What Homeschooling Gives Kids for Life| An Interview with Jennifer Pepito

I think that that time that they had to explore their own ideas was a big part of their success. And this is what parents are sort of squashing in their families when they over schedule, they overdo curriculum, they overdo extracurriculars, is you leave your child with no time for them to actually develop their own ideas, their own explorations, and then maybe develop that world changing invention that's inside of them to create. Welcome to Our Life Homeschooling. My name is Sherry, Christian, wife to my high school sweetheart Nelson, and thankful mom to 10 incredible kids. I'm the author of the blog and YouTube channel Our Life Homeschooling, where I share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I believe that motherhood is ministry, and homeschooling is simply an extension of parenting. My passion is to cheer on other moms who are at home doing the most important work of all, raising the next generation for the glory of God. Welcome to the Our Life Homeschooling podcast. I am honored to share with you today's guest, Jennifer Pepito from the Peaceful Press. Jennifer Pepito is host of the Restoration Home podcast and the bestselling author of Her latest book is the inspired homeschool, How History's Heroes Light a Path Toward Joyful Confident Learning. Jennifer is the founder of the Peaceful Press, a homeschool curriculum provider. Jennifer lives in the mountains with her beloved family where she enjoys reading aloud, working in her garden, and watching the sunset. Today's conversation is going to be really encouraging because we're going to be learning about people in history who were homeschooled. And I know you'll take away more confidence in your ability as a parent to homeschool your kids. And remember that it's more than just academics. There's so much more that kids gain from the opportunity to be homeschooled. So let's jump right in. Hi Jennifer. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sheri. I am excited to talk about our topic today, which is homeschooling beyond academics, what kids really gain. And I love this topic because the academics is part of it, but it's not all of it. We're educating the whole child. And I think that's a message that a lot of parents need to hear. And so I just was wondering if you could share with us just a little bit of your story. Why did you decide to homeschool? You're a name that's well known in the homeschooling community, but this is something that I think a lot of people may not have heard. I know I haven't heard your story. What inspired you to homeschool? Yeah, that's a great question. We started having kids in the early 90s. My oldest was born in 1993. And at the time we were going to a church that really didn't have a lot of homeschool families. It was mostly public school kids. But there was a couple of families there that were really sweet. Like I loved the way they interacted. There was so much mutual respect between the parents and the kids. You didn't sense that exasperation and frustration that you see with a lot of families. And so that made me have a vision for a way of being as a family that was different than what was modeled in culture around us and even in that church that we were in. And I just felt like, oh wow, my husband and I, we could have this close relationship with our kids and we could be friends and we could have this like courteous family. And that definitely inspired me. And then as I started reading, I also felt like, oh wow, and I could give my kids a better education than the public schools can do. We can go so much deeper with subjects than the public schools can do. And I found that to be true in my homeschool life that my kids are so well read and have a fabulous vocabulary and are really equipped for anything they want to do in life. Yeah, I can relate. And I just started reading some of your new book, The Inspired Homeschool. And as I was reading The Inspired Homeschool, it was so encouraging because you write all about the history of people who were actually homeschooled, which is so cool. I read a lot of biographies to our kids. So there are parts of this that I want them to know their story. I would love to read some of them to our kids just so they know these people were also homeschooled and this was their experience. So what inspired you to write a book about people in history who were homeschooled? I, you know, I've seen so many more people homeschooling than earlier days, and I'm really excited about that. But I've also seen then this perfectionism and this fear and even an attempt to keep up with either some idealized homeschool vision or the public schools. And in both cases, that breaks my heart for those moms, because when you have a lot of little kids running around, you can't necessarily do perfect Charlotte Mason homeschooling where you're reading every single level of Ambleside online. And, you know, the public schools were never I mean, they're really never even created to educate children. They were created to make children conformists. And so in either case, to me, it's a big mistake to be such a perfectionist that you burn yourself out or try to copy the public schools and then burn yourself out. And so I wanted families to have a picture of the fact that homeschooling is not an experiment. It's been going on forever. And some of the greatest minds in history were, you know, homeschooled, unschooled. And I'm not I'm not an unschooling