558: A Mother’s Mission to Transform Learning

In this powerful conversation, we explore how traditional schooling can quietly extinguish a child’s love of learning, why hands-on, curiosity-driven education creates extraordinary outcomes, and how parents can reclaim confidence in their role as educators. This episode challenges deeply held beliefs about intelligence, socialization, and “expert” authority—and offers a hopeful, practical vision for raising resilient, capable, lifelong learners.

Highlights:

• Public schooling can destroy a child’s love of learning. Rigid systems, labeling, and forced conformity cause many children to emotionally and intellectually shut down.
• Homeschooling restores curiosity, confidence, and natural intelligence. Learning at a child’s pace allows them to thrive academically and emotionally.
• Children learn best when education is experiential and applied to life. Real-world, hands-on learning creates true understanding.
• Modern education has removed true critical thinking. Reasoning and logic were replaced with memorization and compliance.
• Certified experts often fail children more than help them. Medication is often pushed instead of addressing root causes.
• Children develop at different rates and not in linear ways. Homeschooling allows natural leaps, pauses, and acceleration.
• Socialization in homeschooling is more natural and healthy. Mixed-age interaction reflects real-life relationships.
• One-on-one attention dramatically accelerates learning. Personalized instruction produces faster mastery.
• Parents are capable educators without degrees. Effective teaching does not require formal credentials.
• Education should protect a child’s love of learning above all else. Once curiosity is crushed, recovery is difficult.

Intro:

The holidays are here, so happy holidays. You can always tell when the holidays are here when the cyber sales have started. It feels like they start earlier and earlier. I'm just waiting for them to start in August at some point. So they're here now and my two favorite ones popped up early this year. I just love it.

My favorite magnesium products, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Use coupon code LTH to get a total of 35% off. That adds a discount on top of their current sale. You'll want to run to livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and grab a few jugs of that magnesium soak. This is the time of year every year where I restock for my entire family because it's the biggest sale that she puts on every year.

I love this magnesium soak. You put your feet in a few inches of water with just two ounces of this soak and you absorb grams of magnesium. You will have better sleep and more energy. It lowers stress levels, so you feel better. It's wonderful. If you haven't tried it already, you've got to try it. It's also a great Christmas gift, and she has some amazing, very high-quality Christmas gifts over there.

I say that because I know Kirsten. I've gotten to know her throughout the years, and she's meticulous when it comes to all of her ingredients. She has shea butter in some of her products, and she has an acerola cherry powder for the most natural vitamin C you can get. It's all very close to nature and has great ingredients. I love her products. 

My favorite is any of the magnesium products. I love the muscle cream, for example. I have a jar by my bed, and if any of us, my husband and I, wake up with a little muscle cramp or muscle tension, I take a goop of that jar, rub it on my hands, and rub it all over my neck. I fall asleep so quickly because all the muscles melt and all that tension melts away. I love the magnesium products. They're at livingthegoodlifenaturally.com.

Be sure to use coupon code LTH. The sale happens until they run out of supplies, so you'll want to grab that as soon as possible. Make sure when you check out that you add the coupon code LTH, as in Learn True Health, so you get the extra discount, which totals 35% off. Anytime you're buying throughout the year, you can use that coupon code. She allows listeners to do repeat orders and always get the discount, which is great because not everyone does that. Some people only give a first-time sale discount, and she gives a discount every time you buy. Use coupon code LTH every time you buy from livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Anytime I mention something that I really believe in, I always try to get a discount from them, and usually you can use that same coupon code. It's worth a shot. Anytime I mention something, try coupon code LTH. More likely than not, you're going to get a discount for mentioning that coupon code.

The next big thing is my favorite sauna. In fact, you might hear it — it's beside me. You hear that? That is me knocking on my amazing and beautiful full-spectrum light-therapy healing sauna. It's wonderful because you feel so comfortable in it. It only gets up to about 130 degrees, which sounds hot, but when you're sitting in a sauna it's comfortable and very easy to breathe. The traditional saunas are between 160 to 180 and they're very hard to breathe in. The air is so dry and hot. This sauna is comfortable to sit in because the heat from the light and the near, mid, and far infrared soak into your tissues and heat you from the inside out. You're not waiting for the heat to penetrate in. The light frequency gets in and heats you on a deeper level.

There are many studies about sauna therapy and why it's good, from cancer studies to longevity studies, cholesterol studies, weight-loss studies, detox studies, heart-health studies, and studies for athletes to repair faster, recover faster, and get rid of aches and pains faster. It's safe for children. You have to work your way up, so they say one minute for every year. A 10-year-old can do 10 minutes. It is safe for the elderly. Obviously we have to watch out for hydration, so you can do 10-minute increments.

Getting in a sauna once a day or once every other day increases your longevity and decreases all-cause mortality. Go Google it. Search “benefits of sauna therapy studies.” You're going to be amazed. The benefits increase when you're using infrared saunas because most studies are on traditional saunas. When you look at infrared sauna studies, you'll see amazing things.

You can go to learntruehealth.com/sunlighten to listen to one of my episodes about the specific Sunlighten saunas from the creator Connie Zak, the founder of Sunlighten. To get the amazing discount, they're hosting an awesome cyber sale now. You can go to learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna — that's learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna — and check out all their different types of saunas. They have a personalized sauna that folds up like a massage table and can go under the bed or in the closet if you live in a small space. I live in a pretty small townhouse condo, and our sauna is like a tardis. It looks small on the outside, but my husband and I can sit inside together, side by side, if we want to. That is their one-to-two-person sauna that fits in a small office. It's tucked into my corner, which is really cool. They have bigger ones for the whole family, or if you want to lie down in a sauna, you can get the larger ones. They're awesome. I highly recommend them. They're non-toxic. A lot of the cheaper ones have toxic glues and adhesives, and you don't want that. You want something guaranteed to help your body heal and not create more of a toxic burden. So check that out at learntruehealth.com/sunlightensauna.

If you have any questions, I'd love for you to reach out to me. You can come to our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. You can go to learntruehealth.com/group to get there, or search Learn True Health on Facebook and ask questions. Jump in and ask questions. I love answering questions. We also have other experts in the group who answer questions. We're an amazing community looking to always take our health to the next level. Some people are on a healing journey, and some people want to learn new things. They geek out on it. I constantly geek out on everything I'm learning. If you want to stay in touch, come to learntruehealth.com, scroll to the bottom, and add yourself to the newsletter.

I have some exciting things coming up in the next few months. I have my course on anxiety, where I worked with several complete strangers who suffer from intense anxiety, and I showed them how to turn their anxiety off in 90 seconds or less. Then I taught them tools that rewire the brain and turn off anxiety, and within weeks these participants had between 70% to 100% decrease in their anxiety, including complete elimination of their chronic anxiety problems. It's so exciting. I'm taking what I've been doing for the last 20 years with clients and putting it into a powerful course that is simple to do. It's not too heady or intense. It's simple, step-by-step tools that work, that turn off your anxiety and help you rewire, reprogram, retrain your brain to stop choosing anxiety and instead create excitement, motivation, joy, peace, and calmness in your body. If that excites you, be sure to get on my newsletter so you're the first to know when it launches, which will be in the next few months.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we're turning a ripple into a tidal wave and helping over a million people learn true health.

Enjoy today's interview. 

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 588.

Ashley James (0:09:34.712)

I am so excited for today's guest. We have barbierevera.com here today. I'll try that again. I didn't mean to say that. It's so funny. You're now a website. I'm sorry. Your website. Actually, I'll keep it. Barbie's not a website. Barbie's an amazing guest. I'm excited to have you here. I also wanted to let guests know about barbierivera.com, which is her website. Of course, the links to everything that Barbie does are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

You can get the first six chapters of her book for free when you go to barbierivera.com. I'm excited for people to dig into your story, dig into your book, and learn from you today. So the school system tried to drug your son and failed, and you have this amazing story, and I'm so excited for us to learn from you.

I think parents, students, grandparents, anyone who has a child or a student in their life that they're helping, that is struggling — this interview is for them. I also think on some level it's cathartic for us whom the school system failed. The school system failed me. I spent half my life believing that I'm stupid and the school system's perfect and I'm the one that was broken.

Until I learned — it was mostly from John Taylor Gatto — where I started to have these revelations that this system is broken. It is not designed for every learning style. If your learning style is outside of the box of the education system, then you fall behind. A lot of these children end up being emotionally damaged, sometimes for life, because they have been led to believe that they're lesser than because they didn't fit in that system. The system is not designed to help every type of learner reach their full potential. So we've been lied to.

I'm excited to dive into this because I think it's an aha moment. It's a paradigm shift when you get that you and every single person out there have this amazing ability to learn. Children are amazing learners. They love learning, and they all have different styles of learning. Not to subjugate them to one system. We should instead look to support their learning style. So much comes with that. Plus, when we look at how to support optimal brain health — thinking for example, ADHD — supporting optimal brain health, there's such a turnaround that happens in a child's life.

I have a 10-year-old. If I don't let him get just one factor — good enough sleep — if he loses a few hours of sleep for a few nights in a row, he is not all right. No one around him is all right either. It's just this one little thing. If he eats something he has food sensitivities to, for three days he's having emotional outbursts. He's not a difficult kid. He's wonderful. Every single parent goes, “Your kid's so easy. So amazing.”  Well, you don't have him 24/7. He's a handful at times, but I'm watching and I'm seeing these little things — sleep or too much screen time — and we do screen detoxes all the time. Three days off the screen, he’s a new person. These little tiny things make such a huge difference.

They do for adults too, but we tend to mask it a bit better than kids. Kids have no ability to mask. They have no filter. They let all their stuff out. If you learn all the little things you can do to support your learner in your life, including yourself as an adult, and then learn that the system's broken and what you need to do as a parent or a guardian to help support that child, it is life changing. It is night and day. That's why I'm so excited to have you on the show.

So Barbie, welcome.

Barbie Rivera (0:13:55.311)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Ashley James (0:13:57.717)

Absolutely. Let's just dig right in. So your website, barbierevera.com, first six chapters of your book for free, which is exciting. You did say before we hit record, you know the real transformation, the real meat, of course, is in the second half of the book, but the first half really sets it up, and people can go, wow, they see themselves in that story in the first six chapters.

Tell us your story.

Barbie Rivera (0:14:22.393)

Yes. Okay, so I'm an artist, really. That's what I wanted to do. I mean, there were a couple of goals that I had in my life. I wanted a bunch of kids. I'm talking eight. I have four. Actually, I have five. My closest friend, I'm going back 20 years, maybe longer—actually, longer. She got ill and she wasn't going to recover, and she asked me to take her eight-year-old.

I'm like, okay, what do you say to that? No? You can't say no to that. So that was my fifth boy, my fifth child. He would make it four boys and a girl. He is in the middle of my two older ones and in the middle of my two younger ones. To me, when you have a family of four and you take one in, it's nothing. It really doesn't change the dynamic at all. If I would have had one and taken one in, I think it would have been a disaster. 

I come from a huge family. I've always wanted a huge family. My grandmother had 13, my parents had five, I have aunts and uncles that had nine and seven.

Anyway, so I'm an artist. Not formally trained, but I can paint, I can draw. If you're, “Hey, I'm having a wedding and I need little favors,” I'm like, “I got you. I know what to do.” And it looks nice. It's nice. Anyway, so that's what I was going to do, and I find myself—this was 33 years ago, actually 34 years ago—my oldest son Damon was six.

I don't know that there's a better six-year-old. If you were to describe the best traits of a six-year-old, my son, you could check all those boxes. He was super well-behaved, very respectful, very easygoing. I don't think he ever threw a fit, no tantrums. He spoke two languages and would go with the grandfather to the Keys and go fishing, and there were no problems. No one ever complained about him, and it's not that I'm a parent that's not going to listen to complaints, it was just that he was easygoing.

