Latest / The Christy-Faith Show / Ep. 48 - Why Parents' Rights are Vital to Homeschooling Freedom // Sam Sorbo

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Ep. 48 - Why Parents' Rights are Vital to Homeschooling Freedom // Sam Sorbo · The Christy-Faith Show

• 0:00
  Sam Sorbo: Freedom isn't free. And if you don't exercise your rights, you will lose them, and they are being encroached upon right now by the institutions. They have been for many years, in fact.
• 0:20
  Christy-Faith: Welcome to today's show, everybody. I am thrilled to have an amazing guest here today, an author, keynote speaker, and a homeschool mom of 3 kiddos who are now all grown. Today is gonna be an amazing day full of wisdom. I have Sam Sorbo here today who is a multifaceted talent and a leading advocate for parental freedom and the protection of children, which you guys know I am a huge advocate for children. She began her journey at Duke University studying biochemical engineering before transferring into an international fashion model and Hollywood actress.
• 0:57
  While filming in New Zealand, she met her husband, Kevin Sorbo, star of Hercules, and they married soon after. Sam dedicated over a decade to home educating their 3 children which deepened her insights into modern schooling. Girl, you're in the right place today. Now, an award winning film and TV actress, prolific best selling author, and dynamic keynote speaker. She focuses on empowering parents to reevaluate traditional education.
• 1:23
  As a leading fighter for parental rights, her mission is to help families break free from the limitations of the modern school system, promoting a freedom mindset that fosters happier parents and smarter kids for stronger families. Sam hosts the Sam Sorbo Show on Patriot TV and her own podcast where she frequently shares her commentary on politics, religion, culture, and education, inspiring audiences to create meaningful change in their children's lives. We are so happy to have you on the show today. And in in particular, I was excited to do a deep dive on parental rights because here in Colorado, actually, in the last election, we had something on the ballot that was talking about children's rights, which is something we're gonna start hearing a lot more about. But first, I wanna get to know you a little bit.
• 2:15
  Sam, would you share with us how your homeschooling journey started?
• 2:19
  Sam Sorbo: Sure. My little boy was going to through 1st and second grade in our local little public school. We moved, to that community basically for the schools, for the lifestyle. It was a little bit more rural than the inner city, or the city, I should say. Never, we were never really in the inner city, but in the city.
• 2:37
  And they were getting the job done. And, you know, I I tell people this story and I I tell them, you know, I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't that. It wasn't, you know, that he was in a classroom with 5 very misbehaved children that ran the teacher frazzled. It wasn't that he was the kid who was supposed to help his neighbor with his math, so that the teacher didn't have to. It wasn't the stupid book reports that they assigned, that I never received back graded.
• 3:08
  So I had no way of gauging how well he was performing, vis a vis other students, which is of course, how we function as parents. Like how is my child doing on the broad metrics of how children are supposed to be doing? And so now that's actually something that I speak against. You know, stop comparing yourself. You're fine.
• 3:28
  Your kids are fine. You know? Because we get so caught up in that comparison. So at the end of 2nd grade, there were a couple of things. The book reports was 1.
• 3:38
  There was also, she sent home work with my son that he wasn't supposed to do in school. And we were on a trip, so she sent it with us. And so all of a sudden I was like, the nasty substitute teacher was making him do the stuff that he doesn't have to do in school. And I just felt like the whole thing was a bit of a setup. And I said to my husband, you know, I think I could fail at homeschooling him.
• 4:01
  In other words, I could fail the whole academics part, but he'd still be better off as a person. We'd still be leaving behind the worst of the worst kind of thing. And, and of course, it's worse today than it was back then. A lot has changed. That was before common core.
• 4:16
  He's 23 now. And I'd love to say I never looked back. It's not true. So I commiserate with parents who feel wholly inadequate. Who want to quit.
• 4:27
  Who don't think that they have any idea what they're doing. I was one of them. And I'm here to tell you, it doesn't matter because you are in the service of your children. That's the most important thing. If you love them and raise them to be people like you are, you're way ahead of the game.
• 4:48
  The academics are all secondary to that.