advocate at all, but just that you could see that it wasn't the success of a child was not dependent on how many hours a day you did school. The success of a child is not dependent on, you know, how many books that you read together. And I fully believe in reading great books together. That's what the peaceful press curriculum is based on, is reading beautiful, virtuous stories together and narrating them, talking about them and having a, you know, some time out in nature to process incorporating art and poetry. And so it's very much a Charlotte Mason inspired curriculum. But I just hated to see families be so fearful that then they squashed all the joy out of learning with their kids and out of this experience with their families that it actually was counterproductive to learning because fear inhibits learning. Yeah, that is so true. And I've seen that as well, just with some of the families, you know, it's like the tendency to model the public school system or to have this perfect homeschool. And I know just thinking back to our personal experience, I started out very academic and I just lean that way. Like we read every book. We did every paper or, you know, every page in the worksheet. And as I homeschool more and more, I realized how much it's about relationships, having a family culture, enjoying our kids. And we kind of came into our own as we were learning more about it. And I'll probably always lean a little bit that way. But I've certainly learned to relax and see some of the practical life skills that we do as part of our schoolwork, not an obstacle or a hindrance to what we're doing. And so, yeah, I also feel that same burden for people, for parents to feel confident that they can homeschool and it doesn't have to look like either two of those extremes. Yeah, it's so true. And I think the problem is when you're in those extremes is that, you know, some kids can handle that, but not all kids can handle that. Those extreme hours of sitting down. And that's why in the public school you see so many kids ending up on medication or labeled as special, you know, special ed, because it's not built for child development. Like young children really need time to move and they need more sensory input. They need to be outside more. And when you force kids to sit down for hours a day, it's really so counterproductive to their way of learning. And when when you look at history, you can see, wow, there's all these people who developed great minds, you know, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison. Those are people I didn't even include in the book. They were inventors and so intelligent. Blaise Pascal is one that I did include the book. He was a brilliant scientist and mathematician. Some of his principles are still used today. I think that that time that they had to explore their own ideas was a big part of their success. And this is what parents are sort of squashing in their families when they overschedule, they overdo curriculum, they overdo extracurriculars is you leave your child with no time for them to actually develop their own ideas, their own explorations, and then maybe develop that world changing invention that's inside of them to create. Yeah, I agree. Reading about some of the different people because they're all they were all very unique, some of them were well off, some of them had very limited circumstances, but their educations were each unique. I'm thinking of you have Laura Ingalls Wilder, Elizabeth Gouge. She's one of my favorite authors. The Little White Horse. Is that right? Yeah, that's one of her books. Yeah. Oh, I just love that book. The first time I read it, Ben Franklin, C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Blaise Pascal. So just reading the lives of each of these people, some of their parents had an excellent education. Some of them were limited, but yet they thrived in this environment. And it just shows that children are naturally born. They want to learn. And our our job as moms is just to spread the beast, not to force feed them information. Yeah. And, you know, a couple of them had actually really rough childhoods. Charles Dickens ended up being a child laborer for a season. His family was in a I think a work house or a poor house. Booker T. Washington was born into slavery. C.S. Lewis, his mom died when he was young, so he was homeschooled by his mom in the early years. And then he was sent off to boarding schools, a very difficult and devastating time in his life. But, you know, like in the case of Charles Dickens, then in high school, he was tutored one on one. So he lived with his tutor and his tutor's wife. So homeschooled by them. And, you know, that was this really precious time in his life that developed a lot of what was in him as a communicator. Thank God later on, he also came to faith. But, you know, I think that's also an encouragement is that things don't have to be perfect. You know, when you look at the lives of these people who achieve so much, some of them had financial difficulties. Some of them had, you know, a broken family. And and so I think it can be really reassuring for families who are right now feeling a lot of sense of failure or that inadequacy. Like I'm just we're just not we're not good enough. You know that it's not about perfection. It's about having an interest in adult. There was a Smithsonian study of genius that was done in the 60s, and it talked about geniuses or who have really achieved great things. There were some common denominators. One