So when he went to school, I'm like, they're going to love him. I was thinking his first grade would be my first grade in Cincinnati, which I think I was in first grade in 1970. In 1970, first grade was three recesses, which was an extended lunch, a half-hour break in the morning and a half-hour break after lunch. No homework, no standardized testing. It was a slow gradient of mastering skills. The teacher was this older woman who played the piano.

It was a lovely thing. I remember, I had artistic skills back then, that when the type of encouragement I got, we were learning words: tie and pie. I drew a pie with the P-I-E, which I was super happy that my handwriting was good, and I drew a pie. She was, “Barbara, that pie looks so good, I can almost smell Thanksgiving.” She sent me across the hall to the second-grade teacher to show them my pie. It was a big deal. She even called my mom: “Barbara's pie has the entire first floor of the school just wanting pumpkin pie.”

She didn't have to do any of that, but that's how it was. This was a poor section of Cincinnati. This was the East End. This was not a private school or whatever. This was the East End in Cincinnati. You could see the river from my back porch. It was about a mile away—the Ohio River.

So I'm under the delusion that my son is going to get that much affinity and that it's not going to be a pressure cooker. His first day he came home with three hours of homework, and I'm like, what are we doing? He had to write a book report, and he couldn't read. It's not like that he can’t read, he also couldn't drive a car, and he couldn't manage finances. He's six.

So I did the wrong thing, which I thought was being a good mom. Looking back, I was being a horrible mom. No offense to any moms doing what I'm about to tell you. I sat and I worked with him on his homework, and I explained everything to him. He was more miserable and more miserable and more miserable, and the words got bigger and bigger, and the concepts got, Why are we talking about elections? Whatever happened to “George Washington was the first president”? Simplicity.

On the second Friday of school, the teacher pulled me aside. Second Friday—we're ten days into the school year. She says, “Barbie, your son is mentally handicapped.” Those were her exact words. “He will most likely need a prescription for the rest of his life to learn.” I'm like, there is no way anybody is putting a pill in his body.

What the teacher wanted me to do was sign off on him getting evaluated. There is no way my son is going to get prodded and probed. He speaks two languages. I do not speak two languages. I'm going to argue that you want a school full of this kid. He doesn't lie. He doesn't cheat. He's respectful. He raises his hand. But they destroyed.

Then I did another thing that was horrible as a mom. I kept him in school because in August or September I was seven months pregnant with my fourth one. I'm like, okay, I have a one-year-old, a three-year-old, a six-year-old, and I'm pregnant. There's no way I could homeschool him. There's just no way. I'm, I'm going to end up doing more harm.

That was false because looking back, and I wrote this. This is my analogy: I left my son in a burning building with a beautiful lunchbox, a great haircut, Ninja Turtle shoes, but he was in a burning building. I could see the fire and I could smell the smoke.

Ashley James (0:21:41.312)

What do you mean when you said they destroyed him, his love of learning?

Barbie Rivera (0:21:45.718)

Yes, his love of learning. At the end of first grade, he learned one thing from the public school system: that he was stupid, and those were his words. “That's a knife through my heart.” By Christmas, he was shut down. By Christmas of that year, you could see this light in his eye just went out because every day he is going into eight hours, seven or eight hours, forced to sit in a chair.

When I was in first grade, we were not forced to sit in a chair. The seat work was the lesser part of the day. Most of it was singing songs in a circle—Farmer in the Dell. “okay, we're going to play this game.” They were all learning games. It wasn't just “do what you want.” There was structure, and the structure was fun, like, “okay, now it's time for science. Get your magnifying glasses, put on your coats. We're going outside. It's snowing. Let's see if we can discover something.” It was exciting.

Now it was just paper and paper in a packet, paper in a packet and a pencil. That was his day. He was just shut down, overwhelmed. He was expected to write book reports before he could read.

I'm like, “That makes absolutely no sense.” The teacher argued, “Well, his capacity for learning”… I'm like, “There's nothing wrong with his capacity for learning. Did you not hear me? He is fluent in two languages. He can learn.” He knows how to make himself macaroni and cheese. It's the box stuff, which isn't the greatest, but he could do those things. He can help me with his brothers and his sisters.

When I say, “Damon, bring me the diaper bag,” he'll gladly bring it. If I'm cooking, he'll sit with the baby while the baby's in his little car seat and tell him jokes or engage. He's an active participant in the family and loves his siblings.

It just—he stopped playing the way he used to play. He stopped creating the way he used to create. It was really hard to have the front-row seat to see his decline. I'm, “My God, this guy has his whole life to fall apart, but he's not going to fall apart on my watch when he's six.” Even if he was special needs, even if he was mentally handicapped, he shouldn't feel stupid, and the drugs aren't going to solve it anyway.

If we speak to the drugs, the drugs are under this classification. It's called CNS medication, and it stands for central nervous system. So essentially they wanted to destroy or alter his brain and his spine before his baby teeth were out. That was somehow the cure.

I'm like, “Will it help him read?” I already knew the answer. No. “But it'll manage his behavior.” His behavior doesn't need to be managed.

I don't know what we're doing. He wasn't doing anything. That's the thing. Out of all four of mine, he was the most chill. Seriously, if you gave him blocks, he would sit on the ground and play with blocks. If I would pull him to a chair—and I feel I'm a very hands-on mother. I read stories to my kids every night.

There was a routine: dinner, clean up after dinner, playtime, showers, baths, snack, brush your teeth. “Now I'm going to read to you. I'll read you or tell you a story every night.” I mean, it was years because when Damon gets to be six, there's a three-year-old and there's a one-year-old that I'm going to read the stories to. Then the baby grows up, so they had stories their whole life.

They had Easter egg hunts. We had Santa. We did letters to Santa. I'm very hands-on. If I'm cooking something in the kitchen, they help me. When I go to the grocery store and I need spaghetti sauce, I have them pick it out. I'm giving a choice. “Hey, here's four jars. It's the same thing.” They don't know that. “Which one should I get?” They get it. And I'm like, “Hey, do you know that tonight's spaghetti was amazing because of the sauce you picked?”

So they felt they were loved. They felt that my life has benefited because they're in it. They weren't constantly driven away or told, “Shut up,” or, “You're being too noisy,” or anything. It wasn't that. They were nurtured, I would say, and they were not allowed to have bad manners. They weren't allowed to say bad words. They weren't allowed to kick and hit. They weren't allowed to throw a tantrum in public.

I think because I didn't allow it, they didn't do it. “okay guys, when you get up in the morning, go to the bathroom. Then you come in and you make up your bed.” Do I think it's going to be military standard? No, but they can bring the cover up, and they can put the pillow on top. It's simple. To me that's part of managing a family. I felt I was on point.

But I was under the delusion that he's going to have the experience that I had in school. Earlier you said something—the system is broken. The system is not broken. The system is intentionally, and this is strong, ruining our children.

If you have a flat tire, okay, you fix the tire. But if your bicycle has been altered to where it takes you into a ditch, that's something else.

I've been doing this for 30-something years, and I see what is happening in the school system. It's a one-way ticket to that ditch. If the child is B, he gets labeled gifted and the work gets piled on. If he's slow, he gets labeled this. If he mixes up the P and the G, that's dyslexia. There's a label for everything. I'm like, “Life is actually not that.”

I sometimes forget why I walked into the kitchen. Sometimes I forget what I named my own children. You know what I'm saying? But that doesn't mean I have a mental defect, because I do know what their name is. Maybe I didn't sleep last night, or I'm hungry, or I'm distracted, and I go to my son, I'm, “okay, you—what did I name you again? Whoever you are, could you please take the trash out?” I reckon it's a joke.

Except these kids are getting labeled and then drugged for being kids. I argue that I don't know when it happened—if it was the 40s, if it was the 50s, if it was the 60s, maybe earlier, maybe later—but the pharmaceutical companies were, “Hey, here's a whole population of people we could be making money off of.” So we're going to use our vocabulary words.

Where people used to think “kids are always more active than adults,” we're going to make that a label. Children are more active than adults as a natural consequence of planet Earth. We're going to turn that into a label and we're going to call them hyperactive. Then we're going to shut them down. I've seen these kids that have been on these drugs, and the parents are, “Look, he's focused.” I'm, “okay, mom and dad, if you were in high school and you went to a pot party or your friend was drinking at one of these teenage parties, and they look at a vase for three hours, one inch from the vase, and they are, ‘Wow, look at this,’ I go, that's not focused. Those are drugs.”

Children have shorter attention spans than adults. Now it's labeled. When I was growing up, it wasn't. It was an understanding of life. When I was in first grade, we got instructed in short spurts of time. We would spend—I remember it—15 minutes on handwriting. Then that was it. Pencil to paper, practicing the alphabet. Then we switched to something else. It was a short session. Then there would be a game. Then a short session. Then there would be a song. Then a short session. I loved it. I learned. I was reading chapter books by the time I was at the end of second grade. That wasn't because I was gifted. The majority of my classmates were the same.

Yet now it's different. Now, the scary thing is I'm seeing sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth graders that don't know a sentence starts with a capital letter. That's frightening. The statistics now are—I might be off, I don't have it in front of me—but 57% of American adults from the ages of 17 to 75 read at or below a sixth-grade level.

That's terrifying. I see it. I see it, and it's almost comical, but it's not. When my school has a field trip and the kids are going to the zoo, and I think we're being super clear: “Please send them with a packed lunch that doesn't need to be in a microwave.” Somebody already sends a can of SpaghettiOs.

What can we do with this?

I'd say that's almost comical. But to me, the education has deteriorated so horribly. I eventually homeschooled, and then I transitioned into a small private school. In reality, I would be what's considered a micro school because I have less than 50 kids in my kindergarten to 12th grade. I'm in a storefront in Miami.

In the summertime, I had three different teenagers come to me from a school that is a $30,000-a-year school. I'm about ten or eleven thousand a year. Thirty thousand a year, and the school boasts one psychologist per four students. So these boys come because the school was closing. They now need a school, and the parents are looking for a small school. On paper, it sounds wonderful.

Parents show up. These are three separate boys. They're not related at all. Three separate appointments, three separate interviews. The kids walk in, and I already know.

I already know I'm dealing with second-grade level. I sit. I just wrote on a piece of paper. I have a high-school assessment—there was no way these kids could do it, so I wasn't even going to bring that out. So I'm, “okay, could you write your name for me?” It looked like a first grader. Total—letters all different sizes. No space between the first name and the last name. I'm, “These are the things we correct in first grade. Not corrected.”

“Write three sentences about yourself.” Didn't know how to do it. None of these boys from this school. “Give me 100, take away 81.” One for one, the kids reach for the calculator. I'm like, “No, no, no, no, no. You don't get to use my calculator.” “That's the way we use it.”

Now again, I'm cramming a lot into this. You have the term “special accommodation” in school, and there are valid points to special accommodation. If one of my children was born deaf, I definitely want a hearing aid. If they need a wheelchair, absolutely—we need ramps, we need hearing aids, we need all of that. Those are special accommodations.

However, now if the child gets labeled, there are special accommodations such as: they give them calculators in kindergarten, and they're allowed to keep the calculators until 12th grade and use them on all tests, quizzes, and exams. I'm, “That's hilarious. We just made them stupid. They'll never be able to run a business on their own if they can't think mathematically.”

I have students now. I teach pre-algebra in my school. Some of the kids will say, “Barbie, I'm never going to use it.” I go, “That is absolutely not true.” I go, “In life, your problems are going to be multi-step. It's not all two plus two. When you buy a house, you have to be able to sustain a thought from beginning to end. There's a lot to that action.”

