Rebellion is seen as a cultural norm, but Rebecca Lindenbach begs to differ. Rebellion is not a mistake, it is a habitual behavior pattern. Yes, bad things can happen, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. In her book, Why I Didn’t Rebel, she shows how rebellion is not unavoidable and how it is often misunderstood. She offers incredible research partnered with her own story and the stories of others. Her foundation stems from reasons over rules, giving parents a new paradigm for raising kids who don’t go off the rails. Because rules create a power imbalance while reasons cultivate a healthy parenting relationship. Her book is the best parenting book I have read, so I know you will enjoy this episode!

In This Episode, Allie + Rebecca Discuss:

• What rebellion is and what it is not.

• How you can effectively work discipline, training or teaching into your parenting to help your kids void rebellion.

• Why rules create a power imbalance while reasons cultivate a healthy parenting relationship.

• The power of the words you speak over your children, as they are a self fulfilling prophecy.

• How discipline works when your kids are really young and how you can set them up for success as teenagers.

• Their perspective on whether or not how you choose to school your children impacts their behavior.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Why I Didn’t Rebel by Rebecca Lindenbach

• Rebecca’s Website: Life As A Dare

• Rebecca’s Mom’s Website: To Love, Honor and Vacuum (Rebecca manages the parenting side of the site!)

• Unburdened

Mom life. We are surrounded with the message that it’s the tired life. The no-time-for-myself life. The hard life. And while it is hard and full of lots of servitude, the idea that motherhood means a joyless life is something I am passionate about putting a stop to.  I’m on a mission to help you stop counting down the minutes till bedtime, at least most days.  I want you to stop cleaning up after your kid’s childhood and start being present for it.  Start enjoying it. I believe in John 10:10 “that we are called to abundant life” and i know mothers are not excluded from that promise. Join me in conversations about simplicity, minimalism and lots of other good stuff that leads to a life of less for the sake of enjoying more in your motherhood.  I’m Allie Casazza and this is the The Purpose Show.

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ALLIE: Hey ladies. Welcome back to another episode of The Purpose Show. I am so beyond excited for this one. I am sitting here with Rebecca Lindenbach. She’s the author of Why I Didn’t Rebel and it is a book that I have been talking about so much lately because, as I said on Instagram, it is the best parenting book I have ever read. It’s not even written by a parent and I think that’s what makes it great. I’m so honored to have you here. Thank you so much for being here!

REBECCA: I’m so excited for this! Seeing all the Instagram feedback from you as well has made me even more excited for today.

ALLIE: Yeah! And everybody is like,”No pressure, but everybody’s been waiting for this!”

REBECCA: OK, I’ll try to deliver.  {laughing}

ALLIE: I am so looking forward to this conversation. You are like me in the way that you speak very directly and you definitely have a “no BS” for lack of a better term, attitude about the way that you speak and I love that. I really respond to that. I think it’s really good for people to hear that kind of talk in this sugarcoated, overly-fluffed society that we live in where everybody gets a trophy and everything’s “It will be fine. You’re just doing your best.” No, it won’t though. We need to be intentional. We need to know where we’re going and I love that about you and your book. Before we dive in to all my post-noted questions, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself first?

REBECCA: Well, I am Canadian, which is one thing a lot of people don’t know about me. I don’t know why that always seems to be such a huge thing when people find out. “Oh my gosh. You’re Canadian, right?” Yeah, we exist.

I’ve been married for almost three years now. The beginning of our marriage was me writing this book, which as anyone who’s ever written a book knows how incredibly busy and stressful it is to write a book, and that was on top of being a newlywed. So that was fun. It was a lot of fun, but it was definitely very emotional at times. But, it’s been a topic that I’ve been so interested in for such a long time. I’ve always just been one of those people who loves to see themes and patterns, especially when it comes to human behavior, which is why when I studied psychology in school.

And so as soon as I got this book, my mom was telling me, “You have to write this book!” And Connor, my now husband, was like, “well, of course you have to write this book! This is your book!” And so, I wrote the book and he was really good through that. Pretty much my life these days is talking about a lot of parenting issues online, but mostly I’m working with my mum online, which is also pretty fun. I do most of the parenting side on her website.