of them was having a caring adult. You know, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, it might have been his dad or his uncle. It was not, unfortunately, his mother, you know, having some time to explore their own interests. That was another big criterion. And so just recognizing that it's not about perfection. It's not about having this perfect environment. It's just about intentionality that you, you know, study your child, that you are attuned to your child. And when you notice your child has an interest, you start putting some effort into helping develop that. Even Booker T. Washington's mom, who was born into slavery, who was illiterate, was willing to do what she could to find opportunities. Like when she saw that Booker T. wanted to learn to read, she started finding opportunities for him. And that's what's so inspiring is that you just know your child enough to start paying attention and honoring some of their interests. And it doesn't all have to be you. Like at this point in history, there's so many resources. The child could learn how to be a nuclear scientist or atomic physicist or something through YouTube. I mean, there's like so much information available that almost anything can be learned. And so it's not about how smart you are or how much, you know, it's just about being willing to pay attention to your child's interests and facilitate their own interest led learning. Yeah. And I just think you as a parent, you know more about your child than anyone else. You care about them more than anyone else. You're going to do whatever it takes to find what they need to help them with their struggles and with their gifts. And so I like to think of it as when you have a child in school, kids have a different teacher every year and that teacher has to learn the student and it takes a couple months to do that. Whereas when you have just imagine having one teacher your whole life that is invested in you and knows everything about you, doesn't have to play that catch up every year of getting to know about you. They already know that they're in tuned and they're finding those resources based on your interests. That is us as parents. That is who we are. We are meeting the needs of our kids and we know them so well. So what do you think is one of the most important things for parents to focus on, especially for parents who feel like they're not equipped? Yeah. In the early years, I would say the most important thing to focus on is reading out loud to your children and connecting to your children. Because when you read out loud, you are building in your children imagination. You're building vocabulary, the composition skills that later on will help them be able to read a college textbook and write an essay on it are built during that comprehension that happens when your child is listening to you read aloud and then maybe drawing a picture about it or writing a story about it or making up their own imaginary games around it. And when you read beautiful stories out loud, you're also shaping virtue. And when you look at culture right now, there's a lot changing. We don't actually know what's going to be important in the future in terms of jobs. You know, it's hard to be like, OK, my child's in second grade and I think the way they'll be successful is to be a lawyer someday. And so we're going to we're going to train them to be lawyers or the way they'll be successful is to be a software programmer. A lot of those jobs could be taken over by AI. We don't really know. And so instead, you know, work on teaching your child a work ethic. Make sure they have some chores that they have to do every day in some areas of responsibility. Read virtuous stories out loud so they have an imagination about people in history who've done great things and who've overcome hardships. You read fairy tales and fables. So there's an understanding of like good versus evil and what it looks like to live a virtuous life. And when you do those things, you know, connect with your children through eye contact, reading aloud, teach them to work hard and encourage the development of ideas and virtue and character and imagination. Then they'll be equipped someday to do whatever they have to do. Obviously, you also are adding in some math drills or math teaching that's quality math instruction. This is good for early elementary. Then as they move into grades four and up, then you start adding in more composition and grammar and more sort of basic skill building. But in those early years, especially teaching them to love learning, to to read well and listen to books being read that just builds such a strong foundation of virtue, imagination, character or work ethic that will carry them into whatever they want to learn in the future. Yeah, I've seen that with our own kids. Whenever we have periods of time where we just can't get to everything, if we are overwhelmed or, you know, we had just had I came back from a trip where people have been sick and it's bare bones. We just always bring it back to the read aloud. That is something that is always there. Even in the summer, we don't do formal work during our break. But if we're having a day that we're at home, we are spending time reading aloud. Today we did Felicia and the Pot of Pinks from Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy book. We're always that that is kind of the staple. It always comes back to that. So I couldn't agree more. If you're reading aloud to your kids, then you are keeping