Even if you plan a wedding, plan your graduation, there's a lot to that. When you can stay with a math problem from beginning to end, that develops that problem-solving skill. That is a skill. And they're like, “okay,” and I'm like, “Yes.” So then they get it.

So when we give these calculators to these kids, they don't have that problem solved. They've not touched problem solving. They're dependent on a device.

The other special accommodation which has come up a lot since COVID is called the reading pen. You can Google reading pen, and there's always a fancy name for something because then it makes it sound, “I need this.” They're about the size of a cigar. One end of it could be the head of a fox, an owl, a dog, or a cow. They're super cute.

What the student does is they take the reading pen and they put it over the words on the page and it reads to them. They're allowed to have this reading pen for all things that they read—texts, materials, books, worksheets—and they can use it on a quiz. So now the kids that can't remember the sound of the letters of the alphabet, we just give them a reading pen and then they don't have to.

I'm like, “Now there's the double whammy. Now they can't read and they can't do math. So what are we doing? Seriously, what are we doing?”

When I told you I was being the good mom, when I wasn’t. You have parents—they love their children, but they are parrots to the pharmaceutical and psychiatric and psychological community of, “My son doesn't obey. They don’t obey me because they're ADHD.” That is a load of crap. Make your son put his shoes away. “He can't put his shoes away because he's ADHD.” That's a lie. You may have to pick his body up, make his arm pick up those shoes while you're holding them, and you walk them into the closet and you put them down, and then you say thank you. And then you do the next thing, and then you do the next thing, and then you do the next thing. You don't have to be mean about it.”

I recall my youngest son. I'm in Miami. It's 100 degrees eleven months out of the year, and my kids all played outside. They all got filthy every day. My youngest son comes in. He goes, “I'm not taking a bath.” I'm like, “That is not true. It's time to take a bath.” “No.” I'm, “I pick him up, turn the shower on, and I'm in the shower with him fully dressed.” I'm like, “You're taking a bath,” and he's screaming his head off. I don't care. He's not getting into bed like that. He's not going to eat dinner like that. If a seed were to fly on his body, it would plant itself and grow. That's how dirty he was. This little three-year-old is not running the show. I'm running the show.

What did he learn from that? The next time I say, “You're going to take a bath,” he's like, “Yes, I'm going to take a bath.” Whether I want to or not, I'm, “I'm not asking your permission. I'm not consulting you the same way I'm not allowing you to eat ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

That's parenting. That brings up an interesting thing, because I'm a single mom. I'm the executive director of this family. I'm in charge of the money. I'm in charge of the activities. If these kids won't put their shoes away, that reflects my skill as an executive director. What if I was the manager of McDonald's and nobody worked? I have a full shift. Nobody works. Nobody will listen to me. That's not on them. That's on the manager.

My youngest one—thank goodness he was born last. I had Damon. My daughter was easygoing. My son Adam, easy peasy. Then Michael. I swear I think his first word was, “And another thing.” I'm like, “Oh boy, oh boy, here we go.” It wasn't that he was bad. He was just different.

He was very strong, and I don't want to break the strong. I don't want to break that. But at the same time, I've had parents say, “My child is free-spirited, and we let him go to bed when they want.” That to me is crazy because no matter how free-spirited they are, you still have to obey the traffic lights. Come on, mom and dad. I couldn't wake him up in the morning because he looked just so peaceful.” Come on. You're setting them up to fail. Getting them up on time is not going to harm anybody.

Ashley James (0:41:54.321)

More importantly, getting them to bed on time. Yes, that is the thing. Especially children who are neurodivergent. More often than not, it is harder for them to fall asleep. Their brains are going. But that routine you described, that bedtime routine, is so important. Having that nice shower, having that wind-down with the storytelling, that is so important. But bedtime routine starts after dinner.

That's my thing. Don't go to screens. Don't turn on TV. It is 6 p.m. dinner or 7 p.m. dinner maximum, and then it is immediately the bedtime routine. They're not falling asleep right away, but they're beginning the bedtime routine. The whole thing takes about two to three hours for me from start to finish with my son. The whole routine. But that's part of their learning hygiene. They're learning self-care.

He never wants to go to sleep ever. He'll cry. “I can't believe it's bedtime already. I can't believe the day's already over.” He's just so sad about it because he wants to go have more fun. “Can I just have five more minutes of this? Can I just have the…” He will turn the five minutes into five hours. If I left him alone, he would pull an all-nighter. I have to be his executive function.

If I let it slip because I get this, “It's the summer,” or “It's the weekend,” and if he misses, if he just goes to bed a little bit late, he still wakes up at the same time. But now he has less sleep. Less sleep for kids is ten times worse mentally and emotionally than for adults. We can kind of self-medicate. We drink some kind of caffeine to mask the feeling of being tired. We do some kind of sugary thing in the afternoon to try to pick us up. Not me, but in general adults will do caffeine in the morning, sugar in the afternoon, alcohol at night. That's the self-medication cycle of adults to mask the fact that they are not being responsible enough to go to bed on time.

I have several interviews about sleep hygiene. Just type in sleep or sleep hygiene in LearnTrueHealth.com. It gives amazing and detailed explanations as to how to set yourself up, especially if you have insomnia, for amazing sleep. But we have to be so protective of children's sleep, and we're really setting them up for failure, especially learning failure, if we don't have them go to bed early enough.

My son's bedtime—for me, I want to be into the bedtime routine around seven. I'd love to have him asleep by eight. He's ten. He has friends whose bedtime is 10, 10:30, 11. That is too late. That is absolutely crazy. I'd rather he fall asleep at seven, but somewhere around eight, I'd love that because then his body can naturally wake up when it wants to, and we know it has enough sleep.

But I see it in his behavior for days. For several days, I see it in his behavior. Food is a big thing—processed food. I see that. If he does maybe go to a friend's house and have some junk food, I see it in his behavior for days. It's not massively overt. He's not punching holes through walls. He's not a human ping pong ball. It's just that I can tell his emotional regulation is off, and he's so sensitive to that. Just little changes in diet and in lifestyle—sleep, not enough movement—is another one.

I have him in some kind of physical activity. I homeschool. I don't know if you know that. I have him in some kind of physical activity every day. I think again, we adults need the same thing. We need to go for walks at least. Get out, move around, or put some Zumba on YouTube and just move around in your living room. I love to run up and down my stairs in my house doing cleaning. It's just, I'm going to carry one thing at a time up and down the stairs. I get so many steps in.

They actually think there was a longevity study that showed people who live in homes with multiple floors live independently longer and have healthier lives as seniors. It just makes sense. We're protecting our ability to be physically functional.

Children, if they're sitting around all day, sloths or on iPads or whatever, and you're, “But it's the weekend,” they don't get exercise. You'll see it in their behavior for days. They don't get their sleep. It gets disrupted by not enough exercise. It's kind of having a puppy, to be honest. You have to run them, they're good. You have to feed them well. You have to run them. You have to bathe them. You have to give them time to sleep. Having kids is having dogs in a lot of ways.

Barbie Rivera (0:47:02.527)

It absolutely is because the other thing that creeps up on you is they're growing. I had one of my children, he's almost six foot four, and I'm five four, and the fathers were five seven. On my mom's side of the family, people are tall. My son grew six inches in one year when he was, I don't know, 12 to 13. When they were little, he would sleep for 12 hours at night for three days in a row, eat everything, and then go three days back to normal eating and normal sleep habits.

You don't necessarily see that, and then if a family member visits every three months, they see it. They go, “My gosh, Adam, you've grown a foot,” but you don't see it when you're there every day. You just know that it's there. So you have to pack that body with good food, and you have to make sure they are getting sleep.

For me, just what you said, I think I had dinner at five thirty or six, and that was when the nighttime routine started. Okay, the bedtime routine started. My younger one, I could leave in the tub and I would watch him. I also had my routine too, because I would do the laundry. I would start doing the daily laundry at seven o'clock at night. “Hey, Damon, can you watch Michael in the tub? Bathroom door's open. He's playing in the tub. I'm going to go put a load of laundry in.” I come back and they knew the routine, and it was the little ones.

The younger you were, you're the first one to go. First one in the tub.

It was a routine, and that stability made for a very peaceful household. People say, “You have four kids.” I got it, and I got another one in there. I have a fifth one in there. Yes, it was peaceful because it was managed. I was in control of the schedule. I was in control of the entertainment. My kids never said they were bored.

I can say this: one time, one of my kids said, “I'm bored.” I’m like, “Oh, we got to handle that.” So I'm like, “Look, there. There are art supplies.” I go, “First of all, my job is not to supply your entertainment. That's yours. You have Legos. We have this. We have that. You have this.” So I just made that even more available.

Put more focus on that and that handled that. That didn't come up ever again. Now you go through my house and you see these little sculpey clay figures that you bake in the oven—these ridiculous figures that my boys made. They're boys. So when they were eight, nine, and ten, I remember when I turned 42—I'm 61 now—when I turned 42, my son made me an old lady with a cane out of clay. I'm like, “Adam…” He goes, “Purely a coincidence.” I'm like, “It is not. It is not.” But anyway, that was funny.

The point is what you were saying is yes, kids need sleep. I'll tell you, sometimes at my school, we just had a student that unfortunately I did not accept in my school as a little boy. It's just not the right fit. My school is not the right fit for everybody. It's a small school. There's no playground. The kids are in a groove. They can work. They don't need space to run around.

The parents were not happy that I didn't accept their ADHD child. But the first time I met the child, he's eating an ice cream cone that's two full scoops. I'm  like, “What are you doing?” In the meantime, my school is small, and on Wednesdays you don't have to wear a uniform. You pay a dollar, and then I use that money to get birdseed because we feed birds every morning. It's a little— we'll make $12 a day. So while this child is literally covered in ice cream, the little sister is taking the money out of the jar, and the parents are right there. I'm like, “okay, there's no control.”

I understand they're little; they're four, five, or six, or whatever. But my four-year-old, when I went into someone's house, knew he couldn't go touching your stuff. How did they know that? I told them. If they didn't obey me, I was holding their hand and saying, “No, that's not yours.” That's part of parenting. Language. “Feet off the sofa. Where’d this football come from? Put it away. Hey, dishes.” That’s part of being a mom.

I got off track. It's just sad to see what these kids are fed or not fed. They're not set up for learning on top of already having a school system that I will swear to is not out for learning either. It's an indoctrination center. It's a labeling center. It's how we can find out all the things that are wrong with you and put it in writing and make it nice and solid and make sure you know that you aren't adequate—and that's a crime.

So now I'm going to get to this book. First of all, I write the way I talk. In the beginning of the book, it says “Note to Reader,” and it says there I'm sure some college professor is going to find many things wrong with my grammar.  I'm telling a story, not trying to get a PhD.” I don't use big words, because I don't know any. It was kind of a joke.

I'm telling the story of what happened to me and my son. It's not that every chapter is about me and my son. It starts off friendly enough. I'll tell you where I'm from. I will tell you how my parents met, which was all baseball and Cincinnati, and a couple of little stories. Then you get a feel for who I am. Then I talk about my son.

I talk about when I was in the fourth grade. I had a teacher who you could picture from The Cosby Show—Mrs. Huxtable. That was my teacher in the fourth grade. Wonderful, wonderful woman. We read this book, one of our readers—a reader has different stories in it and then there are questions and answers at the end, and you read a story a week or whatever.

The title of this story was Set Me Free, and it had a picture of a girl in old-fashioned clothing hugging what you assumed to be the mother. It was Helen Keller, and it just floored me. “How can you teach somebody who can't see, hear, or speak? How can you teach them words?” It really resonated with me. We would have our reading group and then you discuss the story.

