Episode 11: On Families

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by Catherine Picolic from Catholic University of America. We'll talk about families, population changes, and time as a form of wealth. All right, we're here with Catherine Picolic from Catholic University. Catherine, thank you for joining us today. Oh, you're welcome, delighted to be here. Yeah, it's great to see you. Can you-- we'll start off. Can you just give us a little bit of background about who you are and what you do? Sure. So I teach in the business school at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., the Catholic University of America, along with the Ohio State and a few others. Yeah, so I'm a trained economist. And so I kind of work on developing and enhancing our economics curriculum in the business school. But as an economist, I've always been interested in demographic questions and that interest. You go all the way back to my dissertation years, starting to sound like a long time ago. But then separately, as a mom, I've got a big family, and I grew up in a big family. So for personal reasons, I was also interested in the demographic crisis. And so, yeah, so generally, I teach a bunch of classes. And then I've recently written a book on falling birthrates and the people who, in a sense, kind of are bucking the trend and doing something different. So that's been really fun. And I spend a lot of my time these days traveling around, telling people about that. Yeah, great. So people have, I think, have heard of this idea of the demographic crisis or the fertility crisis. And in higher ed for the past couple years, we've been talking about something called the enrolment cliff, which is kind of a downstream effect of that. We talked about, maybe the separately, the need or the desire for fewer people to go to college. But whether or not that's correct, there are just fewer 18-year-olds to go around with futures. Yeah, there are. Can you kind of lay out the basic idea of what's going on with all of that? Sure. So in fact, you're exactly right that we're going to see-- we're seeing this effect of this fewer numbers of children being born is hitting the school age years. In fact, the UN thinks that we passed global peak child, actually, I think about five years ago. It's really tough to estimate these things. But that just means that every year now, the number of children in the world is shrinking. There are fewer children each year than the year before. And so that will have to show its face in school populations. In fact, a funny story is that recently I was invited on a kind of a big news program to talk about my work. And the scheduler for this program didn't really tell me in advance what they were going to ask me about. Normally, they just asked me about my book. And my book isn't about schooling. And she said, well, we hope we can ask you about schooling. And I thought, OK, well, I can talk about that. And I thought they wanted to know about birth rates in relation to schooling. But no, what they actually really wanted to talk about is how there won't be people going to school, the school-opera-- and this will put tremendous pressure on local school budgets. And that's everything. So-- and I was like, well, sorry. I kind of had to make it up on the scene. But yeah, basically, just a tremendous reduction in the number of school-aged children. And so actually, the profile of the type of people who might-- I would say, might typically be looking for an alternative type of education and sort of the mainstream public monoculture education. They are also the same people having more births. So this is kind of accelerating the fact. So just to give you one more statistic, the women I profiled in my work, they are about 5% of the women in the child-bearing population. So roughly 5% of women, a little bit younger than I am, but close to the end of their fertile years, have kind of larger families, like four or five kids. But they represent close to 20% of the children. Wow. So that's-- yeah, because they usually do the math and that. It's like, I should get a good graph on that. So they have a disparate impact. They're raising more of the kids out there than they represent in their own population. So what that means, of course, is that there will be not just sort of a normal effect on public school budgets, but actually an accelerating effect as an increasingly large share of the school-aged children are being raised by families who have lots of kids and cannot afford traditional private schooling, but still want an alternative way to raise the kids. Or choose something else, right? You do need to graph about this, because this is a very interesting-- I know. It's really interesting. --interesting. Right? Yeah. So yeah, so many things. It's interesting to talk about the term peak child. In part, because this is something we have total control over, right? Right. We don't have to be a peak child, but we kind of are. That's right. So let's talk about your book, then. Hannah's Children. In this book, you interview this group of-- or people from this group of college educated women who have chosen to have five or more kids. So say more about that for people who haven't read it yet. Sure. Yeah. In a sense, without going too far out of my league, I'll say that there's a impulse here, which I think is common to a set of fields, which is sort of like-- you see a thing that's got a lot of problems. So we got this demographic decline or crisis. One thing you could do is just study the problems. You could go in and be like, well, what are the problems or the different ways you could think about the problems. But another thing that you could do is you could say, well, where are there not problems? Who is immune from this problem? And I think there's obvious parallels with schooling. It seems to me. You say, well, look at these-- the kids can't read. All right, well, which kids can read? Where is nobody able to-- so you take those principles of, I guess, I would say study success. So in this sort of sea of birth rates trending to below replacement, we know that life families would say, well, we haven't achieved even our own goals for-- so you say, are there pockets of success? So that was the basic impulse was to go out and study success, which, like it's moving