that flow of ideas. You're keeping them inspired and reading aloud to them just causes them to want to learn more about the world around them. It gives them just kind of a spring springboard to start from that. I just think our kids, as soon as I finish reading aloud, they have all these ideas of creative play that they want to do. Yeah, I love that you brought that up. I just actually podcast with Dixie Dillon Lane, who wrote the book Skipping School, and she's a college history professor. And she was saying the same thing that, you know, she has so many people coming into college with no idea about history and really hating to learn about history. And she recommends as well teaching through stories, because when you when you read and especially like diverse stories, you know, we read missionary biographies. We read, you know, books about people who like the lost boys in Sudan as our kids got older. We read the historical fiction. We read biography, just such a wide variety and and mostly virtuous books. So like it was very important to me that books had a redemptive storyline. I wasn't going to read books to my children where it always ends up sad. It always ends up that the the protagonist is ruined or or that the protagonist does immoral things to get back at the bad people, where it sort of muddies the waters of who's heroic in the book. And I think, unfortunately, there's a lot of that now that literature is like muddying good and evil, highlighting a victim narrative. And it's very destructive to our own children's hope for the future. Like it does nurture nihilism to constantly be fed the idea that nothing really matters and nothing you do matters. And there's no real heroes in the world. Yeah, I agree. And I think the we just read through this past year, one of the books we read was God's double agent is the story of Bob. I don't think it's very well known, but after we finished reading it, my kids said it was one of the best books that I had ever read aloud to them. And it was more for the high schoolers. You know, some of the younger kids weren't into that as well. But it's just it was so inspiring to them. And I think they resonate with people that go through hardships. And if it's a Christian biography, they see how the Lord provided and brought them through it. If it's not, they, as you said, they can see how things worked out in the end and it inspires them for courage and bravery and things like that. That's so true, Sherry, it's such an asset to our children to have those stories built in, you look at the Bible, you know, God was constantly teaching his people through story, whether it was the parables, whether it was the stories of what they overcame. And I think it's important that we continue that model. So for parents who don't feel qualified, can you give them some encouragement on why they should be confident to teach their own kids? Yeah, that's another great question. It was interesting when I was podcasting recently with Dixie, she mentioned that even though she had a Ph.D. in teaching or a master's in education or something, I don't remember exactly what the qualification was that she'd still faced and dealt with that imposter syndrome. So I think that is very normal for you to feel inadequate. So first of all, don't beat yourself up for feeling inadequate. It's normal. Like as mothers, we just care so much. We're always going to have questions about whether we're doing enough and whether we're doing it right and whether we're messing up our kids, like we're always going to have those questions. And this is a big reason why I wrote my first book, Mothering by the Book, is just that the problem with fear is it pervades the atmosphere. You know, there's some studies that have come out recently about how when mothers begin to deal with their own nervous system regulation and when mothers get more calm and peaceful, then the children in the family also become more calm and peaceful. And so I think, you know, first of all, recognize that it's normal, but then also work on, you know, I would say in as a Christian, I would say work on taking those toxic thoughts captive, because in the Bible, it says that we have, you know, we're equipped for life and godliness. We have everything we need for life and godliness, that as he is in the world, so are we, that anything we ask, he'll give us. And so there's all these promises from the Lord that he'll equip us to do what we're called to do. And so if you as a mom feel like you're called to homeschool your children, trust that the Lord will equip you day by day. And you're not going to necessarily feel that in the moment. When I first started homeschooling, I did have those fears and questions. But then at some point I saw that my kids were, you know, becoming great learners themselves. And I stopped worrying about keeping up with a public school system that's like ruining kids. And so, you know, yeah, so I think that just recognize it's normal, but also continue to speak life to yourself. Continue to say, you know, God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind. Continue to just speak those God glorifying declarations over your family and yourself so that you start believing what's true. Because when you look at neuroscience, like a lot can change just just by what we believe and what we speak into the atmosphere. Yeah, if I could, I'd like to read just a small section from the beginning of your book that was inspiring to me because it reminded me of myself. It's