ALLIE: I love that because you’re her daughter. If you haven’t read the book listeners, it’s funny because it sounds kind of funny. You think, “She doesn’t know anything about parenting,” but, no! That is what makes this book so amazing is because it’s coming from your perspective and you didn’t just talk out of your mouth and just about your own childhood. You brought in other people. I think every chapter has a story from other people.

REBECCA: Every chapter has at least two other people and psychological research. I was a psychology student like I said, and the research side of me was “I can’t just have this be a case study of Rebecca.” Because, first of all, no one wants to hear an entire book just about me. And also it just wouldn’t be that interesting. Right? But I wanted to make sure it was representative of it. The curiosity was, “Is this the thing that I found helped me,  going to also help other people? Or was I just an outlier? Right? So I really wanted to address that question.

ALLIE: Yes. And I love too that you’re a Christian and your family is Christian. I’m a Christian. But you do not have to be of faith at all to take something incredibly valuable and powerful from this book. You’re very unbiased.

No, you’re totally unbiased. I feel like you’ve covered all the bases. There is no way that somebody (and it’ll be really irritating if somebody finds a way), but I don’t think there’s any way that anybody could read this book and be, “Well, she didn’t think of this or she didn’t cover this kind of parent. You cover incredibly, incredibly strict, very rules-based, to the level of unkindness, really crazy strict parents. And very loose parents. You cover everything. Christians, not Christians. Church-going, not church going. Church-going, but didn’t really get involved. Every type of parent that I can think of that. I love that. So I just want to get right in.

ALLIE: I just highlighted some things that I wanted to ask you about more towards the beginning of the book because I don’t want to get the whole thing away. People need to get your book. I love how the first chapter is “What is rebellion?”, and how you preface the entire book perfectly by addressing that. And it’s quite a large chapter, too, of what rebellion is, defining it and saying what it is “not.” I think, this is where myself as a mother, I tend to freak out. Especially when I hear parents or other people talk about that “something happened”, a mistake is made. And I’m like “Oh my gosh. I can’t believe that happen to them.” But then after this big thing “happens,” there is a lesson learned and the person or child and they go on to live a great life. A mistake is not rebellion. Rebellion is rebellion. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what you say in the book about that, and your thoughts on actually defining what rebellion is before we freak out about it?

REBECCA: I wrote the first chapter after I had done all of my interviews, right? I had already talked to all of these people. I had really delved into this and really thought about, “OK, what makes me think that this is one of the kids who rebelled versus this kid who may have gotten really drunk at a party once, didn’t rebel. What’s the difference?” Right? Because there was a difference in how they lived their lives and how their relationship with her parents was.

And what came back to me again and again was just this idea of who are you living your life for? Are you living your life for God or are you living your life against God? Because we all sinned and we all fall short. Teenagers are very lovable, but they’re very dumb and they make mistakes. I say in the first chapter that everyone goes through extreme hormones, hormonal swings during teenage years. I had a lot of people in my life growing up and I saw all my friends who would get punished for being really moody when they were PMS-ing like mad when they were 14 years old.

I just didn’t really see that as necessarily being a bad kid, and I thought, “I don’t know, that just seems really rough.” So I really wanted to address that to make sure that we didn’t see all sorts of misbehavior as rebellion because there are two different types. There’s the mistakes you make once and you say, “OK, I can be a better person than this.” And there’s that habit. There’s habitual stubbornness to go your own way, even when you know that it’s wrong. Then there’s also rebellion of the heart. All three of those look very, very different. But all of them need to be addressed.

ALLIE: Yeah, absolutely. And you did it beautifully in that chapter. It brought a lot of clarity and it was really great. You could tell that you wrote it after the rest of the book, which is good. It was as if you were saying, “OK, I’ve done all of this. I’ve gone through everything you’re about to read, and you need to know what you’re looking for here.” You brought a lot of clarity to a hazy area of parenting. It’s really sad and myself included. I think a lot of parents kind of get thrown into this whole gig. Everybody is super planned. Personally for my husband and I, I was told, “You’re either not going to be able to have kids or it is going to be super hard.” So we were just chilling together and pregnant eight months into our marriage.