• 4:51
  Christy-Faith: Absolutely. I'm a huge advocate of having mamas, the mamas that I mentor to first ask themselves and figure out their why because that's the compass for everything moving forward. It gets you through the hard days. And truly understanding that, I think, also helps a mama define what an education is because when you actually start asking people, well, what do you think an education should be? They start describing basically everything but the school system and you kinda they just walk right into it.
• 5:22
  And so I think that's really powerful. And you're so right. As a mama, you know, I coach a lot of moms into not quitting. We we help a lot of moms who are homeschooling teens and they're like, what do I do? And so it gets really hard.
• 5:36
  Now, I wanna talk about the education system first with you today before we get into parents' rights and, some lingo that is kind of bandied about lately among politicians. What do you think about our school system? Because I get a lot of flack on social media personally about you shouldn't be putting your energy towards homeschooling. You should be trying to fix the system. Christy, you need to be doing this.
• 6:03
  You need to be doing that. What are your views on the system and do you think that that's an approach that we should be taking rather than as they are viewing it this is not the truth as they are viewing it pulling our kids and running? As a homeschool mom who values a family together approach and leans towards the classical and mom who values a family together approach and leans towards the classical and Charlotte Mason styles, I often struggle to bring my educational vision to life with my kids' diverse ages and learning needs. With all our interests and super packed schedule, bridging that gap between the dreamy homeschool I want and reality, I gotta be honest. It's a challenge.
• 6:34
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• 7:01
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• 7:28
  Sam Sorbo: Yeah. No. Pull your kids and run. I don't care if that's Hey, that's their truth. No.
• 7:34
  Pull your kids and run. And if you wanna stay and fight to fix a system that's not broken, good luck. That's all I have to say. System's not broken. It's working exactly as it was designed.
• 7:46
  It is designed to churn out non thinking, widgets, automatrons, that do exactly what they're told. Obedient little soldiers. And unfortunately, that's not the way to succeed in the real world. And that's why we're seeing the the majority of students now that are graduating college, who can't get a job, much less have a career because of what they've chosen to study. And no one is in the in in the colleges advising them that maybe Middle Eastern Basketweaving of 16th century is not the best choice if they wanna get a job when they graduate, so they can pay off their loans?
• 8:28
  I mean, the whole thing just seems at this point like a setup. And so, yes, grab your children and run away from that. And my advice is to not do anything that the schools are doing. Because at this point, to me, it's all tainted with the fact that the schools are an abject failure. We are now 37th in the world academically, so clearly they're not drilling into the academics.
• 8:52
  They're completely failing on that metric. Oregon passed a law a couple years back. It's a couple years already. You don't need to read or do math to graduate high school. Well then, really, what's the point?
• 9:03
  What I love about what you said is that you talk to parents. Let's sit down and define education, which incidentally is a good portion of my book, because with that's the conversation that we have to have. What is education? Because school is not education, and in fact, school is the opposite of education. And so if you want your child to be a free thinker, if you want him to be creative, to be able to sort of create out of thin air a job for himself, he needs to be a creative thinker.
• 9:36
  Right? And in fact, the jobs that they're preparing kids for today won't exist in 20, 30 years. Basically, they're preparing kids for jobs that already existed, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, that are gonna be phased out. I mean, the whole thing is absurd. So if you're looking forward for your children, the best thing you can do for them, is set them free.
• 9:59
  So that they can explore and discover for themselves. And I'll I'll leave with this. If we think about education, children are intrinsically curious, right? So at 2 years old, why? My, why mommy?
• 10:10
  Why? How come? How many? Why? Where?
• 10:13
  What for? How come? Right? And then we knock that out of them. The moment that they hit school.
• 10:20
  No, you sit down and you shut up. You be quiet now. Teacher's talking. No, no, there's no talking. You be quiet.
• 10:26
  And if you wanna ask a question, you better raise your hand. And all of that is a deterrent to learning. So we're handicapping our children the moment that they enter the school doors. And I say to parents, I'm not sure where we started to doubt the intrinsic nature of children, that they're so curious that they'll learn whatever they want to know. They're going to go find out.