when I first started homeschooling my children, I hadn't read many books about it and I didn't have a background in education. What I did have was a vision. I read a book by homeschool pioneers Raymond and Dorothy Moore, and in this book they included the stories of several homeschooling families and their daily routines. I can't remember which of their many books I read, but the picture they painted of days at home, reading books together by a cozy fire, taking walks down a tree lined road and sipping tea and munching on peanut butter toast around a flickering candle while they discussed the day's learning, lit a spark in me. That was my experience completely. I had a vision for how I wanted to raise our kids. We wanted to give them something better and we just believed that it was possible. We felt the Lord was calling us to do it. And I just wish that we could transfer that over to that mom or dad that is feeling the same way they want to give their child something better. Yeah, it's so encouraging to know that our home is one of the teachers, you know, Charlotte Mason's motto is education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life. And you think about just that advantage in itself, you know, kids in public schools are under fluorescent lights all day. There's not a lot of natural beauty in the classroom there. The library is being modernized like moment by moment. So the books reflect modern values that are probably not many of our Christian family values. And so there's a lot of disadvantages just in the atmosphere of the classroom and not to mention the physical, you know, bringing in germs from 30 different kids or, you know, the being under fluorescent lights, like not to mention some of those aspects. And so just just that your child is in your home, like in our home, we have art on the We have poetry. We we watch things that are uplifting. We have plants growing. We have, you know, chickens or we we watch birds or we go, you know, I mean, like our life is so full of beauty and so full of inspiration that just being in our home is one of the teachers. Like there's so many wonderful books and watercolor paints and just any kind of creativity that you want to pursue is available to you in our home. We have wonderful discussions. Like we're constantly talking about interesting things and we're reading and discussing the books together like our home, even if I'm not like right now, my youngest is 17 is going to be a senior. So it's not like I'm full time homeschooling, but my home is still this very interesting educational place that's already a big teacher. And then, you know, in the book, I have a chapter for each of those concepts, education, discipline and life, you know, so the discipline, like the habits that you're developing in your home, you're not expecting your children to sit at a desk all day and not move their bodies and be like so limited in their physical development. Instead, in the morning, you might be making breakfast together. And so they're getting like some science experiments as they decide, you know, how long it takes for an egg to boil or or how, you know, how long it takes for yeast to develop and and water. They're getting some so much motor skill training. They're getting categorization training. They're reading comprehension if they read a recipe. And then then the life of the home, the the habits of self-care, even like so many school children barely even have time for decent self-care in the morning. A child at home can, you know, sleep as much as they need to and brush their teeth and have some time to instruct those things. And the stress like I just feel for all those kids who in the morning are like shaken awake and rushed out the door with a Pop-Tart or something instead of being able to have a reasonable, healthy life, especially in those early, early years when transitions are harder for children. Yeah. The home is a life giving place. There's so much life happening in a home. And I think even for parents who are new to homeschooling, if it's like their first or second year and it may seem intimidating to think, oh, well, my home doesn't have a lot of art or I don't I don't even know any really great classical music or we don't have a lot of books or I'm not, you learn, you just learn and you grow. And my experience was our library grew the more we were homeschooling. And now we have bookshelves in every room in our house. And I can't fit all the books in our house. We have some in our garage of books that we don't read very frequently, but I just can't let go of. But you grow in those areas and you learn. I mean, I had a public school teaching experience and it paled in comparison to what I learned as a homeschool mom. I just learned so much. I'm still learning about history and art, things that were completely foreign to me. So you do grow the longer you're doing it and your education expands. It's so true. It's wonderful how much I've been able to learn through homeschooling my children and and also how many things I've been able to learn about. And that's another Charlotte Mason motto. She says education. It's not so much when you're done homeschooling. It's not so much what the child knows, but about how many of things the child knows and how what manner of things and how broad is their learning. So I just love that idea that we're not limited to only learning about California history in fourth grade or only learning this narrow scope of American history that we're really