This one boy was, “How did Anne Sullivan… why was she so…” I'm sure he didn't use this word, but I'll put it out there: “Why was she so persistent with Helen?” My teacher, I remember this, said, “Because she loved her the same way I love you,” which was huge. Huge.

Here's a Black woman teaching white kids. Nobody cared. My parents didn't care. My classmates didn't care. This lady was phenomenal. Again, it resonated with me. This story. So then in my book, I talk about it. Then I talk about my beautiful boy, and he's a beautiful boy. He is. He's a beautiful boy who speaks two languages, who's respectful, who all the neighbors know. It's a love fest that this kid gets.

Even though I ended up divorcing my first husband, my kids never saw me argue with him; they knew nothing but love. To this day, I just had dinner with my ex-husband, Damon, his sister, and Damon’s girlfriend for Damon’s 41st  birthday. We go out all the time. There’s no friction. 

The two children that I had in my second marriage, which I'll save that story for Oprah, consider my first husband their father. He is super close with them. From the time they were teeny tiny. Again, that's part of that management. No matter why my marriage failed or whatever, that's not on the kids. That's on me and my husband. That was our decision.

Because I have a school, I've had a school for 30-something years now, where a parent comes in and it's, “My wife, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, my ex-wife, that's why I divorced her,” and their seven-year-old is listening to all of this. I'm, “Come on, show some class. Show some class. He doesn't need to hear that.” You're trying to win him over in a tug of war. That's actually pretty sick.

Grow up for the five minutes that this boy or this girl is in your presence. Don't talk bad about the father. Don't talk bad about the mother. I don't care if they ended up in jail. Tell that child that the mother loves them more than anything and they'll believe it.

So I have this very impactful moment in the fourth grade with Helen Keller. Then my son goes to school and ten days in, they say he's mentally handicapped. “Oh my God, people, stop it already. He's not. He can see. He can speak two languages and he can hear. We're going to drug him?” “Helen Keller wasn't even drugged.”

“I think somebody needs to do their job.” I had a person who was reading the book reach out to me. On barbierivera.com, you can email me. I do pick up the emails. “I just finished chapter two. I don't even know who you are, no idea who Damon is, but my heart sank when the school system moved to label him. I was right there with you.” I'm like, “Great,” because that's really what I want to convey in this book. I want to have facts with the story because otherwise it's just dry. “The school system's bad.” Yes, any spectator can say that and be accurate. There are a hundred reasons why to not choose a school, probably including my school, but that's all spectator.

I don't want to be a spectator. I want to give you what to look for. You're going to enroll your child in a school and the bulletin boards are super pretty and they have a playground and it's all this gloss and lipstick and all of this. But what's actually going to happen to your child is they're going to get destroyed. They're going to get shut down.

Barbie Rivera (1:00:26.286)

They're going to be passed when they can't read. They know it. They know that their education is useless. By the time they're eight, nine, and ten, they know they can't do it. They know.

So I wrote the book. One: who am I, what am I? I'm a regular person with children. Then I take you through part two, which is a horror story. Each chapter, a different topic. Then part three is how I solved it. What I ultimately want to do with the rest of my life is to not just solve it for me and the 50 kids that I have in my school, but to actually reverse the decline in American education. I know that that's a big statement, but the truth of the matter is the politicians aren't going to solve it. I don't care who you voted for. The educators aren't going to solve it. The college degrees are not going to solve it. It would have been solved by now.

The education system is so wrapped up with the pharmaceutical companies and the textbook companies that are in bed with the whole thing that it's going to be an outside-the-box. It's got to be completely outside of the box. Over COVID, this is when I really got on this, because I could say, hey, pat on the back, my kids are grown. They're all great. They're successful. I have no retirement because homeschooling isn't… “Let me get a Lamborghini. I know, I'll homeschool.” That's not the way to do it.

Or start a micro school again. I pay my bills, but not much more. It's not glamorous. I have two beautiful dogs. My kids are great. My apartment looks good, so I'm okay. But it's not, “Let me now save the world,” as a cliché. So over COVID, I'm like, “okay, I'm losing sleep over what am I going to do about these kids coming in that don't know anything?” The parents think, “They got an A on their report card.” “I don't care about the A. Have them bake muffins. Have them read a recipe and bake muffins.” Even if it's the box cake where you just have to add water. It's about as low as you can go. I'm not even talking about something from scratch. They can't do it. They just can't.

So the education is a problem, and it's a problem for people expanding businesses. It's a problem for me because I can't hire certified teachers because they haven't been certified on how to teach. I have examples of that. It's somebody who can't take a message or write a sentence. You can't really employ that person and have them take part of the workload so that it can turn into a profitable activity. Even though my school is nonprofit, I need to make more than I spend. That's just basic business. You bring in more money than you spend. okay, you're doing okay.

Anyway, I started digging. One of the earliest statistics I could find on American literacy was in 1913. It was considered that the statistic was 97% of Americans were literate, and they were going from sixth grade to adult because you really don't check the literacy of a fourth grader. That doesn't factor in. Sixth grade and above. This is 1913. It was considered that the American school system was so strong that it could wipe out worldwide illiteracy. “That's intense. That's great.” Of the 3% that weren’t literate, they never went to school. They stayed on the farms. They stayed working on the farms. So we can account for them. But it was the majority that were literate in this country.

I'm going to bring up a religious reference, which I'm not married to a religion or religious reference, the Constitution was founded on the belief of God. That was how it was founded. Reading was developed so that people could read the word of God. That's why it was so important. That goes back to the 1500s.

So when I look at 1913, what was the purpose of school? It was to turn out adults, one, that were strong family leaders, mothers and fathers. Okay, good. They were quick-witted with entrepreneurship potential. Perfect. Moms could run the house, dads made the money. Non-traditional by today's standards, but still pro-survival. They were aligned with God, so there was a moral expectancy. Again, I'm not saying that everybody was moral and all of these things. It was never perfect, nor will it ever be perfect, but that was the purpose of education. “Bingo.” It was future and it was survival. 

“Thank you.”

My very limited view of business is what creates the statistic going up will always create it again. The people that sell Christmas trees don't do anything for seven months out of the year because they know they have a season. When they sell the Christmas trees or gather or whatever they do, it ends up on Christmas trees being bought in November and December. They are set for the year, so to speak.

I started buying textbooks from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s: reading, writing, math, civics, manners, science, spelling. These books are fantastic. The literacy level alone of an eighth grader in 1920 and 1930 even, surpasses what I see coming out of colleges. So okay, what if I do a plan? What if I turn my school over to my daughter, very capable hands.

What if I dive into bringing these textbooks back to life? Now, there's many things in these textbooks that are out of date. It'll say Tommy bought a whistle and a lollipop and a harmonica for 10 cents. I'm like, that's not going to happen today. But it could be Mr. Mouse bought a blueberry for one penny. It just needs to be changed. You have words gay that back in the day meant lively and entertaining and fun. We're not going to use that word because I'm not going to go up against that. What I'm saying is we're not going to use that word because it means something else now. But I want to take the reading, writing, and math back to how it used to be. Phonics now. It's not phonics. I don't care. You go to Barnes and Noble, it says phonics. It's not phonics. It just isn't.

The challenge is finding things that were published that were in writing as early as you can go. So I have searches on various sites: eBay, Etsy, Thrift Books. I have saved searches and sometimes I find gems. There's a couple of things back in this time period where the viewpoint alone clashes with modern day. It's completely the opposite.

For example, kindergarten was on a 90 to 10% equation, depending on how long that child was in school, because kindergarten would run half day or full day. Only 10% of the time that child was in school was seat work. He was only allowed to sit in a chair with a pencil or a crayon for 10% of the day. The 90% he was supposed to be out singing, creating, looking at leaves, watching squirrels. How did the truck build a house? It was out. It wasn't inward; it was outward. They were building things. They were turning milk cartons into cities. It was all very structured, but it was 10% of the day with seat work.

Now we have kindergartners that are supposed to sit all day, and if they can't, they're labeled ADHD. They're drugged. Then there was another concept: you don't find many textbooks for first, second, third grade because they simply didn't exist. The powers that be at the turn of the century frowned upon giving Kinder, first, second, and third graders textbooks for fear of overwhelming them with significance, therefore squashing their natural love of learning.

So you still had in the third grade, maybe it was 50–50 on the activity-to-seatwork, but it was still a very easy day for the student and the focus was on mastery. For example, they didn't introduce parts of speech until fourth grade because they wanted the student to have a grip of just writing. All that they were required to do was: the first letter of a sentence is a capital letter; names of people and places, proper nouns, are capital letters; and sentences end with a period and question mark. They didn't even get into the exclamation mark. I'm like, thank you, because that gives the child wins. That was also part of the philosophy: you lose them if they lose. We lose them if they lose.

Now, let's take all the losses and bundle them up and put them on an IEP, an Individual Educational Plan or Program, or whatever it's called in the state you're in. Make it nice and solid and official and let's get your parent. He's ADHD. He doesn't follow directions. I'm, so how's he going to do? Expect this person to ever get a driver's license? Of course I'm going to buy him a car. How are you going to do that? When does he start following directions? When do you start insisting on that?

He doesn't sleep. Okay, maybe cut out the ice cream. Maybe do something.

The parents that I'm speaking about are just parrots and they've just surrendered to the psychiatric ideology that there's something wrong with their child when their child can't sit still for eight hours.

My kids wouldn't follow directions either. My son, for example I gave about taking a shower—if I would have left it up to him, the whole house would have been filthy. But I'm not going to leave it up to him. It's not up to him.

My son—kids are kids. He turned 10 and he goes, somebody gave him $50, and he goes, Mom, I want to get a tattoo. I'm like, you're not getting a tattoo. We can get the temporary tattoos; no problem with temporary tattoos. He goes, I want to get tattoos. I'm like, tell you what—when you turn 18 and get tattoos all over your forehead, I don't care. Three weeks go by, he's not thinking of it. He's a child.

I was, no. I'll get you temporary tattoos. You can have all those you want. And he'd wear all of them. I made the mistake of getting him Spider-Man band-aids. He goes, Mom, can I have Spider-Man band-aids? He was five. I'm like, sure, we'll put them in the bathroom. Blah, blah. Here's your—with, along with your toothbrush. In the bathroom I keep one of those plastic shoe container holders on the back of the door or whatever. I used to use one for my daughter's Barbie dolls. Instead of shoes, she would put her Barbie dolls in there and kept it super organized.

Anyway, my son comes out of the bathroom. He has every band-aid that was in the package on all available skin. He's wearing shorts, so it's his legs, his arms, his face, and his neck. I'm like, okay. Next time I will give him three and keep the band-aids out of reach. But he's a kid and I find that funny. He's a kid. But he's not going to make the decisions. He doesn't get to decide, I'm not going to take a bath when I'm filthy. I'm like, no, you're taking a bath. I don't want to brush my teeth. Don't care. You're going to brush your teeth.

Eventually, they start taking control over these things where they don't have to be told to take a bath. It's natural. They don't have to be told to make up their bed because they do it.

That to me, that's the easy part. To me, the education is the easy part too. When I go back to how I homeschooled my kids, I used older books and a dictionary. What's the definition of geography? Geo means earth, graphy means to draw. When we were learning about light in science, and that the unit of light is photons, my 10-year-old is, photography, drawing with light. I'm like, exactly.

They sounded like little geniuses. It was just that they knew what words meant. People, my gosh, people would hear them. They're like, wow, you must have a degree. I don't. I have a Webster's dictionary and some common sense.