• 10:51
  If we don't get in their way by sending them to school, we've lost confidence in just the design of the child. And I want to get us back to that, to this, this wondrous mechanism that every child is born with, this curiosity, this insatiable curiosity, that we just knock out of them the moment that they start school. I say, that's wrong. I say, that's abusive. That's what I counsel parents today.
• 11:16
  You're gonna start homeschooling? Okay, don't do, don't do the stuff that the schools do. Don't buy curriculum. Don't dig into that, like teaching them about the feudalist system, if that isn't the thing that's interesting them. Don't force feed them.
• 11:31
  Don't coerce them. Get them involved in the things they're interested in. And then once they're invested in learning those things, you can feed in the other things. Hey, you know, if you're really interested in cars, you probably should learn a little bit of physics, because that's how motors work. You wanna learn how to how a motor works?
• 11:51
  You know, that that kind of education. And then you've created somebody who is more in the vein of Elon Musk, who wants to just go do everything that he possibly can.
• 12:03
  Christy-Faith: So you were you a little bit unschooly raising your kids?
• 12:06
  Sam Sorbo: I did it wrong. So I totally schooled them. And and and by the way, like, like, I admit it. So so my oldest, I schooled him. I found classical conversations.
• 12:17
  It is a highly academic program. I loved it. I'm an academic, so it totally appealed to me. Wasn't really his bag, but I forced it on him. But here's the difference.
• 12:27
  So when I was schooling my kids, they were done by 1 o'clock in the afternoon. They did not have 7 and a half hours of boring school, and then another hour, 2, or 3 of homework. They got their work done in the first four four hours of our day. 9 to 1, basically. When they got older, they had extra work, obviously.
• 12:47
  But the the formative years of learning, they had a lot of freedom despite my drilling into the academics. It wasn't until my 3rd, my daughter, who is an artist. And so when she was 5, I said to her, hey, if you like to draw, you should purpose to draw 15 minutes a day. Just put that in front of you, and like, make that a thing that you do for yourself every day. Well, pretty soon she was drawing 3 hours a day.
• 13:16
  And so when she got to the age of 11 or 12, I kinda hit my knees. I was like, I don't I don't know how to teach this. I'm not an artist. I I my second's an engineer, so I can do that. My first is an actor, so I can do that.
• 13:29
  Actually, now they're both actors. Go figure. But like, I knew how to navigate for them. And, and I like to call parents, parents, you're the navigators. You're not the teacher.
• 13:39
  You're not the teacher. And this is how I know. Because I said, okay, I don't know how to teach art. So what am I gonna do? And somebody said, well, get her an anatomy class.
• 13:49
  I'm like, that's perfect. I'll go find an anatomy instructor, and I'll delegate, and then they'll be the teacher, and I will have done my job of teaching through them. Right? And I go up to a room, and I, and I say, anatomy class. She goes, oh, with this sort of, bless, bless your heart, mommy.
• 14:05
  You know? She pulls out her sketchbook and shows me a double page spread of the interior workings of the human knee in various positions with labels. Wow. And I'm like, you're already teaching your yourself anatomy? And she goes, yeah, mommy.
• 14:22
  I mean, if I wanna be an artist, I need to know that. And so my point is, she knew better than I did, Because I had given her the freedom. Now I was still doing academics with her, but like I said, we were done before lunchtime every day, basically. And so every afternoon, she was free to pursue her interests. Now a lot of parents are out there saying, Yeah, but Sam, an artist can't make money.
• 14:48
  Yeah, that's true. But my highest value for my child is not the amount of money that she can make. If I raise a good person, she can always get a job because she knows how to serve. And so she can always get a job. Will it be the best job?
• 15:04
  Will it be the corner office at Goldman Sachs? No. But let's face it. If that wasn't her bent, she was never gonna get there anyway. That's not my goal for her.
• 15:15
  And even if she could get there because, say, I put so much pressure on her that I said, you, this is you need to be a stock broker. You need to right? I'm setting her up to be miserable for the rest of her life. Why would I do that to her? My job is not to dictate to my children who they are.
• 15:33
  My job is to help them discover who they are. It's a completely different mindset. It's a paradigm shift that I am trying to get parents to understand. And what happens is when you, when you shift into that and you're like, oh, so I'm my child's advocate. I'm a navigator.