And it was shocking and so you kind of fall, for lack of a more professional term, backwards into parenting. You just have a lot of fear of “I don’t want to be too harsh. I don’t want to be too relaxed. I don’t want to have all these rules without reasons.” But then, especially in the Christian atmosphere, very spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child. I’m very strict. My husband and I tend to stick out in that regard, which you address as well. And I love that. It’s like you just have all these things. You’re just trying your best and it’s not enough. I think it is very important to shine a light on what we’re looking for, what we want and what we don’t want. And what is that verse? It’s in Proverbs. “Without vision, the people perish.” That is so perfect for parents, for everything. But for parenting, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, how can you effectively discipline, train or teach?

REBECCA: Even in parenting the added element is that what if you do have one of the kids who has like a “big mistake” in high school, you’re in the middle of the emotion of it as well, right? You’re in the fear, in the middle of the uncertainty of the “is this going to become a perpetual habit or is this just a once in a lifetime kind of big mistake?” And I think that sometimes parents need to be told there are kids who just make mistakes and it turns out OK. Kids who don’t go into full blown rebellion.

And that was a big thing I tried to do with the book in general. It was just kind of showing parents that, “Yes, bad things can happen, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. That doesn’t mean that even if your worst case scenario comes true, it can’t be used by God.”  And that was kind of a point I was trying to strike, trying to hit again and again and again with the book because it’s really scary. And that was one of the biggest revelations coming out of all the interviews that I did was just, “Holy cow parenting must be really hard.”

ALLIE: So is being a kid, which is something that I took from your book. You forget so quickly what it was like. I read this book with two different trains of thought – which is why I had to read it a couple of times and will probably read it again – one was how I was raised and then how I want to raise my kids. And so it was really interesting to just notice, “Yeah, I did feel like that or I didn’t.” I didn’t realize that’s why I had done that or felt that way and then to reverse it and think forward with my kids. It’s just so good in so many ways.

OK. Basically after chapter one, I think the rest of the book is really what made these kids rebel and what made them not. And what is the common denominators here? What happened? And so one of the first things you talk about is rules. I’m just talking out of memory. I think it’s the chapter where you gave the example, which I loved, of your dad being allergic to all your dress up clothes and the feather boas and others.

REBECCA: Yeah, the really fluffy ones.

ALLIE: Yeah, and you had a sister, so girly things everywhere. It’s just the way she handled it and it’s simplest example, but I love it. It’s so perfect and applies to everything. And your mom saying, “Let’s not bring these things downstairs (or upstairs) because Daddy’s allergic and we it sucks for him to come home and be allergic. Just keep them over here.” And it was a reason instead of “I’ve told you we do not bring these things downstairs!”  Instead of having these set rules and nobody understands why. Kids are not dumb, they can handle it. They just want to understand. If you lay out for your kids, “oh, we’re not going to do this in our house just because we need to respect Dad and that really sucks for him to come home from work after a long day and then have an allergic reaction. So let’s not do that.” And then you never did it because you understand why. It wasn’t just an unwritten rule that was “because I said so.” So can you talk a little bit more about that and how you saw that played out in positive and negative in the people that you interviewed. And in parenting in general, and why that’s important?

REBECCA: Exactly what you said. Kids aren’t dumb. What they really understand is cause and effect relationships, right? I do this, I get a cookie. I do this, I have a timeout, right? That’s why we use positive reinforcers and positive punishment. Sorry, that’s psychology talk. But that’s why we use “the carrot and the stick” kind of mentality a lot of the time with kids. And so what I saw in a lot of these families is you have the two sides of the spectrum. You have families who have a ton of rules and you don’t give any reasons at all. It’s like “You do this because I am your parent I told you to.” One person in particular who I talked about in the book, I call him Nathan in the book, the problem that he found was that the rules didn’t have a clear cause and effect relationship, and the cause and effect relationship that was there didn’t change as he got older.

REBECCA: For instance, he would be allowed to go downtown 45 minutes on his own after dark, but he wouldn’t be allowed to go over to another guy friend’s house and watch a G-rated movie unless there was parent supervision when he was 17 years old. 13 years old? That’s one thing.17 years old? That’s another. And for him it just felt so unfair because, as he said in his words, he was going to move out in five months anyway, so why wasn’t he allowed to have at least a little bit of freedom. Was it that his mom didn’t really respect him? Did she just like having the control? What was it? Of course, looking back on it, he understands a lot of the fear and the uncertainty that his mom must have been facing as a parent.

