You, you tell me.

You know, I, I think a few things.

Um, first, we are very reactive as a society.

We're reactive parents.

We wait until there's crises, and then we go to solve it, but when you're constantly fixing things, and especially in education, it's going to then become an emotional response, and it's going to be a very hard conversation in the time of crises.

B- but I think that you're very right that most parents wait until school age to have a very brief conversation, and it typically goes the way my husband and mine went, which is private or public? You know, what district do we live in? You know, where would the kids be going to school, or do we wanna pay for private? As a whole, we're in this mindset as parents, when we have babies, we, we do the reading.

How, how are we gonna sleep-train, and, and what does this mean? And toddlers, we're watching for the milestones.

It's very beautiful.

But if they don't know that, can you just tell us a little bit about your background?

Sure.

Well, I'll actually, I'll actually go back a little bit further, um, than my introduction.

So I am a product myself of the school system.

And I think if you looked at me on paper when I was a student, you'd say, "She's a great student and, um, is thriving in the school system." I got good grades.

I would say I was a pretty, um, system-compatible learner where I could definitely performance learn or appear to be learning well because, um, I'm just a natural rule follower, and I wanna stay organized.

And more than anything at that age, I didn't want to get in trouble.

Mm-hmm.

absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay.

All right, so I'm halfway done and I'm going to talk about one that I actually only got a sample of.

And here's another tip.

If any of y'all are on Facebook, there are so many fragrance Facebook groups that you can buy samples from.

Like people will sell samples.

Well,

Why some that are in the system don't trust it?

There's the educational side.

There's the just straight, let's look at the facts, let's look at the research on the educational side, and that is how much formal instruction a child needs and whether or not the school system as it's set up in classrooms of 25 plus kids, one teacher, is able to deliver that.

And so we s- are sending kids for seven and a half hours a day.

They're receiving less one-on-one attention and instruction, one-on-one, than a commercial break.

And their whole day then, coming home and having more homework and more, you know, I'll use that buzzword, of rigor, when the educational, the academic side isn't there.

And we know through research, okay, kids need one-on-one support.

Uh, so the cons, the cons are, like, debatable and can be, you know, over time they can kind of turn into pros.

who, who listen to this podcast almost all send their kids to school, that they would disagree with?

Oh.

Gosh.

Kids know more about their learning experience than we give them credit for, and we need to listen to their behavioral signals.

And I can see that now in myself when I was little, but I think a lot of times, you know, I watch on social media the beginning of the school year, and you have the five and six-year-olds just breaking down going to kindergarten, and you have the moms breaking down, and dads, alongside them.

And I've seen the videos of the kids screaming, "I don't wanna go to school." You know, it's so easy for us as parents to write that off.

You know, "Oh, no, no kids wanna go to school.

And so you hear all the time, "Well, what if they fall behind? Or what if they lose their skills that they once had?" How do you trust your kid in those moments and their pace?

grade level were you teaching?

Fifth.

Fifth.

Fifth grade.

Yeah.

And I was surprised.

I was frustrated that I couldn't make changes and it just fueled this fire in me to keep going.

And I was thinking they might've been younger because I do have a lot of moms that come to me that are like, is it possible to shift gears, to switch lanes at this point when I have someone that's going into middle school? Can you talk about what that process looked like and how you built confidence or what you would tell moms who are asking those questions?