How to Teach Your Kids to Homestead

Hi everyone, and I wanna thank you for having joined me in season two of the Homestead Education Podcast. It has been a great season with some amazing guests and I can’t wait to continue this momentum as we head into the third season. I have how found that one of my listeners favorite topics is homeschooling and how to teach homestead in the homeschool. So next season I am going to have one episode a week completely devoted to homeschool. Isn’t that exciting? But here’s where it gets really exciting. I’m not leaving my other listeners hanging. I will have a second episode each week to discuss homesteading homestead businesses, agriculture and personal growth. So I have a few announcements before we get going on today’s episode. First I am offering my Christmas sale for a few more days. So that’s 15% off of all curriculum with the code GIF 15 and all of my printed storybooks are 20% off until the end of December.

The storybook box set comes with the audio books as a free gift always. And did you know that I also offer the animal science units of the curriculum as a standalone digital eText? This is a great option for those who only want part of the curriculum. I’ll link all this information in the show notes. I also wanna make sure that everyone is subscribed to my newsletter. This is where I give some insight into our daily lives. I start conversations with you, I give content updates, post subscriber only sales, and my favorite part is where I link you guys some of my favorite products usually from other small businesses and homesteads. There have have been a lot of problems with business newsletters going into promotion folders or even spam lately. And I’m not just giving you this heads up for my own benefit ’cause I’ve been really disappointed to find some of my favorite newsletters in my spam folder lately.

So make sure that you check these folders and flag your favorite businesses as not spam. I have two great learning opportunities for you coming up over the next two weeks. First, I’ll be speaking in a home studying in your homeschool summit, there’s gonna be several other great speakers as well in this summit and it’s launch launching January 7th. You can get lifetime access to this for one low price. So see the show notes for more information. Next, which is actually coming first is I will be hosting a completely free How to Teach Your Kids Homesteading for Lifelong Self-Sufficiency Live webinar. So be sure to register to get your free guide to teaching your Kids’ homesteading. This is gonna be an in-depth webinar going into the why and how of teaching homesteading. And trust me guys, it’s gonna be fire. Now, if you can’t make the webinar on Friday, or if you’re listening to this episode much later, it’s still there for you. It’s just not gonna have the live question and answer at the end, and you won’t be able to catch some webinar-only promotions.

All right, onto this week’s episode of How to Teach Homestead. Do you wanna give your kids a desire for self-sufficiency to be strong and confident, to be someone you can rely on who shows respect for animals each other in the land while preserving traditions and their food, who sees the value in home cooking and natural health? Teach them to homestead. Alright, I’m not gonna cover all parts of teaching kids to Homestead today because you can get all of that in my free webinar. But what I do wanna emphasize is that most kids don’t just do things because we told them. So now I do wanna back up and say that we are the parents and it is our job to guide and teach our kids. Bottom line is that sometimes they do need to do things just because we told them. So my biggest one is safety for themselves and others.

I strive to have an understanding with my kids that if I tell them to do something, especially in an urgent tone, I am not to be questioned. 99% of the time. I will follow up this scenario with an explanation as to why we had urgency or they will figure it out on their own because of the circumstances, but we always thank them for their quick action afterwards. On a homestead or really anywhere in rural life, there are many times in which there are situations that everyone needs to jump into action. For my younger kids, that can mean simply getting outta the way. There are often times where there’s road cows, power outages and wrecks on the highway, and I know that my kids can be relied on to handle emergencies simply because they know when we tell them to do something, they need to do it.

Now for non-emergency situations, we try to take time to teach or explain as often as possible. We don’t have a lot of issues with defiance. It’s generally more of an issue of completing something in a timely manner. This is where the majority of the teaching comes into play. The example that I use the most is giving piglets iron shots within 48 hours of birth. Piglets are not born with iron stores on their livers and a sow’s milk is iron deficient. Therefore, it’s extremely important for kids to let us know when there’s a litter born and then follow through with piglet processing. Processing includes iron shots, clipping their needle teeth, and if they’re gonna be a pig that’s shone at fair, the tail will need to be docked. We have about 150 piglets born on our homestead every year, and in the past we’ve lost a couple of piglets from what we believe was anemia, the lack of iron.

This was eye-opening for our kids and they didn’t like that Their actions led to the loss of an animal. Unfortunately, them experiencing this loss was in the incentive that they needed to be able to grasp the importance of proper and timely heard management. Kids have to be able to fail sometimes because of the teachings we have provided our children, we are able to give them direction without explanation due to the respect that they have for our understanding of proper and timely her herd management. Now, every family is different, but I know that when I started teaching this way from a young age, we have seen really positive results with our younger kids. We started this process by having them complete the task because I told you so. Then we follow up with, thank you for your help to take out the trash. Now I can make your dinner more quickly.

Understanding why they need to help and then how it affects them really is key. Now in the case that I do occasionally get a snotty. Why? Because let’s face it, I have teenagers. This is a non-negotiable. The task will be completed. If not, there’ll be a consequence that handles the instant gratification that they were seeking by not completing the task. This is the natural consequences that go hand in hand with the consequences that happen from homestead mismanagement. To hear more on how to teach homestead, register for my free webinar at the homestead education.com/teach-homesteading. I hope this gave you something to think about and until next time, keep growing.