He was the first born as well. And I think it’s always harder with a first born because you don’t really know what you’re doing. But it’s really hard when you’re the kid who is sitting there and you feel like, listen, I have the ability to get myself a job. I could legally move out if I wanted to. I’m going to be living on my own really soon. And I feel like my parents don’t even see me. I feel like they can’t see what I’m capable of doing and I feel like they’re just trying to control me instead of getting to know me. That’s what a lot of the really strict rules do because they create a power imbalance instead of a relationship.

ALLIE: That is so controversial. I thought it was, “I’m the parent of a child. You can do whatever I say because I said it.” Really that is kind of what’s happening, but it’s not in that tone. You can’t come at them like they’ve done things wrong when they haven’t. It’s like being treated like a convict when you haven’t done anything. You just want to go for a bike ride and if you can’t that’s fine. But can I know why?  

It’s just changing our tone and our perspective to have these conversations with our kids, to have a relationship with them, to build trust and closeness, but also you’re still being authoritative. You still are their parent. I love that you break it down to where you end up saying that authoritative parents are the ones who have the balance of warmth and respect in a relationship with their kids, but they’re also the ones who laid down the law and say, what is, what goes and what doesn’t. Yeah, go, who are you going to be there with? That’s where you land is that’s what our goal should be, is to be that type of parent that has the healthy balance.

REBECCA: Precisely. Here’s what I’ve come to the conclusion after talking to 25 young adults, it was a lot of interviews. Yeah, there’s a lot of footage out there. What I’ve found is that if the ultimate goal of parenting is blind obedience to the parents then what happens when they hit 18? Right? But the thing about authoritative parenting, is that you still have rules. You still have things that you do and you do not do as a family. Like my family, we didn’t bring feather boas outside of our dressup room. Of course we had other things we didn’t do as well, like swear and party and all those kinds of things. But on top of that we didn’t only have the rules, we had the relationship and when I didn’t agree with my parents or something, we could talk about it and there were a lot of times where I changed their minds.

There were a lot of times I did not. And then there were a lot of times where I didn’t change their minds and my little sister got to not have the rules because I realized later that they were a little bit strict there. But having that mixture of the solid “No, there is an authority here” that makes you feel safe as a kid. You know what’s expected. But that authority is going to listen to me and isn’t going to put my needs and my rights second to anyone else’s. Because the rules aren’t there to put the kids’ needs and right below the parents. It’s there to help the kids stay safe and become the kind of person who God wants them to be. That’s why that relationship is so important.

ALLIE: Right. And I think it’s just a focus shift where if you’re focusing, like you said, on just getting them to listen and obey to every single thing you say all the time, well yeah, there’s ways you can get that. But it’s going to turn sour eventually sooner or later.

But if your focus is, like you said, having the relationship, raising good humans who can think for themselves and know who they are. That’s the thing too, is that if you’re focused on just obedience, you’re missing each child. I have four, so I know something about how different they each are. What works for Bella will not work for Leland, for Hudson and Emma and all the other thousands of kids (that I can just keep listing because I have so many kids), but it doesn’t. They’re all different and if I’m focusing on obedience on rules and I’m missing an opportunity to listen and see each of them in their hearts and their gifts and their struggles and then adapt. It’s so much less pressure as a parent to do it that way too, to just play it by ear and follow the Lord’s Spirit.  Play it by ear and listen to your kids and have a relationship with them and know your gut what’s right or wrong for them right now.

REBECCA: Well, that’s exactly it. It’s a lot less pressure, but it can be a lot more intimidating to decide not to parent by parenting gimmicks versus parenting by the Spirit, right? Because how do you ever know for sure? There’s no checklist if you’re parenting by the Spirit, right? There’s no formula. There is no group of people who can judge you and say, “Yes, you are parenting exactly like the Spirit.” That’s why it’s so much harder for a lot of people, you know? That’s why it can be so much more difficult, but it’s so important. It’s such a huge testament to kids to be able to see their parents who are living by their convictions and by the Spirit versus by a rules-based version of what they think the family should look like. I mean, I know that my prayer life and my faith is so much impacted by my parents, seeing them deal with the times that we really tested them.