• 15:53
  My job is to discover who they are and help them discover who they are. Then, my gosh, like, hold on, fasten your seat belt, because it's a wild ride. It's an amazing ride, and it's so rewarding. Whereas if I was trying to control my children, and saying, no, you have to do this, and then you have to do this, and the path to success leads only through the institutions. And, you know, suck up to that teacher.
• 16:19
  Even if he's lying to you, you better agree with him because the your grade is at stake, young lady, or whatever. That's just stress. We don't we don't need that. Now I will say I did, I did a grammar program with my kids that was fabulous. I highly recommend it.
• 16:35
  It's in one of my, it's in a couple of my books actually, because I, I just recommend it. Unpaid, by the way. But I just loved it. And it, it had a writing program. With my first, he did every writing assignment.
• 16:47
  By the time I hit it with my second, I realized he doesn't have to do every writing assignment. And so I slacked off a little bit, which was fine. But my first has written he's just finishing his second book. It may be there's a correlation. I'm not really sure, but he's writing books.
• 17:06
  My second one is not writing books. Not that he should be writing books, I'm just saying. So maybe maybe my digging in was beneficial in a different way with my first, or maybe not. I really can't say.
• 17:22
  Christy-Faith: Yeah. Now I'm so curious to ask you because you are an advocate for parental freedom. Why are parents' rights so crucial for us as homeschoolers to understand?
• 17:34
  Sam Sorbo: Freedom isn't free. And if you don't exercise your rights, you will lose them. And they are being encroached upon right now by the institutions. They have been for many years, in fact. So you're talking about parental rights, but let's just let's, let's step out and take a wider scope right now for a minute and understand that generationally, we have been attending school for a 100 years.
• 17:58
  The first high school was established in the late 1800. That was the first one. And so basically from 1900, or let's say 1924, for the past 100 years, we've been in school. That means we have not had a parented generation for 5 generations. And so, your parents weren't parented.
• 18:24
  Their parents weren't really parented. And, you know, I talked to people and they, they argue back and they say, Oh no, my mother was very strong. She came down and talked to the teachers. She was involved in the PTA. She was Yes, but you did not spend time with your parents because you were at school for that amount.
• 18:42
  And I've heard it's calculated at 16000 hours that we give up with our children when we send them to school. 16000 hours. Now, it takes, according to some, it takes 10000 hours for mastery. They're mastering something with your children that you're not a part of. And my contention is it divides the child from the parent.
• 19:06
  It definitely separates the child from the parent, but it also damages the child's relationship with the parent. Because when you drop your child off at school, you're saying to the child, tacitly, if not out loud, I don't know. Trust them. They know better than I do. They have the authority to tell you what's right and what's wrong.
• 19:27
  And that's why your authority is challenged in your homes. The school has come between you and the child. And you don't know what the child is hearing at school. You have no idea what that teacher is saying to that oh, our teachers are handpicked. Really?
• 19:40
  Really? They go through, like, your teachers, all everything that the teacher has ever said and done before. No. Your school needs to hire somebody. They pick the prettiest or the person on paper who fits the mold or, you know, graduated from wherever.
• 19:56
  They just pick somebody. And maybe they've done a good job, and maybe they haven't done a good job picking somebody. You just don't know. So unless you go to the school, take the teacher out to lunch, visit her at home, just because you I don't think you really know somebody until you visit them at home. That's like a, that's like my own little metric.
• 20:17
  Like somebody says, oh, how well you do know, do you know them? And my, my metric is, well, I've never been to their house, but other than that, I think they're a nice person, you know? You know, we, we just sort of accept things on face value, I think, because we went to school and we were trained to do so. So, so in that way, the school damaged us because we're a lot, we're a lot less discerning, I think, than we should be. Like there's so many different factors that go into this.
• 20:42
  So back to your parental rights. We, we don't even know what it is to be a parent, much less the rights that we, you know, supposedly have. I, I have a friend who, who has 2 boys, and his wife left him, and she decided that one of the boys was transgender. He's like 7 years old. So she is transitioning him.