on from schools for a minute. So we'll leave that to you, because that's your expertise. But like in fitness, we do the same thing, right? Imagine-- just imagine for a minute, you had a whole country that wasn't very healthy or was tending to obesity. You wouldn't learn a lot just by studying the failures. You'd want to go and say, well, what did it take to get out of that? Are there people who've escaped this? People who've recovered? And you'd want to grab those principles and learn from that. So that was the impulse was to go out and discover what ideas, backgrounds, motives, just different ways of looking at the world might be present in these communities where I found a lot of kids and earlier marriages and that kind of thing. So yeah, so I put all that together in a book and tried to tell that story. And that is the book. Yeah, it's really interesting. One archetype of a micro school or a hybrid school founder is a teacher who is tired of the machinery of schooling and sort of strikes out on their own. Or they have some idea for an interesting kind of education that they want to do, but they can't, because of the constraints of their school. But another archetype is a mom. And very often, a mom with multiple kids who maybe was a former home school or maybe not, who just decides that she's going to start something up for her kids. So obviously, I don't know the subjects in your book personally, but in reading through it, over and over, I felt like, oh, I know that type really well. Yeah, you know that type. These are perfect stand-ins for the moms that started my own kid's school and for people I've met all over the country. So I'm curious how did schooling come up in your interviews? Yeah. Well, it came up frequently, because I think a great example, I'm just give you one example, a mom who is called Terry in the book. She, I think at the time we interview her, she's expecting her 10th baby. And she's, you know, I'm kind of asking these moms to kind of tell me like, well, what, you know, when did you have your first and like, what made you have your second? Like, when did you decide to have four? Yeah. So you're walking through this story with them. And she says to me, well, and then there was a time when my husband and I looked at each other, we had our kids in the local Catholic school. And like four or five, and she said, we just looked at the budget and we thought, well, it's either going to be another kid, you know, or we're going to keep the kids in the parochial school. And she said, we looked at each other, we said, well, I guess this is when we're going to become home schoolers. So you see that, I mean, one of the pieces of the story was like, these are people who want children so much, who believe in the value of having children so much that they're willing to make sacrifices to sacrifice other things that they might have. that they might have valued highly. And so what this is exactly where this comes up, you go, oh, there you go. You see that trade off where they say, well, we really value education. We really value our children. We don't want to have an artificial kind of imposed limit on our family size because of the cost of schooling. And so she says, well, voila, that's when we became homeschoolers. So that's a kind of archetypal story, I think, that one in particular, I told in the book. And I think there were many examples of that. In fact, some of the interviews were conducted in a church-based co-op of some kind. And again, I don't even know if it's a homeschool co-op or a micro-school. There were certainly classes happening. So yeah, so you see that. That's why I think this has been driven by moms like that or just to say, we're going to do this. Yeah, I think it was interesting because it comes out again and again about how they-- it would be really easy. And people are kind of told to see the next kid as a big economic burden. But your interviewee really didn't. So what are some arguments against that idea that big families are unsustainable in moderate-- Yeah, yeah. --American. Yeah. Well, I think that a couple things. I think one of the things I heard a lot was, like, look, it doesn't cause as much as you think. And one of the main ways it doesn't cause as much as you think is that a lot of things that you need to have for a kid, you buy it once, and then you use it again. So the best example of that is your shelter, your home. You can put a lot more kids at a home than the mainstream popular culture has you think. But this is a big point, which is family sizes have decreased while home sizes have gotten big. So this is the first point. If you have one shelter, in principle, when we look at our parents and our grandparents, you can have a lot of kids under one roof. So you don't have to buy 10 houses for 10 kids. And that principle really extends a lot of other things. You buy the clothing once and you pass it down, the stroller and the cotriments. And there's a few places where the moms would say, well, this was kind of-- we had to upgrade to a bigger car that was an expense. But I think that would be the number one principle, people just aren't careful. They just sort of go like, oh, it was one kid times 10. And that's a big number. So then there were, of course, the first point is just the extra marginal cost isn't as big as people think. Number two is you can do with a lot less than people think you need. And in fact, it kind of works out better for your kids. There's a lot of story about that. Just to me, I've recently learned that people think you need a separate bedroom for each kid. And the mom said, well, we've got like five kids in this room and the boys over here and the girls over here. And when we try to separate them into more rooms, they want to think they're back. They really-- yeah, exactly. So you kind of go, oh, separately-- and I assume this is of interest to you too. But separately, we've got this whole conversation in the country about what you do with lonely kids, and anxious kids, and kids who are depressed and on screens. And the moms are saying to me, well, look if there's a lot of advantages to putting five siblings in a room together, they're never lonely, they're never anxious. The one who's afraid of going to sleep, he's got six siblings on top of him. And so there's a whole lot of