ALLIE: I love that you said that you think there’s a big gap in our generations of raising kids because we’re like the first wave of parents raising kids in this overly tech-saturated, terrifying season. I was much like you. I was the oldest. My parents were great. Everybody has their flaws. I had a great challenge, great parents. I did not rebel, and they didn’t have to worry about any of this stuff. I didn’t have a phone until I was 17 and it was a little flip phone and it was ten cents per text or whatever. And now if you accidentally hit the microscope for the magnifying glass icon on Instagram and there’s full on pornography right in your face. It’s so accessible.

I’ve got three boys. That alone would send me careening into a pit of despair. It is so crazy. And on the girls side, the comparison game is at its peak. It’s so hard and I don’t have an example of how to raise a kid in that. And so you specifically chose kids who were raised in this tech-obsessed time. None of them are my age or older, they’re all in their early…

REBECCA: They were all under 25 when I interviewed them.

ALLIE: Yeah, so after post Facebook, cell phones, all of that.

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ALLIE: The next thing that I wanted to ask you about and just bring to light is the section about expectations, that children are a self-fulfilling prophecy. I love it so much. I want to bring up Monica and how you talked about her and her mom almost flippantly jokingly saying, “Oh, I only have a couple more years” until she starts to do whatever these awful things that teenagers tend to kind of do.

REBECCA: Sneak out the windows?

ALLIE: Sneak out the windows to be with boy. I thought, “is that normal?” And there’s another episode of my podcast where I talk about the power of words (I have seen it so many times in my life) and speaking positive things over our children, speaking blessings and abundance over their lives and Jesus over their lives in their hearts. And it was so painful to read that section.

REBECCA: I was kinda the opposite of that, right?  

ALLIE: Parents say that all the time as a joke almost. I wonder if it’s almost like a self-defense thing. “She’s going to do it because every teenager does that.” “She’s such a troublemaker.” Or my least favorite thing about boys, “Oh, he’s going to be a heartbreaker. He’s gonna be a lady killer.” Even on onesies now like it’s supposed to be cute.  Maybe you can talk a little bit more about that and maybe some examples that you saw, what that looks like, how parents were doing that and what we should be doing instead.

REBECCA: Yeah. Well the big thing about expectations is that kids feel it very, very, very hard. Parents, I think. A lot of times the kid’s perspective was that their parents were always disappointed in them if they had those expectations of failure. So I had one girl in particular, we call Haley in the book, she said that she had never once heard her mom say “I’m proud of you” except for at her figure skating recitals and competitions and stuff like that. But her mom was always on her case about what she was doing wrong, if she had done anything wrong. What did you do wrong? I know you’ve done something and I know you’re hiding it from me, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

And it makes the relationship go from tense to bad to non-existent. It just does.There’s no sugar coating it with that. For the expectations part, the thing is that we tend to treat kids like they’re little juvenile delinquents before they’ve even done anything wrong. I see this over and over again where kids just want their parents to like them and all they get is this message of disappointment. Why can’t you be more like your friend? Didn’t I raise you better than this and all those kinds of messages of disappointment. Where as in families where there was a lot of expectation for the positive, even when there was failure, it went well, if that makes any sense.

So I had one girl named Parker in the book, her parents were very much like my parents. “Our kids aren’t going to rebel because they’re just not. They have Jesus, we trust Jesus and we fully expect them not to rebel.” So when Parker would do something really dumb and screw up or gossip on a friend, or maybe she didn’t study for a test and failed it when she really should have passed it with flying colors, it doesn’t become this, “I’m so disappointed in you. I knew that this was going to happen. You are just like your father'” or any of those kinds of messages. It was more of, “Hey, we know that you can do better. You did so badly, but we know that you’re better than this because we know who you are. We know who God has made you to be.”

It isn’t a shaming thing. Whereas like, “Man, you can do so much better than this. What’s wrong with you?”  But more of a, “Hey, what’s up? How can I help you? It’s a symptom of a greater problem.

ALLIE: Exactly, a symptom. That’s a perfect word. I love that.

OK, so my last question for you is in light of all of this and in light of the book and getting into why kids do or don’t rebel, how does discipline look when your kids are young? Is that too general?