• 21:02
  She moved him out of state, went to the sanctuary transition state of California, and he has just lost all of his parental rights. All of them. He may have supervised visitation, which he is abjectly refusing. Because when you have a supervisor there, they can make up anything that they want. And it tells the child, it broadcasts to the child, your father is not safe, and I have to be here to supervise.
• 21:31
  And so he's refusing that. He's basically just lost his children. So when we talk about parental rights, you know, you can lose them like that. You can lose them like that.
• 21:41
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• 22:12
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• 22:36
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• 22:57
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• 23:30
  Go to learningrx.com or click the link in the show notes. Yes. And, you know, in Texas this past year, there was a medical kidnapping of a young woman, a homeschooler family. And I think that what parents don't realize and and honestly, they don't even think through this when you just do what you always did, what you did, what your grandparents did. And that is when your kid turns 5 or even earlier, you just send them through.
• 23:53
  I don't think people realize the symbol how symbolic those doors are. When you let your child walk through the doors, you are abdicating your rights in so many ways. They don't let you come on campus. You can't observe the classroom. You can't do this, that, the other.
• 24:10
  Okay. Wait a minute. Last I checked, these were my kids. And make no mistake, listeners. When you start hearing language about children's rights and protecting children, It's not children's rights.
• 24:22
  It's a transfer of rights from the parent to the government, and they want rights over our kids because children can't really make wise decisions for themselves. A 5 year old can't, you know what I'm saying? You know, here well, I live in Colorado. The big thing was the government was kind of trying to inch in on our curriculum selection. But that's kind of where it starts, I think, because they were being well, of course, every child in Colorado has the right to an education and we are the ones that need to make sure the parents are doing that.
• 24:55
  I want you to speak a little bit to this general distrust, not just of homeschooling families. There's a lot of distrust of homeschooling families, and this is a curve ball. Sorry. But I know you'll be fine. But the general distrust of parents, like, where did this even come from?
• 25:13
  We can't decide what's best for our kids. The government needs to step in.
• 25:17
  Sam Sorbo: Because we've become so dependent on our government, now the government takes responsibility for us and wants to make sure that it is, you know, providing the proper resources for us because we've asked it to. And I would love to get away from that. I'm very hopeful that we will see, in a sense, a morning in America, a new dawn, for parents to be more parental and less government dependent. And unfortunately, it's the slow creep of socialism. So school itself is a socialist proposition.
• 25:51
  You take money from everybody to feed it to the only the few families with children, and and so on. And and then the more that that happens, of course, because school itself is socialist just in its inception, of course it teaches socialism. And it teaches more and more socialism and less and less of the opposite of socialism, which is our system. And so now we have government schools that won't teach the citizens that the power resides with the citizen, because it's not in their interest. It's not in the government's interest to tell us that we hold the power.
• 26:27
  And so we have to get back to foundation or fundamentals. Right? And that's a, that's a hard thing to do because we're kind of walking back the, you know, it it We bought into this idea that it's some security blanket. Like, we bought into the idea that if you go to college, you will have a job and a career. There's no proof of that.
• 26:47
  There's less and less, actually. And so we, but we still rely on the metrics that, from the studies that they did in the 1950s. That students who dropped out became, you know, ne'er do wells, smokers, you know, at the corner of a billiards store. You know, trouble, trouble, trouble. We got trouble here in River City.
• 27:06
  And then the people who went all the way through through high school, went to college, they got a they got a job, and they worked for 50 years, and they, you know, resigned with a gold watch. They retired with a gold watch. Those days are gone. We're back in the wild, wild west. This is the this is the founding of America.
• 27:25
  This is you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You make it happen. And and it's exciting if you can embrace that, that insecurity. But you have to first convince yourself that the that the false sense of security that you have with the government is indeed a false sense of security, which it is.
• 27:43
  Christy-Faith: It absolutely is. Yeah. One of the master classes I teach is on fostering independence with your kiddos. And my main argument for that is all of the things and all of those skills and soft skills are gonna make them successful human beings later. Like, I hate to say it, but even if your kiddo is interested in accounting, nowadays, they're gonna need to also have entrepreneurial skills.
• 28:06
  It's just they have to now. There's just no there's you're right. Those days are gone. And I've said this before is the system is still preparing kids for a world that literally does not even exist anymore Right. At all.