able to go so much deeper and broader because of the freedom we have in homeschooling. Yeah, I could not agree more. It's it's such a beautiful lifestyle. It's been one of the best decisions we've ever made for our family. And it's funny because back at the beginning we were so intimidated. I was so intimidated stepping out. And it is a little sad. Having been a public school teacher, you would have thought I would have been very confident. I was intimidated to teach my own kids. It's a weighty, weighty responsibility. But once you start and you're just if you can relax and see that you're just learning alongside them, it is so, so enjoyable. Not easy, not easy, but it is so enjoyable. It's true. And I'm glad you said that because it is true that homeschooling sometimes will make you feel pressed. It's challenging at times. But we were made for this. Like we were made to work. We were made to be creative. We were made in the image of God, who is a creative, orderly, diligent God. And so it's this honor. Like of all the things we could do with our lives, of all the possible potential callings or jobs, even how wonderful it is to get to homeschool our children. And really my like my family at this point in our life is supported because I homeschooled like my the years of research. And the years of learning about homeschooling, the years of experimenting and reading about education, philosophy and really studying children and education led to an award winning homeschool curriculum, the Peaceful Press, which now supports my family. And so it's just fabulous that what you're doing as you're homeschooling your children, it could it could lead to like a second half of life career. Even there might be you might get really interested in flower arranging or you might get really interested in videography. There's so many things that we get to study with our kids while we're homeschooling. There's this freedom that we don't know what it could lead to in our own second half of life as women that that we're not being limited because we're homeschooling. We're actually our horizons are expanding because of it. Right, right. I, I, that's been our experience. We've had more opportunities, more freedom since choosing the homeschool. So what would you say would be the biggest takeaway that you want parents to come away with after reading your book? Just confidence. I really want moms to feel like, yes, I can do this, that it's been done before history was homeschooled and I can stop being afraid and just figure out how I want to do this, because that's that's the bigger question is, how do you want to do it? Like you don't have to be so afraid that you have to copy some other system. It's really not that hard to teach a child to read. It's really not that hard to teach math to a child. And if you can't do it, there's a million other resources that can that can facilitate that, whether it's a co-op class, whether it's in your home, it's just that freedom to decide what do my children need in this season? It might change year to year. Like there might be a year where you're really focused on, um, like heavy duty, basic, uh, academics, because that was maybe neglected or maybe you're deschooling right now and your children have been taught to the test every year. And this is the year where you really do delight led learning. But you as a mom, as a leader of your, of your, you know, the in-home leader, I think a mom and dad are partnering on this together, but as the, you know, direct one responsible often for the day to day running of the home, like you get to have this freedom to learn with your kids and get excited about what you want to learn with them. Yeah, you get to decide you're the parent. So what is it that you want to pass down to your child? That's what you can focus on. That can be your education. You can decide what's important to you. You can pass down your values and you don't have to give all that up to the whims of what everyone else thinks is a proper education. I love the freedom that we have. It's really wonderful. Absolutely. It's such an honor and such a joy to get to learn with our children and really make discoveries about the world with them. Yeah. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me. This has been an inspiring conversation for me, and I've read a couple chapters of your book and I'm excited to keep going. I know I'm going to be reading some of these stories to our kids because I know they love hearing about other people who are homeschooled. So could you just tell everyone one more time where they can find you? Yeah, if you go to inspiredhomeschoolbook.com, you'll find my book. And if you put your order number in there, you can also get access to the Peaceful Press Master Booklist if you want to get started on that reading allowed habit. And then that also is gives you access to my website, thepeacefulpress.com, where you can find my homeschool resources. All right. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Sherry. What a joy to chat with you today. Well, thank you for joining us today. I have been encouraged and inspired. I can't wait to finish reading about some of the characters in her book. So thanks for watching. This podcast has been an encouragement to you. Would you take a moment to leave a review? This helps spread the word so others can get this homeschooling encouragement that is so needed today. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time on the Our Life Homeschooling podcast.