found it to be very delightful. It's a smaller scale than Twitter. And it's just a lovely community. So yeah. Okay. That's good to know. It's it.
I always see it and I always get invited and I'm like, I just don't know if I can do one more thing right now. Totally get that. It's nice to get a little in the nutshell what it's like. So, all right. Well, thank you again so much for your time. You take care. You too. Thank you. Thank you for listening. To learn more about guests on the podcast and to stay up to date on how they are showing up to make the world a better place for children and families, please check the show notes.
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