REBECCA: No, this is great. People ask me all the time about the book, “Is this a book on “teenagers?”  Really it’s just a book about parenting in general.

ALLIE: Yes, because most of our listeners their kids are young, nine-ish and younger. Most of them.  I tended to think, “Oh, this is so good for when they’re older,” But no.

REBECCA: It’s actually just the kind of thing where I had a lot of parents of teenagers email and say, “I wish I had this book 10 years ago when my kid was five years old.” It’s not a teenager book. It’s just the kinds of things that helped us as teenagers, which goes way back into childhood. Most of the questions I asked kids (they’re all adults at this point) but I asked the children was actually about the elementary school years.  

ALLIE: And I think discipline is one of those things where there are so many things that you can do or shouldn’t do and it’s just overwhelming. It really is. Especially when something doesn’t work for one of your kids that worked with the older one.

REBECCA: That was the story of my parent’s life, I was like the perfect kid and my sister was a little bit more difficult as an elementary school kid.

ALLIE: Maybe just give us a general idea of what does a plan would look like in terms of, you know, why I didn’t rebel?

REBECCA: Yeah. Well the overarching principle behind discipline that I found works best from my interviews and I also talked to a clinical psychologist who specializes in parenting psychology with children with behavioral problems. So these are really difficult kids to work with. And I talked to a theologian. I really, really, really did my research. What I found is the major principle behind it is we need to work on discipline, not punishment. Discipline is all about teaching kids what is the right thing to do and punishment is about teaching kids what’s the wrong thing.

REBECCA: Right? When we focus on discipline, the issue is always the end goal. What are we aiming for? We’re aiming for a kid who is loving, who is caring, who is considerate. And so when we’re talking about these kinds of issues, we can have five million kinds of things. “This will have your kid be the perfect kid at the end of the day. ” But really it comes down to understanding what is your child’s feeling at that moment? Why are they doing what they’re doing? That’s a conversation that needs to happen. Like I share in the book, I had a lot of emotional control issues my entire childhood and I still deal with emotional ups and downs. But a big thing my parents always did was, “What are you feeling?” “When we are feeling angry, what can we do instead of hitting our sister?”

And then also letting kids deal with the consequences of what they did. That’s not the same thing as a punishing them harshly. A big thing in our family was if we didn’t eat our dinner, we didn’t get dessert because that’s a natural consequence. If you don’t eat your healthy food, then you don’t get your unhealthy food. You have to eat the food that mom prepared for you first. That was a big one for me because I love dessert and I did not like peas. But these ideas of how can we teach kids what’s the right thing to do instead of simply harshly punish them for the wrong thing. And that’s something that can be really difficult to figure out in the moment. But the biggest advice that I can give, based on the interviews, is focused on what your child’s perspective is.

Because molding behavior won’t really do anything if you don’t get to the heart of the matter, right? If they’re hitting their sister because they’re really, really, really angry and they learn not to hit, but they don’t learn how to deal with the anger, then the anger is going to come out in other ways. But the other thing too is just relax a little bit and just let them deal with what comes, OK? I gave the example of one little kid who really didn’t like putting on clothes and wanted to wear pajamas all the time, and so mom was like, “OK, you can go to preschool in your pajamas” and all the kids made fun of him in his pajamas and then he put on clothes after that. And he’s not scarred from it. Just relax a little bit.

Your kid doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s not going to be horrible if other parents see your kid bearing the brunt of their own actions. So what if your kid has ripped pants because they ruined their pants and didn’t take care of them properly? Then? Well, you don’t get to have nice pants while everyone else has nice pants. These kinds of ideas where it’s about doing the right thing, not about harshly punishing so they don’t do the wrong thing. And a lot of that just comes down to getting to the heart behind it.

ALLIE: And that simplifies the brain clutter that we feel so much. This book was just a breath of fresh air and it really lighten my load as a parent in all the different ways, especially doing what I do. I talk to a lot of people with a lot of opinions and a lot of different methods for things. Really there is no one-size fits all method. You have to just, like you said, relax and take it as it comes and look at the heart and where you want to go.

REBECCA: Yeah, and get to know your kid. There are so many parents who don’t really know their children because they don’t take the time to really talk to them. And something I found again and again, (I wish I’d had more space to put this in the book), but out of all of the kids that I’ve talked to who rebelled, I asked every single one with them what their biggest regret was. And these are kids who had a lot of things that went on and their number one regret for every single one except for one kid was that they didn’t have a good relationship with their parents.