Ashley James (1:16:45.316)

I love that. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, you don't have a degree in this. How are you going to teach him math? I'm going to have a book, and the book, I'm going to go through the book with him. I can look things up on the Internet if I need to, and I can find experts if I need to and ask them. The idea being that the older they get, the more responsible they become for their own education.

It's already started. My son kind of picks topics he's excited about and he goes down his own rabbit holes. I'm all for the ride. I get a Ted Talk every day, about five. I probably get about five Ted Talks a day.

He comes up to me and he's, I bought him this thing we're hanging on the wall. One of the words on it is “smile.” It's a mosaic. It's a cross and it's a mosaic, and the word “smile” is inside it. He goes, did that the saber-tooth tiger's scientific name is Smilosaurus or something, Smilodon or something like that. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I was like, are you kidding me? Then I looked it up and he was. He's, and he had this whole, again, Ted Talk about why it was the way it was.

He starts telling me these other Latin words. Not the word “smile,” it's a common word now, but he starts telling me, yes, you must know about this Latin phrase, this Latin phrase, because he's been digging into dinosaurs and history and ancient history. It's so much fun. It's so much fun. 

Barbie Rivera (1:18:20.922)

Yes, and that's what's brilliant. You're not forcing it down his throat. He's doing it. That's what it is. I'll tell you, my son, one of my kids, he was 16, the tall one. By this time, I had a high school with 14 kids in it. On the weekend, I swear, all 14 of those kids were in my house. We're experiencing a tropical storm. I'm at school. The kids are at the house.

I come home, my youngest one has a guitar and they're singing songs and whatever. My oldest one, I'm like, what's happening? He's, mom, I'm making a New York style cheesecake from scratch. It's going to take me about eight hours because certain things have to freeze the Grand Cracker crust. Anyway, the whole house was full of these teenagers. No one is.

I don't want to comment on it because I don't want to ruin it. But this is amazing and it's boys and girls. There's nobody being weird. None of the girls are wearing bikini tops with low cut. They're good kids and he's making cheesecake and this one is singing songs. Two other ones have my art supplies and they're, I had a rule just on a side note.

I have a lot of art supplies. I'm like, look, you are welcome to use whatever, but whatever you do, if you're going to do something major, I get something for my Christmas tree. So you can imagine my Christmas tree looks a garage sale exploded on it because it's all these little things that kids have done at various ages, I'm going to paint a little wooden bird. Barbie wants something, so I'm going to paint something for her. And I love it.

You look at the little date on it. I go, I need your name, first name and date on it. I have all of these unique little sculptures in my house and some of it goes in a frame with a picture. Anyway, it's nice. Personally, and I know that other parents have not been as lucky as I am, I never had, my kids never went through the teenage drama where they're going to hate you when they become a teenager. They didn't do it. They didn't get into drugs and alcohol. They just didn't do it. They were making money when they were early. This education has to serve you. It's not, when you go to college, that's nine years from now.

Right now it serves you. I remember my youngest son, he was 14 and he had bought a secondhand drum kit and it wasn't that great. He comes out of his room, he goes, mom, I need a new drum kit. I'm like, okay, how much is that? He goes, there's a refurbished one for 1800. I'm, I don't have 1800. He goes, no, no, no, no, I'm going to work for it.

But could you do something? I'm, yes, your birthday is coming up. I'll do six. So he sits down with me. My other kids all tutored at the school. At that time, going back several years, they would make $25 an hour. My son is like, I don't want to do that. That's going to take too long. But I don't know what I can do. I'm, I have an idea for you. You can juggle. He was brilliant at math.

He taught himself to juggle and taught himself to drum. To me, they're all related. It makes sense that they're all related. He came up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies just randomly. I'm like, put out a flyer at school, charge $5 an hour, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and see what happens. He was making a hundred dollars a week, working two hours a week.

Ashley James (1:22:19.656)

What was he doing?

Barbie Rivera (1:22:20.792)

Teaching them how to juggle. He had 10 kids.

He had them standing up against tables so that when their bean bags would fall, they didn't have to bend over. The parents were thrilled because it was $5 so they could pick their kids up an hour later for $5. He got 10 students, so he's making $50 an hour, twice a week. He did it for eight weeks. We put it on their report cards, and the kids were getting good. He goes, this is hand-eye coordination.

You don't need anybody else to help you with it, but you do need to practice. It got them off of their devices. We actually saw those kids that were in the juggling class, their grades went up because, again, it's an indirect way of getting them to focus.

Ashley James (1:23:15.998)

Yes, I'm building that part of the brain.

Barbie Rivera (1:23:19.204)

That's right. They loved it. Then Michael started doing one-on-one drum lessons and he charged 20 an hour because he could only do it with one student. He had a couple of students. Parents were like, man, I hear my son in the garage and I can hear him improving. That's great. They're helping a teenager out, blah, blah, blah. My son ended up getting his drum kit, but he earned it. He was not, if only you weren't a single mom. He wasn't being a little victim about it. He was like, okay. Can you help me? Birthday's coming. What can you do? Blah, blah, blah, and now let me figure out how I can get this done. I think he had his drum kit by Christmas. It was a good two months, but he was on it.

Ashley James (1:24:12.680)

Has he done different things after that? Has he figured out other ways to be resourceful?

Barbie Rivera (1:24:23.686)

Yes, but then he was like, I can tutor somebody on math. He could do all sorts of things. The point was when he was a kid, he was already thinking with that. You say your son does a deep dive. My other son did twice before he was five, and he was homeschooled all the way. Damon I took out of school and homeschooled him. Damon was the only one that had public school experience, which took me two years to undo. My other three never felt they were stupid, and they just moved like lightning.

My one son, twice before he was five, birds—wild birds—landed on his body. One was a crow, one was a sparrow. Okay, this guy's got a gift. I wish it was a different gift, but that's not mine to choose. He would always come home with a snake. Yes, the neighborhood cat had this snake in its mouth. Okay, Adam, we have to do something here. I invested in two tanks. He had two 55-gallon tanks, bunk beds on wrought iron stands. So it looked decent in my living room. It didn't look like a garage. It was aesthetic.

The top part were his pets, stuff we would buy, his little lizards that we would buy at a pet store, and the bottom was a hospital. For every animal he nurtured back to health—which he didn't win all of them, some of them he lost, some of them passed—but for every one he nurtured back to health that he released into the woods, I'd pay him $3. One month he made $30, and he was six.

If he found a frog that was in a puddle with oil on it, he would put it in the hospital, put distilled water on it, and then empty the distilled water every day and detox the frog. I let him do it. I didn't do anything other than provide the tank for him. He's like, okay, he's ready to go. There's no more oil coming out of his skin. He made that connection. This is now not my activity. He has to figure it out.

By the time he was 10 on his own, he read about 250 books about animals. He asked me one day—which I should have known, I should have been alert—Mom, where's the lemonade container? Oh, it's next to the cereal boxes. He comes in half an hour later: seventy-one Black Widow spiders in the container. I'm like, Adam. He goes, yes, there's egg sacs in there too. I’m like, Adam. He goes, you taught me Black Widows are not aggressive. They want to be in dark places where people don't go. So I found that in the yard because they are in Florida. He goes, and I have them.

Okay, we can't keep them. So let's call the Miami Museum of Science. They were thrilled because they had just lost their last Black Widow colony. I’m like, okay, I'm taking my son. These guys, it was hilarious actually. My son is sitting in the back seat with the lemonade jar with the lid on it, and out come three guys in hazmat suits. Adam just rolled his eyes. They're like, your mom let you get this? He goes, I never tell my mom about Black Widows till it's done.

They're like, how did you get them all? He goes, I had a ruler and I held the lemonade container underneath the web and with the ruler, I went tap, tap, tap. He's talking to them like they're three years old. When we pull away—anyway, for all I know, their Black Widows are still going. He goes, Mom, for scientists, they're kind of dumb. It's pretty obvious. Anyway, it was funny.

He did that. He rescued an endangered bird and it just fell. I don't even know where this bird came from. It fell out of the sky. He was playing football in the front, a Nerf ball with his little friends, and this thing—it looks like a stork—fell out of the sky, landed in front of him. Its wing was broken. Adam was like, Daniel, go in my house, get a dish towel. Justin, there's a big rubber band on my doorknob. Bring them both, get my mom. He put the dish towel over the bird's neck, put a loose rubber band to hold the dish towel, and he held the bird in such a way that its wing was in the correct position. He's 10.

We took it to some wildlife guy who picked it up and, who knows? He's like, yes, we can fix this. I'm like, perfect. That's what education is supposed to lead to. It's not this drudgery of passing a test or doing a book report or all of that. I get it. Tests are important. We need to test. We do need tests. We do need book reports at times, but it shouldn't be this drudgery, suffering, authoritative activity.

It just shouldn't. If I would have done that with my son, my first one, I would have lost him. I already lost him and he was six. He already checked out. He was stupid, he knew it, and there was no reason to go to school. There was no reason to get up in the morning. He lost the joy that he had with his brothers. He even stopped annoying his little sister. Aren't you going to prank her? He would jump out and scare her. He stopped doing that, being an annoying older brother. He withdrew into himself. It was really hard to watch.

So again, I go back to this book. Okay, how am I going to finance bringing back all of these materials? I have about 500 books, lesson plans from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, 500 workbooks, pamphlets, things that had practically disintegrated. I want to bring it back. I want a parent—here's my dream—a parent is like, okay, I'm going to homeschool my third grader. I go, okay, here's what you need. Reading, writing, math, and handwriting. I don't know how far I can get into science. If I could do it all, I would do it all.

We're talking more than a Friday bake sale at the school is going to finance because I can't do that on my own. I really don't want to be the executive director of a publishing company. I want to write. I want to be the Rapunzel turning straw into gold and let somebody else figure out the marketing, let somebody else figure out the technology on it because I don't even want to do that. The plus is, I have a lot of it formulated.

It's not in any kind of a published form yet. For example, with the Math, again going back to my youngest son, when he was five, I guess it was 1996. He hated all the math books. After he went to bed, I would do three or four pages of math and I would just draw it by hand.

I illustrated it. My illustrations are good. My numbers are good. You can tell I'm really clean on that. He would do it, and his math ended up being super strong. I saved all of those illustrations. I have 35 years, actually over 40 years, of illustrations. Just last week I screenshot one and asked AI to turn it into an emoji. I'm like, I'm in love.

Somebody who knows what they're doing can take that and really do something with it because I have that slow gradient. I have the word problems that I developed myself. I also have the guide of all of these books from the early 1900s, which are, again, the philosophy back then was that education has to impact the child's life.

It wasn't just random word problems. It was actually things that would apply to day-to-day life back then. Your friend has five marbles. You give him two. He wins two marbles in a game. How many does he have? Okay, great. It wasn't this esoteric whatever. The modern textbooks are just awful. I give examples of them. I cite them in my book. Just awful.

What they're doing is saying, we're applying critical thinking. I'm going to say a bad word. I'm, what you're doing is bullshit. When it says 15 plus 29, you add the ones, carry the 10, and then you add it. That is no longer done. It's 15 plus 29 by taking a five from the 15 to add to the five from the nine. Five plus five equals 10. Now you have the four. It's like that. If the child doesn't do it that way, which is now rebranded as critical thinking, even if they have the answer right, if they don't go through all of that nonsense, their answers are wrong.

When they do multiplication, there are nine evaluations you do if you do five times four. Did you figure that out by a graph? Did you do it by this? I don't even remember what they are, but I'm like, what the heck is this? Just how about just what's five times four? How about just that? Make four rings of Play-Doh, put five balls in each, count them up. That's five times four. Hands-on. It's just not done anymore.