• 28:20
  Right? Like here, I'm an educator. I have a master's degree in history and I'm a pod I had to learn how to be a podcaster. I had to learn how to write how to master social media to get people to listen to my podcast. I had to write all of these things.
• 28:33
  I basically we joke my because my husband and I are both entrepreneurs, successful, and and we joke like, oh, yeah. Our kids are basically gonna have MBAs by the time they graduate high school from us. And I'm like, great. Yeah.
• 28:46
  Sam Sorbo: There's a lot of value in that. What I tell parents, what I ask parents is, do you think you know more than the 23 year old who's teaching your child right now? And the answer inevitably is, yes. Then why are you sending your child to a 23 year old, who knows nothing? Except classroom management.
• 29:02
  And you say your kids are gonna be, you know, entrepreneurs, or they'll have their MBAs, right? I I know a young woman who's studying for a business degree. And so I asked her, how many of your professors have actually run their own business?
• 29:16
  Christy-Faith: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.
• 29:20
  So I wanna ask you a question that there's a purpose behind it because I know that you are actress, a model. Your husband is an actor too. You mentioned your kids. And we were in LA. We were in West LA for 20 years.
• 29:35
  Most of our clients were a listers and billionaires. We taught their kids. People names you all know and want to talk about the social sacrifice that we make as homeschoolers. And this is how I think it's really relatable because one thing that I think a lot of mamas don't expect it doesn't make them stop homeschooling. But what can happen when a mom starts homeschooling and a mom pulls her kids is she will lose friends.
• 30:01
  She will. Her entire social landscape can really change. Do you have any words of wisdom? Could you share with us a little bit about your story, maybe sacrifices you made? Because now that you're at the end of the road with your homeschooling, of course, you're on fire with everything else.
• 30:16
  But looking back, like, was that worth it? We I in my book, I call it the storming phase. It's to be expected. I try to prepare moms for it because people get very threatened when a mom decides to homeschool her kids. If they're really insecure with themselves emotionally, they'll they'll, like, put judgment on themselves and and, you know, oh, that's just too much work.
• 30:37
  She's crazy for doing that. And and you will lose friends. Would you speak to that a little bit? What what happened to you guys when you guys took a stance in Hollywood of all places? Because I was there, girl.
• 30:46
  And, you kind of keep your mouth shut if you want to stay in business.
• 30:50
  Sam Sorbo: Well, that's true. And we didn't, and that's why we don't live there anymore. But I will say there is there is a level of disdain for a mother who pulls her kids out to homeschool, because the other mothers feel convicted. And they resent it. And so then they apply this, will you think you're better than us?
• 31:12
  Because our kids still go to school, or what have you. I never gave a flip. I encourage parents, don't, like, that's their problem. Let them do their own thing. I did lose friends.
• 31:25
  We wrote about it in our book, True Faith. I lost friends over politics. And it was, like, a weird It wasn't an actual acknowledgment. I just People stopped returning my phone call. You know, like And it was like, Oh, I wonder if it was that event that we went to together.
• 31:42
  And she saw a side of me that she was like, Never going to speak to me again. And I'm thinking about one person in particular. The social So, but I want to go back to a word that you used. You used the word sacrifice. And I think it's important that we, that we dissect that word just a little bit.
• 31:57
  So what do you mean by sacrifice?
• 32:00
  Christy-Faith: Well, I think in the short term, choosing to homeschool does mean that you are going to sacrifice the social landscape that you previously had. It's also a decision to give that up and I think that blindsides a lot of mamas. And and as quickly as possible in my community, I try to plug them in to your new friends are here. Your new friends are right around the corner. Just hang in there.
• 32:26
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• 32:44
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• 32:53
  Sam Sorbo: Such a great, valuable point. And I I talk a lot about the word sacrifice because our culture now considers sacrifice a net loss. But sacrifice is not a net loss, because we live in a free society. And so when you sacrifice something, it is for something greater. And so I think that, I think that the focus has to be on, yes, you're losing that because it had much less value than your relationship with your children.
• 33:24
  And if you need some more social interaction, you'll find it. Because it will be valuable enough that you'll figure out how to get it. It's that simple. It's, it's not more complicated than that. So, you know, we, we sacrificed Yeah.