It wasn’t what they did in high school. It wasn’t living with the ramifications of what had happened in high school. It wasn’t anything like that. It was all about the parents because what kids really, really want is their mom and dad. They really want is that relationship and that is like simultaneously incredibly heartbreaking, but also so incredibly helpful I think for parents, just knowing that you are what your kid needs.

ALLIE: Absolutely. Absolutely. And one more quick thing I would love to ask. You were homeschooled?  I’m homeschooling my kids. We’ve done public school, homeschooling flopped back and forth as needed and there’s all different kinds of ways to raise your kids in that regard. Christian school, private school, Public School, Charter school. How much do you think that has to do with how your kids end up or do you think it doesn’t matter at all? It’s all about you as the parent.

REBECCA: A mix, and I know that’s such a cop-out answer, but I know kids who are homeschooled who are terrifying now. We’re talking terrified, like I don’t want to be in a room alone kind of situation and that’s OK to say because it’s true. I’m not exaggerating. But I also know kids who are homeschooled and are like me and who didn’t rebel and that kind of thing. Also the same thing with public schools. I think no matter what you end up doing with your kids, if you aren’t talking to your kids, if you aren’t spending time getting to know them, it’s not going to end up well. With homeschooling, it is easier to spend a lot of time with your kids and get to know them. I think that is a big factor and that was a huge factor in my parent’s relationship with me. I am trying to think of all the kids who didn’t rebel and how many were homeschooled and I think there was only one other kid.

ALLIE: You mentioned a lot when you were talking to them there was circumstances that came up at school.

REBECCA: I tried to get a really big cross section of different demographics as well because again, psychology research mind, but I didn’t only interview homeschooled kids. It wasn’t like all the homeschool kids were good. They’re actually one or two kids who rebelled who are homeschooled in the book.

ALLIE: I get asked that a lot, especially because we put our kids in school last year and pulled them out halfway and everyone assumes “something happened.” What happened? What were you afraid of? We just missed our kids and it just works out better for us. It’s really convenient and flexible.  But yeah, it’s good to hear that. I think people put a lot of weight on the parenting world on that decision and I think it will matter for sure, but it’s not it. That’s not your only job is to make sure you educate. They spend most of their day in the right place.

REBECCA: I’ll be honest here, I didn’t have a single kid who rebelled or who didn’t rebel say that it was because they went to Christian school, didn’t go to Christian school, were homeschooled or not homeschooled. I think that when we put so much emphasis on the kind of schooling kids are getting it’s easy to put a lot of the blame or the “ownness” on what your kids are learning on the school, if that makes sense? Not just educationally, but in terms of their faith, spiritual development, personal development. Which is why to say no matter where your kids are going, if you just don’t have time to talk with them, then change something.

ALLIE: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. OK. Where can people find you? Where are you at?  Where are you writing? Where can they connect with you outside of your book?

REBECCA: My personal website which is updated sporadically at best is  lifeasadare.com. The best place to find me right is my mum’s website, which is tolovehonorandvacuum.com. I know you have had her on the podcast.  I post pretty much once a week on there, once a week or once every two weeks. That was a place to find me right now.

ALLIE: Yeah, I love that. Well, we’ll link to your site. We’ll link to your mom’s site and, your book for sure. But thank you so much for taking so much time. I know this was a longer episode, but thank you for being here and taking your time and sharing with us. We just are so grateful. I’m so grateful to have you and I’m really grateful that you took the time. I know you initially didn’t want to write this book.

REBECCA: Write the book? Yeah I was very, very hesitant.

ALLIE: Yeah. Thank you so much, Rebecca. You are amazing. I’m so impressed by you. You just, you shine and I know you’re going to do amazing things. Continuing to do amazing things. So thank you for being here.

REBECCA: Thank you so much for having me.  

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This was an episode of The Purpose Show.  Thank you so much for tuning in.  If you are ready to uplevel and really take action on the things I talk about on my show, head to alliecasazza.com for free downloads, courses, classes and to learn more about what the next step might look like for you.  I am always rooting for you. See ya next time!

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