Ashley James (1:35:58.704)

Homeschooling for the most part is so hands-on. It obviously depends on the parent and what kind of materials they're choosing. I've been pretty immersed in the homeschool community. We've been part of two different co-ops, and I actually run a homeschooling group. Now it’s  over 650 moms in my area.

We don't all get together at the same time. I want to preface that. We're not 650 moms all together, but we do weekly meetups, playdates at playgrounds. I believe in that unschooling level of kids—kids should be touching dirt every day. They should know that concept of socializing is the first, of all. I apologize for sounding belittling to people who don't know anything about homeschooling or people who public school.

It's the first question everyone asks. It's like, as a vegan, you get asked, where's your protein? How do you get your protein? Just because someone's vegan doesn't mean they're skin and bones. You don't ask a cow where it gets its protein or the gorilla where it gets its protein. You can get amino acids from plants and your body synthesizes them. Same with children.

Children naturally socialize, and it is actually backwards to put children in a school, a very artificial environment. As an adult, have you ever been segregated by your age? That doesn't exist in nature. When you work at the post office, you're working with a 65-year-old, an 18-year-old, and a 55-year-old. You're working with people of the same sex and people of the opposite sex, and they're all different ages and different classes, different socioeconomic backgrounds.

When we get into the workforce, we have to be able to mingle with a variety of people who think differently than us. Not all think the same. That is a problem with the school system. One problem is conformity—how we teach children to think all the same. People don't think all the same, but we've got to teach kids how to respect differences.

What I love about homeschooling is my kid—he's 10—his best friend is turning 14, best friend in the world. He's got friends that are six. He plays with them both, differently, obviously, depending on the kid. He's got friends of many different ages, and they all learn how to get along with each other. They learn about each other's differences, capabilities, maybe weaknesses and strengths.

When homeschoolers get together, that's their version of socializing. It's normal. It's a reflection of what's out there, what they're going to find in the workforce. In public schools, you're segregated. I remember growing up in public school, if I was in the fourth grade, I didn't like the fifth graders. I thought third graders sucked because they were younger. The older ones were, whatever. It's just by one year. It is very artificial.

But this concept of, how do you socialize your child? He talks to adults all the time. He's super talkative. If he meets a kid, he's talking to the kid while playing. That's just it. We just go and do things. We just go and do stuff. You don't have to be out there every day because some parents work jobs. I know plenty of homeschoolers who figure out when mom's working, the kids are with grandma or with dad, and when dad's working, the kids are with mom. They figure out just how to make it work. Some families can make it work with two working parents. That's where co-ops come in. Small homeschool schools or homeschool pods come in. There are many ways to do it.

I have a friend who has been a single mom forever. She never married the dad. He didn't want anything to do with the child. She loves the crap out of her kid. I always want to see a child with two parents—obviously that would be ideal—but she is twice the parent most parents are. I watched her in awe. She works a full-time job, luckily can work from home, and she homeschools her kid. She does what you say: if your kid refuses to go to the bath, she grabs her kid—not to hurt him—but brings him into the bathtub with her and says, nope, you're taking a shower now.

If he doesn't eat his dinner, she says that dinner is going to be sitting in the fridge. When you're hungry, you're going to eat it. The next day for breakfast, that is your breakfast. She just holds her ground. He is an amazing kid: so smart, so respectful, so resourceful. I see moms, single moms, who go, I couldn't homeschool because I'm a single mom. You got to get creative. You got to get resourceful. You have to plug into communities.

We have it so easy now with Facebook. You can get into Facebook groups, forums online, local groups. You just start chatting with other moms who are there, and there are so many ways you can figure it out. Another myth I want to cover is that homeschooling families are middle class. They have established a certain amount of wealth that they could afford it. 

Most homeschoolers that I know are below middle class, they're living month to month, but they've sacrificed because they see that homeschooling is more important than that extra 20 grand they're going to earn or whatever. That would maybe make their lives a bit more comfortable, but you're allowing so much chaos to enter your child's life as a result.

Certain kids seem to be okay in the school system. They're the type of learners that are middle of the road. I’ve had friends—I was an A-plus student in school. I don't know why you don’t. Listen. It's not for everyone. If your kid is shutting down, falling behind, or being bullied, that's another thing I love about homeschooling. 

I just went to the homeschooling conference, and the WHO was there—the Washington Homeschool Organization. It's our advocacy organization here in Washington that every few years has to go to bat, hire lawyers, and fight for our rights. Washington state is, personally, the best state to homeschool in because we have the least amount of government restrictions imposed upon us. We protect that viciously.

The leader, her name is Jen, was giving a speech, and she said, homeschooling is for everyone. You will be sitting in a homeschool conference, and you will have a orthodox, religious person—Christian or Muslim—beside a Muslim orthodox, beside a Christian orthodox, beside the atheist, beside LGBT people. This homeschooling is for everyone. It's not something that's only for a certain flavor of person. It is to enrich honestly, not only the child but, for me as a parent.

It is not easy. I'm not in any way saying it's the easier route. I fantasize almost on a weekly basis about just putting my kid in public school. That would be so much easier. You just have these difficulties be someone else's job.

The amount of personal growth and enrichment that I get as a parent, watching my kid just take off, flourish, bloom, blossom—you can't buy that. Your kid is going to be an adult in the blink of an eye. Your influence is going to be waning very quickly, but you have this short time when your child, K through 12, is in your midst to enrich them, guide them, and watch them grow. It's not just for them; it's for you as a parent as well.

Have you seen the book The Smartest Kids in the World? I love this book. I read it feelis like forever ago. When did it come out? I want to say 2015. Yes, okay, 2014. It's really interesting. The author goes around to Finland, Poland, South Korea, and America, examining the education systems, how they differ, how they are similar, and what kind of learners they produce.

If you, as a listener, you're starting to see that maybe your child isn't being served in public school, maybe you're ignoring the red flags—it’s the golden handcuffs. It keeps your child relatively safe. Your child’s not on the street. They’re in a school. It’s free babysitting. They're going to learn something. If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for them. I have to go to work 40, 50 hours a week. It's golden handcuffs. You start to ignore those little red flags. Your kid comes home crying or bruised or emotionally bruised. They start to have beliefs about themselves. You see their light going out. You keep going: the school might try to put them on drugs or whatever. It was good enough for me. I have to go to school. I have to go to work while they go to school. That's just how it is. 

Homeschooling wasn’t in the cultural consciousness before COVID. It's funny when I talk to people, and they say yes, we are homeschooled. It turns out it was during 2020. Sitting in front of a computer for six to eight hours while the teacher tried to teach them over Zoom, in which they had zero training—it was fly by the seat of their pants. No studies, no backing. You're used to doing this in person, now do it over Zoom. That’s not homeschooling. That’s just being at home while the public school system is still trying to teach your kid, not homeschooling.

This particular book is fascinating. It talks about Finland, probably out of all the education systems examined, being the best. The reason being: we look at the culture of the teachers. They don't have curriculums or textbooks that they must do and I think that is phenomenal.

When a teacher studies to become a teacher, they must become an expert in something. Believe it or not, In America and Canada, you can get a general degree in education and teach multiple subjects without specializing. You can teach any subject with a general education degree. In Finland, you have to specialize. If you're passionate about math, you get a degree in math, then you shadow a math teacher as an assistant for an extended period. In your first year alone, experienced teachers sit in the back and critique you to get better. The concept: I want to be the best I can be at being a teacher.

They don't send the kids home with homework. Teachers get to decide what books and curriculum to use. Each classroom is unique to the teacher, trying to get the most out of students and help each student with all the tools they could possibly find. One kid might need a different tool than another. That is so different from here. It's cookie-cutter factory production. It used to be to make them good little factory workers.

They systematically took critical thinking out of the education system 150 years ago. They taught it for thousands of years. They taught the Trivium and the Quadrivium thousands of years, over 2000 years. They took it out of the Prussian education system when developing what we now have, our modern education system here in the United States and Canada and other similar countries.

It is taught in Jesuit seminaries and super elite places, but it's also taught by a lot of homeschoolers. The concept is to teach kids how to think. Don't just make them memorize facts. If they learn how to think, they can get the answers for themselves. So that's where it is.

If we teach kids how to think and how to be problem solvers and how to maximize their ability to solve problems, they'll be able to figure out how to solve the problem. We want to teach them resources. I don't care if my kid, when he's 45 years old, memorizes some math thing, I want him to be resourceful. I want him to be able to, if he's on the side of the road and he doesn't have any money and his car, his cell phone's dead and his tire's flat, how's he going to solve that? What's he going to do? How is he going to navigate the world to solve these things? How's he going to navigate the world to be the best person he can be, to be the most helpful, loving member of society that he can be in?

So that's where it is. We can't rely on a government-funded system to turn out the most amazing people. No one will ever love your kids more than you do. That's why I love homeschooling. It's hard and it's so worth it. You can do it in so many different capacities.

You didn't really tell us about your school. The advent of your school. Did you create your school? 

Barbie Rivera (1:52:06.011)

Okay, so I'll tell you. So just on what you were saying, the experts, the college-educated experts, were the ones that wanted to drug my son. So there, they drew the line for me. I'm, I have no degree, and people come on my website for the school. I don't hire certified teachers, just letting everybody know. Occasionally, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, so I have a reputation. So somebody will come in. Are you certified? No. That's to your benefit, because it was the certified that wanted to drug my son. So they're in treason to their own profession. Teaching never heard of, you're not going to drug me to make me a better cook. I'm going to need a cookbook and practice.

My son needed practice. He needed somebody who was looking out for his best interests, and that's no longer the school. My first grade teacher, he would have thrived in that system. That's where you even get that. I did well in school. He'll do well in school. My response to that is, listen, the pot that we smoked when we were teenagers, it's not the pot that's on the market now. Things have changed, and you need to be aware that it's changed. The fact that these kids are getting three and four hours of homework did not exist when we were in first grade. It just didn't.

So anyway, long story short, I ended up with 15 kids in my house that were coming to me for homeschooling. In the middle of it, I became a single parent, and I became a single parent in a horrible way. My second husband took everything. I'm done with being a family man, and left with all bank accounts and all of this. Okay, what do I have? What can I do? I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing except make it better. So I raised my homeschooling fees, which people can do that. These parents, single moms, get six kids in, charge whatever it is, a thousand a month. Charge a material fee. Have them all bring toilet paper and paper towels and hand sanitizers or whatever you need so that you're not out that cost. You're not going to buy a Lamborghini. You're going to be able to have that interaction. For me, as an artist, being an educator the way that I do it is more creative than anything I could do on canvas a 100%. A 100%. Anyway, so I ended up with the necessity to make more money. I had my house full of kids. Then it was Christmas time, probably 2000, or 1998, 1999, around that time, maybe 2000, and this woman came to see me. She has a 10-year-old. The woman is much better off than I am. She didn't have to work. She had her 10-year-old in the best private schools, the best Christian schools. She wasn't reading. She went to the best psychologist, best psychiatrist, and everybody wanted to drug her.

Because irl was tall, she kept getting passed because they didn't want to wreck her self-esteem. Anyway, this lady heard about me. Okay, so this is what I propose. If she can't read, we're going to say, and I can do a standardized test to verify everything. I can do a standardized test, but we're going to assume she's in kindergarten skills. So we're going to take her back, and we're going to teach her the alphabet properly. We're going to teach her short vowel words properly, and we're going to accelerate her forward. The person who's going to do it is my 17-year-old son, my oldest one. This lady's like, what? I go, yes, he helps me with homeschooling. I pay him each week to help me with the homeschooling. He's wrapping up high school after school is over.

She goes, okay, all. On the first day of homeschooling, she came and asked her daughter, got in the car. It's, if you put me anywhere else, I'm running away from home. My son had her do Play-Doh and make the alphabet, make an object. Make the letter B, now do a ball or a bat or whatever with it, and put her through a low-gradient phonics program.