• 33:39
  I sacrificed lunch with the girls. I remember 1 year when school was back in and I was still on all the text threads. It was probably the year, the 1st year I started homeschooling. It might've been the second, actually the 2nd year after I started homeschooling, but I was still on all the text threads and I got the, I got the note, Hey, 1st day of school, let's meet at, you know, Billy Joe's to cry into our mimosas, cry by face. And I thought this is really sad that mothers are celebrating, dumping their kids off.
• 34:11
  Like they were, they were gleeful to be done with their kids. And I was always so hugely grateful to be with my kids. The only reason that I brought my child to school was because I thought it was good for him. It wasn't good for me. And I think our culture has, has accepted too much too readily this idea that, Ugh, kids are, Ugh, blah.
• 34:35
  Who wants them? Who needs them? There's, you know, they're so annoying or whatever. And that breaks my heart. Because they are so tone deaf to understand why they have a little child who acts out.
• 34:49
  Do you know what the terrible twos are? I mean, we have a name for it, right? Terrible twos and they throw tantrums because they can't get their way. The terrible twos are just children who are exhausted. You don't give up the nap.
• 35:01
  Don't ever give up the nap. I'm serious.
• 35:04
  Christy-Faith: No. As you know, I'm laughing because I had twins.
• 35:07
  Sam Sorbo: You do not give up the nap. You don't give up the nap. Firstly, twin. Right? I mean, I I wanted the nap.
• 35:14
  Yeah. It's not the not the kids so much, but me. I needed the nap. But the kid needs the nap. And so when you when the kid naps from 2 to 3, or whatever it is, you know, right after lunch, whatever, then 5 o'clock hits, and the kid's just fine.
• 35:30
  Or 4 o'clock. But if the kid if the child doesn't nap during the day, you 4 o'clock hits, that child is frustrated and and tired. And the slightest thing is gonna set the child off. And it's because we've lost I mean, I I guarantee you, if we went back a 100 years, the parents of that day would be, like, appalled at the way we treat our children. I guarantee you, a 100 years ago, parents would be like, they don't let that child nap?
• 35:55
  That's terrible. That's child abuse. That child should be napping. Every child should nap. 2, 3, 4.
• 36:00
  I had a child who wanted to quit the nap, and I had to trick him back into napping. And now he's, like, he's 20. And he'll say to me, you know, mom, I'm really tired. I'm gonna go up and take a nap. He's 20.
• 36:12
  He knows. He's like, well, the nap's a good thing. So, you know, we're getting so much wrong. And I
• 36:19
  Christy-Faith: think
• 36:19
  Sam Sorbo: that if you dig in, and you invest in being a parent, and parenting your children, and that means homeschooling, right? They're synonymous at this point. You will come out the other side so much better off. You personally, the children personally, and the whole family unit.
• 36:40
  Christy-Faith: Yeah, and you know, and I don't know if you know this, but I run a community. It's it's a nationwide online community called Thrive Homeschool Community and we do a lot of, I do a ton of deschooling in there and also helping moms set up their homeschool. And we have special spaces for, like, veteran homeschool moms who, you know, because we struggle with burnout in all sorts of places. But I gotta say so much with the coaching that we do in there has to do with parenting. And I think it's because we weren't we don't understand what parenting is.
• 37:09
  And one thing I fight for I fight for and I will never stop is if you are not enjoying your kids, if the majority of your day is awful, tantruming, antagonism, everyone's kind of upset, I'm not gonna tell you what to do right now, but I am gonna say fight, fight with all of your might to enjoy your kids, to figure out a way that you love being with them every second of the day. Not saying we don't need breaks from caregiving and little respite days here and there, but when we set intentionality towards our parenting skills that feeds into the homeschooling and then we're just really loving our lifestyle. You know, my youngest right now is 8 and and we are just I was telling Scott last night we were going to bed and I am just like I had the best day. Like our 3 girls, we went, we made ourselves chai lattes and then me and another daughter like we like dirty chais. We put our coffee in the chai and then we went to the, local Goodwill.