Six weeks later, she's at third grade in every subject. The mom is, and I even told the mom, I'm, look, you got to back off, because the mom's like, I do flashcards on the way to the grocery store. I make sure she reads every night. I'm, you're going to drive her crazy. Stop. If she asks you to go to Barnes and Noble, stop everything and go. When that light goes off, you got to go for it.

Six weeks later, she came to me. She goes, guess where I'm going three times a week. I go, where? She goes, Barnes and Noble. My daughter is reading on her own and enjoying it. She goes, Barbie, you don't realize your son, a teenager who only spent one year in school, has done more for my daughter than all of the college education and all the money that I spent. She goes, my mother just passed. She left me some money. Let's take this out of your house, and let's do a private school. I showed her, I was, there's a location that I want. It costs us probably around $125,000. 

We thought it would be $65,000 to renovate a storefront. We rented it. Anyway, it ended up being about $125,000 and we started a school there. It becomes a private school as soon as you move from your house into a commercial location. It's a private school. That school's been in that location for 23, 24 years. We were able to help not just 15, but 50, 60 kids a year.

50, 60 kids—it's good. But if you take a look at the grand scheme of things, it's really nothing. It's nothing. So again, I go back to how am I going to solve this? I'm not trying to sound big headed or egotistical, but how am I going to solve it? So I wrote a book.

I want people to know what they're getting into. I want them to know how I solved it as a homeschooler. Ultimately, what I want is what I needed as a homeschooler when I was starting, because I couldn't find any materials. I would stay up and write them for the next day. As soon as you get into any kind of volume, you can't do that. That doesn't work.

What I want to do now is we'll just talk numbers. If I sell one million books, they're on Amazon, Enough is Enough by Barbie Rivera. If I sell one million books, the profit I make off of that is six million, which I'm not going to buy a boat. I'm going to turn my school over. I really want to get a building in Miami, have my own campus, and my daughter will take it. Then I want to finance the creation of these materials. I want to write and then I want to turn my writings over and my illustrations over to somebody who can then turn them into cute emojis using AI. Put it to where, okay, somebody can buy this and print it out PDF style. But now we have kindergarten, first grade all the way up to eighth grade done where the eighth grade graduate is not only going to know how to write a letter, is going to know what the seven functions of a period are, is going to know the grammar, is going to know the math. He's going to know. He's going to be well-educated when he's in the eighth grade without the nonsense that the school is pushing down someone's throat. If you want to add your religion to it, absolutely, because it's just going to be based on definitions of words.

There would basically be, let's just say I'm creating first grade math. There's going to be a textbook or a workbook because there's going to be an answer key and there's going to be a teacher guide. Then there's going to be the advices of, okay, you need HiHoCheerio that you can get on Amazon or Target. You need this, you need that. What my teacher guide is, is you do one or two pages of math. Then you get up out of the chair and you go for a walk and you're looking to apply the concepts that the student is learning. Even as simple, if the child is learning what the color orange is, color the pumpkin orange. Now get up out of the chair and go find five orange things.

That way we do two things. We properly educate this generation or the future generation, and we rehabilitate. We properly educate the people who missed it the first time around.

Ashley James (2:02:23.060)

That's exactly it, because I have learned so much. Either we forgot it or we were never taught it. But you learn so much as homeschooling mom or dad. I can't tell you, I get excited about the subjects that we are learning. I'm teaching fourth or fifth grade. But man, it's exciting. It's fun. My son and his best friend love astrophysics, astronomy, love science. They asked my friend and me to teach at our co-op because the parents all take subjects, and it's voted on, and then they teach a class that year, and it's get together every Friday.

So we're teaching from a homeschooling high school curriculum to elementary and middle schoolers. I looked over it, I don't need to dumb any of this down. These kids will get this. If they need to look up a definition of a word, we'll look up a definition of a word. But these kids are brilliant and smart. In fact, when they're not pushed, they get bored.

I told you my son was learning piano. He started doing piano. We've had three different piano teachers, and the one he has now is by far the best. Amazing teacher, really just in touch with what my son needs. The first few months, he wanted to learn. You could tell he was just, the outside observer would say, okay, he's struggling, we need to give him something more simple. I said to the teacher, you're not challenging him enough. It needs to be harder. So the teacher kicked it up a notch, gave him harder assignments, gave him harder everything. My kid just took off. It's that observation.

Some kids you need to back off. Some kids you actually need to make it harder. His best friend, he was learning pre-algebra, bored out of his mind, doing poorly. It's just him and his mom. It's not that he was having bad grades, but just really, really doing poorly. His mom was like, maybe this is too hard for him. He's leaving middle school, maybe this is just too advanced.

One day her son said, can we just skip this and go straight to algebra? Why do we have to do pre-algebra? She goes, you want to try it? This is what I love about homeschooling—what's the worst that can happen? Okay, that was a little too hard. Let's back up and find your level. You had to take that child and go all the way back to kindergarten, but in six weeks, you got to the third grade. That's another thing with homeschooling: kids don't learn in a linear fashion.

They might take two years to finish the fourth grade, but they may take six weeks to finish the fifth. They really have these leaps and bounds. Sometimes you just have to take longer with one subject and shorter with another at each concept until they get it. Everyone's different. Some kids pick up tying their shoelaces right away. Some kids take years. It doesn't mean they're good or bad. It's just how it is. You get in touch with them and what they need.

So my friend jumped in. I want to say, the sixth grade when they jumped into 10th, 11th grade algebra, and he rocketed. Completely finished it before the school year was out, going even more advanced. It was too basic. He lost interest, completely lost interest. You don't get that in the public school system.

Even in private schools, you don't get that personal one-on-one observation. How could you? I'm privileged to live in an area that is quite well off, just north of Seattle. Really good school systems. The average classroom size for high school is 35 to 45 kids per one teacher.

How are you, as one teacher, going to manage the needs of 35 to 45 students? Private schools here, because I've looked into it, in fourth grade they have 20 to 25. Yes, it's smaller, smaller than 35, but again, private school, you're spending over 10 grand a year, and your kid is one of 20 or one of 25. How are their individual needs being met and observed? They're not getting enough one-on-one time. Everyone flourishes when they get one-on-one time.

You learn in 45 minutes sitting down with someone what you could have gotten in a full school day—what they consider you would get in public school. The thing is, it's not comparable because my kid will do a deep dive into geography for an entire day. That's cool. Tomorrow we'll do math. We cover what would take months in one day. We cover what a public school takes months to cover. You let their curiosity guide you.

I love that you did that. And that idea that moms could grab a few other families and do some kind of co-op or maybe charge to do their own little homeschool pod. There's many ways to do it. Do you offer any kind of counseling? Could someone hire you to just consult with them if they're interested in pursuing this?

Barbie Rivera (2:08:19.736)

Yes, I'm not there yet. I have this book, Enough Is Enough. It does touch upon how I homeschooled in it in the last section, and it gives lots of examples of all different types of people I had in my homeschool, including adults, because I had adults. I had this 55-year-old Vietnam vet, an African American, who was, look, I miss schooling. Can I come? I'm like, you can come twice a week and my son Damon will work with you.

It was wonderful because, under normal circumstances, if I didn't have a homeschool, my 15-year-old son never would have met this 55-year-old vet. My 15-year-old son taught this 55-year-old vet the basics of grammar to the point where this man was no longer illiterate.

We take a two-week Christmas break off, and then Ray didn't come back. I'm, I wonder where Ray is. He called at the end of January and he's, hey, tell Damon I'm out of the projects and I moved to Orlando and I have a job. I'm like, great. So that was nice.

So anyway, in that book, it does tell you some. The next thing that I'm going to write is more for the homeschoolers. Now that I'm out on podcasts and things, people have called me and I help them. Look, I don't have the curriculum yet, but I can make recommendations. I have screenshots of some of the books that I have downstairs. I have a phonics book from the 1930s that I just sent two weeks ago to a woman who has a brilliant 10-year-old who just hasn't clicked with reading. I go, I guarantee you, it's the materials.

So I sent a screenshot. You can find these on eBay. She called me. She's like, I love how this goes. I go, it's not what they're doing now. They did it bit and piece. You didn't have to learn the whole alphabet at once. You started at a certain point, the short vowels, and you just hit it. As you added letters, you started building words, but they weren't trying to teach you everything.

Anyway, this woman and I just clicked. So I will help. Again, if you subscribe at barbierivera.com, you'll get the free first six chapters. I'll warn you, the first six chapters are depressing. I think I put out something on my website two weeks ago.

I cannot be held responsible if after you read the six chapters you dress in rags and are using a crayon to draw circles on the floor. You got to get the whole book to find out the happy ending at the end and the solution, which again, my solution is the slow way. I sell a million books, it gives me money, I can start the publishing, like really for real.

Now I'm the eighth-grade teacher in my own school, which is a full-time freaking job. Publishing and writing is a full-time job, which is what I need to do. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to create the curriculum that makes sense. It goes from simple to hard without boring the child. It gives a parent a simple guide to follow without needing a Ph.D.

That's going to be, again, the slow way. I go on podcasts, I sell books. The fast way, somebody with the money steps up and says, okay, what is it? What is it? There was a gentleman, I do not know the name of his school, but he was from your area. He's like, okay, I want to start a small private school. What am I looking at? I'm like, you're looking at funding every single thing for a minimum of three years.

He goes, okay. I go, that is the purchase. This man had enough money that he purchased a church, and he had his wife, who was an interior designer, design it. I think it was a preschool or whatever he did. I'm like, you're going to fund it for three years. So if you hire a kindergarten teacher and she doesn't have any students, she still gets paid whatever rate, because her not having any students is your fault in the promotion and marketing. It's not hers. We're going to assume she's a social personality and not driving people away.

Anyway, he stopped funding it in two years. He was solvent. He had 55 kids. I'm like, there you go. He's not looking for 3,000 or 4,000. He just wanted a school where he wasn't sending his kids to private school or to a boarding school. He's like, I think I can do this myself. Again, he hired people to come in and run it for him, but the estimation on the financing was three full years.

So I'm sure he spent a few million dollars, but now that school is up and running, he's on the board of directors, and it is possible.

Sometimes I just get discouraged. I look at the news and it's like, so-and-so just got a facelift for $100,000. A face, $100,000. What that would do for my school or my activity. We're doing something, and it doesn't really do a lot because $100,000 really isn't a lot when you get into bigger projects, but it is something. 

Ashley James (2:14:33.630)

Move the needle, move the needle. So right now we are looking for angel investors or donors, or just buy the book, buy the book, buy the book for a friend, buy a few books, invest in this vision. It is going to come to fruition because you are a force to be reckoned with. This is so needed in the world.

It is approximately 43 million adult Americans in the United States who are considered illiterate, and that is such a huge chunk of the population. Even if people were to branch off from this conversation and say, I am going to start a local literacy campaign for adults, how many lives would you change and transform and touch? These people have, in some way or another, had the public school system fail them, as it fails so many.

I love that you are catching it early. You are catching children early. I believe that reading is a right. I believe it is a privilege, but it is a right. It should be a right. It should be something that everyone has access to. We should never write anyone off as incapable. Like you said, Helen Keller, look at her.

There are so many children who do have disabilities. If the people around them believe the kids cannot do anything, then they are not going to be exposed to the ability to even try. I personally have known kids who had brain damage from one thing or another, and the parents said, no, I am going to help my kid, against all the doctors’ beliefs.

Doctors tend to have a more negative belief about our capabilities. The kids are flourishing, are reading. Some kids are nonverbal, but they have learned to read, and they can point at words. They turn out incredibly vocal, with amazing vocabularies, incredibly intelligent, because the parents believed in the kids.

Two things you do need to do as a parent. Do not believe any limitation anyone has ever said about your child, ever, ever, ever. I do not care if they are experts or not. Do not believe limitations put on your kids or yourself. Do not kill their love of learning.

My husband, for example, because he does the piano practice with our son. Sometimes he pushes our son, like, okay, come on, you can dig, you could do that better, or whatever. You can just tell, like, now we are getting to borderline where he does not want to be doing it anymore. I just look at my husband and say, I do not want to anchor any negative feelings towards piano. What are we doing? You do not need to push him. He loves doing it. He will do it on his own. He will sit there and play on his own for half an hour. You do not need to.

My husband grew up with a professional musician as a father. He saw his dad practice eight hours a day, practice scales eight hours a day. In his mind, it is like he is helping our son. You have to look at the emotional state of the learner. If they are not clicked in and they are not enjoying it, do not keep pushing. Like you said, go outside, get out of the seat, go for a walk.

A lot of education I do with my son as well. We are out in the world. We are talking. He is like, hey, how do I spell that, and what does this word mean, and can we look this up? It is just conversation. So much learning is conversational and experiential. My number one goal is not to kill his love of learning.

We did a test a few months ago because when a child gets to a certain age in the state of Washington, they need to do annual tests. I was surprised at how well he did. I know he is good, but I was like, where are we compared to all the other, like, the normies? I was like, well, hot damn, he is doing really well. Here we are doing very non-traditional education, and he just shot it out of the ballpark.

This is the exciting thing. If you follow these two principles, do not believe any limitation, do not put any limitation on your child, get creative, get resourceful, allow your child to allow their excitement to guide their education. Same with you. You and I and everyone listening, you are listening to this because you let your curiosity guide your education. We are all scholars. We are all continuing to learn.

Do not kill their love of learning and switch state. Change state if they are in a bad state, do not keep pushing. You forced, when you first started, forcing your child to sit down for three hours doing homework. Homework is the most ludicrous thing.

I will wrap this up by saying, if you worked a nine-to-five job in an office, let us say you worked for Amazon or Microsoft. I have friends that work at Microsoft. I have friends that work at Amazon. Imagine they go home for the day and then they are expected to work three or four more hours on personal projects.

If you own your business, you are working that. As an entrepreneur, the saying is, I work a hundred hours so I do not have to work forty hours. That is different. You chose that. You are motivated. It is your business. It is your baby. When you are working for a company, when you go home, there are certain times you have a project or a deadline, but the culture of the entire workforce is not expected to go home and do homework for two three four hours every night after you get home from work. No, let a kid be a kid, you know, so it was though There's my soapbox. I love what you're doing. I love your project. I'm so so excited about it. I'm really excited to promote this. The website's enoughisenoughbook.com. But you want to go to barbierivera.com. And of course, the links to everything that Barbie does is going to the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.Com. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing. Can you please come back and give updates? I want updates on your projects and how you're going. I’m very excited for what you're doing.

Barbie Rivera (2:21:32.137)

Yes. Anytime. Anytime.

Ashley James (2:21:34.743)

Awesome. Is there anything that you want to say to wrap up today's interview?

Barbie Rivera (2:21:39.479)

No, I think that we said it. I mean, first of all, if you're on the fence about homeschooling, just know you're never going to have it all figured out. You're just not. You just need to start. There are tons of resources to get that going.

My personal thing with the curriculum is to go old school with the books. Don't do anything modern because it's just, you said. I called it, when I was doing homework with my son, I was just giving him the same poison, but in a nicer spoon. I was just facilitating the same nonsense.

So you want to watch for that. That's where I go back to just reading, writing, and math. Simple.

Ashley James (2:22:24.837)

Awesome. I love it. Everything else is really going to fall into place because of their curiosity and exploring the world. Absolutely. Thank you, Barbie. This has been awesome and I can't wait to have you back.

Barbie Rivera (2:22:37.655)

Thank you.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Barbie. I know I did. It was so wonderful talking to her. Since you're here, you've listened to the entire interview. What I know more and more is that the power of prayer does make such a big difference. So, since you're here, I want to reward you for staying till the end. If you're someone who receives prayer, I'd love to pray for you. Please join me in praying for everyone who listens to this podcast.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your guidance. Thank you so much for your love. Thank you so much for your son, who you sent here to teach us what love is and to save us. I thank you for your word and I thank you for the healing that you provide. Jesus, you are the great healer and you say that we can heal ourselves too.

So I ask for healing for everyone listening. I ask for revelation for everyone listening, that you open our eyes and our ears and our hearts so we can hear your guidance, so we can feel the intensity of your love. The love that burns away all the guilt, the shame, the sorrow, the fear. We give it to you and allow your love to penetrate deep into our hearts. We want to feel you and have a close relationship with you. We are seeking healing on every level, and I know that we will feel your presence more and more as we invite you into our hearts and into our lives. Thank you for your guidance. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for the Learn True Health listeners. Please bless them. In Jesus' mighty name, I pray. Amen.

Hi, my name is Jennifer Saltzman and I am the head coach at TakeYourSupplements.com. I wanted to share with you a testimonial that I received from a client of mine, one of the many success stories that I have. This one was very close to my heart because she's young and has struggled so much to regain her health and has had such a phenomenal, overcoming testimonial that I really wanted to share it today.

She writes, my name is Angela. I am 25 years old. I have been on a health journey that consists of an autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, and other issues that left me feeling defeated and debilitated every day. For 15 years I have seen eight different specialists and many doctors and have been in and out of physical therapy dealing with symptoms I thought would leave me wheelchair bound and in diapers by the time I was 30. I am now 25, and after everything I've learned through Jennifer at TakeYourSupplementscom, that definitely won't happen.

Some things doctors have said to me have crushed my hopes. I was told to lose weight and that my pain would go away. So I lost 90 pounds and the pain was still there. My days were short, and after a five-hour work shift or even a day of running an errand or two, I was left debilitated. So the doctors told me the pain was all in my head because I was previously diagnosed with fibromyalgia, the only diagnosis so many doctors agreed upon because they couldn't think of anything else.

Despite me having some form of an immune disease, I felt hopeless and as if life was going to pass me by. There were times when I tried hiking one or two miles and I was unable to walk or function for days after. I was missing out on trips and adventures and, as embarrassing as it sounds, I was having BM bathroom emergencies so frequently it was ruining my daily function. I could go on about the ways I was ill and what it kept me from, but honestly, after the progress I've made, a long list of symptoms I used to have have become a blur of the past.

When I finally decided to check out TakeYourSupplementscom, recommended through the Learn True Health podcast, I was immediately connected with Jennifer, who kept track of my overwhelmingly long list of complex symptoms and thoroughly created a personalized, step-by-step plan. Her recommendations have changed my life and the changes were practically instant.

She put me on a complete digestive activation complex that has taken away all of my stomach pain, unnecessary bloating, and gas. She explained to me that the formula supports every stage of digestion, from breakdown to absorption, designed to optimize stomach acid, bile flow, and nutrient assimilation. She recommended a cellular repair-focused diet, which not only has helped my stomach, but the food gives me energy and makes me feel really good. It reduces inflammation in my body, something no doctor ever told me about when I first started with Jennifer.

I took the TakeYourSupplementscom health evaluation and I scored a negative 32. I just retook it and scored a 69. That's 100 points better in five months.

Still room for progress, but my life nevertheless has been changed and I am so happy. My days have been much longer and full of adventure. I have hiked the 4,000-footer mountains of New Hampshire, something I never thought I would be able to do. I have had successful days of workouts, errands, and work.

The Learn True Health podcast and Jennifer at TakeYourSupplementscom have done more for me than any doctor ever has, and it all started with validation. I am now 25 and feel my life is just now starting. It's really hard to put into words just how much has changed for me, so I'll keep on living as actively as possible and learning as much as I can so I can finally take part in the beautiful things of life. I can't wait for the adventures to come with the hope I've been given through this program.

If anyone out there hears this and feels their doctors are taking more than they're giving, give this a try. Thank you, Ashley and Jennifer. Your knowledge and expertise is a gift I cherish every day.

Ashley James:

I love it. It's so amazing to hear all the testimonials that come from the people who go to TakeYourSupplements.com. My life was transformed. My life was transformed from TakeYourSupplements.com, from the same protocols that are used through TakeYourSupplements.com, and I'm just so grateful that we can spread this information and help those people who are praying for answers. Shame on the medical industry to hold back this information.

It is so sad, but when you look and you dive into why it is that medical doctors who are well-intentioned are not even taught how to help people heal their bodies, medical doctors are not taught. That's not in their education. They pay close to half a million dollars in education, and they're not even taught how to help you heal your body and reverse and heal chronic illness.

TakeYourSupplements.com and the amazing holistic health coaches that work there are trained by outstanding experts, these naturopathic doctors and research scientists who have developed these protocols that support your body to heal itself, and that's what I love. It's a totally different concept. It's not drug-based medicine. We're not treating symptoms. We're supporting the body's God-given ability to heal itself.

So thank you, Jen, for coming and sharing that testimonial. It is one of thousands of testimonials and stories that we get from people whose lives have been transformed. Thank you for sharing that inspiration because I know when I was sick and suffering, hearing the stories, the success stories of people's lives transformed through holistic health, is what kept me going and drove me to keep seeking these answers.

So go to TakeYourSupplements.com. It's free to have a consultation, and they can work with any budget. They're amazing there. It truly is their mission.

Jennifer Saltzman:

One of the things that really sets our program apart is that we take the time to understand the different categories of nutritional deficiency in an individual, design a program specific to that, follow up with them, and help them fine-tune it as necessary, so nobody feels they're out there figuring it out for themselves.

They're coached through the process of onboarding, adjusting, and then eventually hopefully moving to more of a maintenance program for extended well-being. We watch their health score over the 90-day time elevate greatly. This young gal I just read, her score went up 100 points. We did it at the five-month mark in this case, but I always do the health evaluation after three months, and I always see people's score elevate.

So wherever somebody is, they're going to get supported help that is specific to their situation, with a program that is so foundational and so thorough that we don't miss things that other doctors miss.

Ashley James:

You brought up this term nutrient deficiency, and a lot of us do not realize that the root cause of our cellular dysfunction is nutrient deficiency. This is something I have covered in several interviews, and in fact, when you work with Jen, when you go to TakeYourSupplements.com and work with Jen, she gives you resources. So if you want to go down that rabbit hole and learn more, you can learn why we have nutrient deficiency. In a world where we're eating too much and we have access to so much food, you wouldn't think you'd have nutrient deficiency, and yet that has been the root cause all along. So when you work with Jen, she helps you to maximize your cellular nutrition. So now your cells can function healthfully, and these symptoms melt away. Illness melts away.

I was able to reverse type 2 diabetes and chronic adrenal fatigue. I was able to reverse polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility and my adrenal fatigue. It melted away within days, and I'd suffered for years, and that is due to the fact that I was nutrient deficient. In a world where we have access to so much food, it's quantity, not quality. We're not getting the nutrients we need. So I can't speak highly enough about TakeYourSupplements.com and how transformative it is to work with them. Go check them out. It is so worth it. Thank you, Jen, for the work you do. It's phenomenal.

Jennifer Saltzman:

My pleasure. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be able to disseminate that which has been given to me and helped me so much with others who are needlessly suffering and need to really understand back to the way God and nature intended for our bodies to function. We need certain basic nutrients, and they're just simply missing from our food. So I am so grateful that I have this tool to help people with.

Get Connected with Barbie Rivera!

Website – enoughisenoughbook.com

Website – barbierivera.com

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