• 38:16
  Okay. Get this. We went to the Goodwill for the only purpose. The only thing they could get was something that they could turn into a Christmas decoration. Right?
• 38:25
  So, like, repurpose or, like, to paint or whatever. Right? We had just the best afternoon. No behavior problem. I mean, our days aren't perfect, but what I can say is that most of our days are really they feel like heaven on earth, but the work the work that I had to, like, undo, like, past stuff from and my parents are great.
• 38:48
  My parents are Christians and they're still married and they're they tried their best. There's no harm done. But it was a different generation and I did not know how to parent when I started. And then I fell into the trap when we were early parents of like hyper authoritarianism Yep. And punitive parenting and so there's been a lot of healing and apologizing especially to our oldest regarding that.
• 39:13
  And we feel like we've really kind of hit our stride and are constantly working on connection. But the one thing and before I want to hear about your book, by the way, which is why I even asked you on but I do want to say for any mamas here listening to this, and the days are really hard because it's just the either there's refusal with the homeschooling or there's just battling and things like that, I just wanna encourage you to fight. Fight to really like your kids. I know you already love them but fight to like them. And there's tools and Thrive for that.
• 39:45
  There's books you can buy, all sorts of things. And I always tell people on my podcast, email me. Email me. We answer all of our emails, and we will lead you to resources that can help you. But, Sam, you have a new book out.
• 39:57
  Will you tell us about your book?
• 39:59
  Sam Sorbo: So my book, Parents Guide to Homeschool, and I'm I'm holding it up. I'm, it's actually a workbook. This is to get you to rethink the way that you think about education. Because we've been getting it wrong for way too long, and that's why you're struggling with your kids. That's why you're struggling with your kids.
• 40:15
  Is you weren't taught how to parent, because none of us were were parented, really. And you were taught a whole bunch of stuff about what education is that's wrong. And so you can do better. And that's what the book's about. And I'm very excited.
• 40:29
  So, because people are loving it. And I got an endorsement from Tucker Carlson, which sort of beats everything. Sam Stormont knows homeschooling, and her family is a testament to the fact that it works. And by the way, that's true. My kids are amazing.
• 40:41
  And I I can hardly take credit, because the credit that I take is that I I had enough wherewithal to set them free. And that's my message to parents. Set them free. Set yourself free. If you're fighting with your kid to learn something, stop.
• 41:00
  Pick something that the child wants to learn. Dig into that. Stop the fight. It's not worth it. It's just not worth it.
• 41:08
  Christy-Faith: Awesome. And then where can everybody find you and your book?
• 41:11
  Sam Sorbo: Oh, yeah. Couple things. So I do have a community online. It's called samsorbo.locals.com, and people can join. I've got a coupon code running right now.
• 41:21
  Freedom. If you enter the code freedom, you get 3 months for free. So samsorbo.locals.com. It's on locals. I'm also promoting a family trip to DC, which you should come.
• 41:32
  We're gonna do, basically, the tour of DC. And so we'll be the Smithsonian. We'll go to Mount Vernon. We'll see where Lincoln died. We'll see where he was shot.
• 41:42
  We'll go to the Spy Museum. We'll see the memorials. DC's a fantastic place, and there's a lot of history there that's American history that's important, and it's nice for kids to sort of touch and feel it. And, I did this with my kids when they were little, and I'm excited to do it again. It's in March.
• 41:59
  And the way you find out about that is go to sa sorbo studios dot com, is where you find all the books and all the information about everything that Kevin and I have been up to, and some of the things that our kids are up to too. So
• 42:13
  Christy-Faith: Great. And then is that DC trip a homeschooling trip?
• 42:16
  Sam Sorbo: I'm not saying that it's only homeschoolers, but it'll predominantly be homeschoolers, because it's during school. So I'm not, if somebody calls and says, you know, if somebody, if somebody signs up and their kids are enrolled in school, there's nothing. I'm not like weaving through people and saying, oh, no, your child is enrolled. You know, I'm not checking up on people, but it'll be basically homeschoolers. Yeah.
• 42:38
  Christy-Faith: Okay. Wonderful. Well, we'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Sam.
• 42:42
  Sam Sorbo: Well, it was great to be here.