maybe just learned wisdom in there that was not part of the subject of the book but came out. So yes, so those are all the kinds of things. And then, of course, it would be worth pointing out that a lot of the families I talked to were willing to go without certain things. And in relation to education, a lot of them said, well, we're not-- we just don't think we're going to pay for college. That's something we're going to let our kids figure out. And we're comfortable with that. And so it's an interesting thing, like a combination between a really canned-ew attitude about not accepting limits in terms of-- we're going to do high quality education and still have a lot of kids. But at the same time, a more hands-off approach about college, not seeing it as something that you have to continue sort of coddling your children through, which also might be-- Yeah, well, I was going to say it's kind of handing it off to them when they're adult-ish age, right? Yeah, yeah. And when we are looking at-- I don't know what the trends are where you are. We go back to that demographic cliff for the colleges. Clearly, we're facing the end of a period of time. I think where people maybe is a bubble in higher education. Too many kids going to college, being encouraged to think that you can't start your adult life without this degree-- that probably needs to go away. Right. OK, so a lot of the women in your book come from pretty diverse backgrounds, but they share this kind of countercultural approach, which is also a very typical vibe among hybrid and micro-spot founders, right? So what kind of advice would you give to young women today who might be considering larger families, but they feel discouraged about their ability to start a school like this? I know you talk a lot about how we're thinking about kind of the trade-offs wrong that we're offering to young women. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, first of all, I'd like to say that there's this really interesting, I would say, kind of what's the right word. It's a really bizarre kind of bias that exists in the sort of education trademark industry, which is like we want everybody to get a college degree. In fact, we want them to get masters degrees and postgraduate degrees. In other words, the whole industry is in favor of women getting a lot of education. And then they forget all that. And then when they look at moms that they're kids, they say you're totally unqualified to educate your children. Right. This is very strange. You're like, wait, can you read? Can you write? OK, what explains that? And when you maybe train a little bit more of a realistic eye on that discrepancy, maybe a little bit more of a cynical eye on that discrepancy, you say, well, maybe what explains that is a kind of a standard sort of protection of territory, kind of an elitism that sort of wants to protect the profession of the industry. I mean, there's a bill in Maryland where I live right now, which really kind of seeks to up the ante, like what are the types of credentials that moms or dads have to have in order to homeschool their kids? I think this is a terrible thing. But the way I think about it is like, well, wouldn't it be nice if we had this whole educated class of people who had liberal arts degrees? We've been-- like I would say, in the classical school movement. And for now for 50 years, we've been really trying to craft the ideal education for an adult for a citizen. Well, that's what that's for. That's what that's for, is to educate your kids. So I'd say two things to young women to think about that. One is that the purpose of-- or one really important and profound, very fulfilling purpose of all that education that you went and got is actually that makes you a great educator for your kids. As the first point, and the second point is that it's-- I think it can be really daunting to think that what you have to do is actually go, like teach every kid every subject for 18 years. But what you can think of yourself as doing is something that I think about, like sometimes they use a language of educational contractor. You just have to have good judgment. And you've read a lot of books. So you can look at a curriculum that is out there. You can say, well, I love some of those books. It's your great books. And so you don't actually-- these days, you don't have to maybe well-trained mind style. You don't have to write your whole curriculum, mark your kids down to the library every Monday, and pick out a new set of books. So there's just a tremendous number of tools that you're disposal. What you have to have is good judgment. And that's where I feel like it's like a lot to encourage young moms to sort of-- this is why you went to school. This is why you got all this. You got this judgment. And then that's where the power of finding four other families might be. So it's totally doable. It's so much more doable than it used to be. And it really contributes to something I would say. There's a lot of complaint right now in the feminist universe. We'll say we've got the feminist. We've got the reactionary feminist. We've got the anti-feminist. They're all out there. But kind of a universal point that they all make is that the industrial revolution did a thing, which was kind of bad for everybody, which was like it separated, like dads and moms and kids. And so we've lost this kind of sense of like the home as like the center of-- you could say like domestic production, but that's like a very kind of crossway to put it. Yeah. Right? It's become kind of a home base, right? Like the place where you-- Yeah. So you have some people today out there, and I can name them, but I won't. Like out there arguing the way to restore everything is to return to home production. Like you got to make your bread, make your cheese, and make your yogurt. Fine. But I actually think the way-- the much more sensible way to do this is to bring sort of education back to sort of being essentially like the center of-- there's overlap. I think of it as like there's overlapping spheres of expertise that you may want to draw on, to educate your children. But all of those circles-- they may not be concentric, put all of them overlap [BLANK_AUDIO] home front. So then your job is really to kind of pull all of these disparate areas of expertise into this domestic sphere. And I think that's a very attractive vision. And then when you couple that with I think, you know, something we celebrate in our business school, which is like the opportunity for women, for moms to do a lot of entrepreneurship from the home, whether it's school entrepreneurship or other types of home based businesses, this is a tremendously attractive lifestyle for a lot of women. Yeah, the Etsy economy is a thing. Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. It's like it's not as bad as people say. Like, okay, yeah, the machine era and industrial revolution. But actually, like, we, I think we really are putting it back together. So we can do that. Yeah. So and some of your other work you've talked about, are you recommended rethinking education to make it more family friendly in terms of opening up school choice? So yeah, so you've written things arguing for that it helps with logistics and affordability and meeting and values. And these again are very literally the reasons that people give survey them about why do you choose micro school or homes or a hybrid school? Yeah. Yeah. But you also argue in another place that just finding a fit between your family and your school, like that alone also helps their academic achievement. So can you talk a little bit about those things? Yes. Sure. Yeah. So this, this came, this came around in my thinking from years ago, like, like a lot of years ago before, I don't think micro school was a word at that time, but, you know, homeschooling and home education was a word and trying to understand like a lot of good theories come around from things that are unexplained. You kind of like, you know, there's, we can't explain why this thing works so well. And I would say that's been true of homeschooling for a long time. Like the the fancy credentialed economists who work on education don't have a good theory for why home education works so well. And so lacking a theory, they just say it's biased. They say, well, oh, it's just because these are like wealthier families or these are more well educated families. And if you control for all that, this would go away. And in fact, that's not true. But they've been able to sustain that argument because we don't have great gold standard data. And you know, that's a, that's a thing I'm, I'm hoping at some point I could make it hard. Right. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, you're not really doing anything really great. You're just, you know, you're just replicating privilege. And I think that's, you know, obviously terribly wrong. But so I was thinking, well, all right, there's, there's got to be some explanation. Like we, we need a, we need a theory which accounts for both the things that work in traditional schooling, but also the things that are so successful in home education. So, so what I noticed is that a lot of the research from schooling looked at the kind of the school. Like was a public school or private schools, you know, public school or a Catholic school. So you have like whole papers, whole lines of research, like what, you know, our Catholic school is better than brought in public school. And I just kept thinking like none of this is going to work because home schooling isn't a type of school because every home school will be in a sense its own case. It's like an N equals one, right? Because like you as a teacher with your kids, like, so I thought, well, what's, what's, what's interesting about this and this whole idea of kind of fit or match kind of came up. And so I started to wonder like, okay, is there something to that? And if that's the case, if, if, no, what do I mean by fit? I just mean something so simple. Like imagine for a minute that a child is a vulnerable, sweet human being who just, you know, kind of would prefer to be at home in his pajamas, you know, like sitting on the couch backwards with the speed up in the air. In other words, like kids are kids are immature, immature humans and that they kind of need to be in the nest. Like they, they, they do everything better when they're comfortable. So I'm going to be by fit or like match. So I thought, well, okay, if you had that, if that actually turned out to be like a kind of a picture of what like young human beings are, like they, like little puppy dogs that need to be with the mommy doggy, well, then you could explain the, the benefits in private schools as, as a case, like a special case of this, where you'd say, well, some private schools may do better in so far as they feel like home for a kid. So it's a whole, it's sort of a whole theory that's based on home education as being essentially like the, the prime, like the, like the, the, the primal case of like how kids are meant to be born into the world. And so yeah, there's something I've spent a little bit of time researching. I'd like to do more of it. The preliminary data that I looked at suggests this is, you know, probably something worth looking more into. Yeah. So, so yeah, I don't know if I, maybe I took a circuit as path. But, but this is, you know, I've recently pointed out to the, to the kind of economics community that there are, when we look at results that explain or purport to explain where the value is in higher education, those same results may be consistent with at least two or three different underlying, like stories about how human beings operate. And if you don't get to the story about how human beings operate or how they learn, like, are, you know, are there principles of human nature? You're going to draw the wrong conclusions from those sort of treatment effects that we see. So, yeah, so there's a lot going on there, but I think it's like, this is a great case where, you know, I think home education and the broader like, microscope movement and community, like you're ahead of the research. Right. And so it's like, it's like wonderful. People still can't figure out like, well, how are we supposed to study this? Yeah. It's wonderful for the schools. It's rough on you and me in some way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's okay. That's okay. That's right. That's our problem. But that's okay. It's a good problem to have. And so, you know, I think for now, it's like, just highlight the success. I mean, you can't, you can't argue with that. But yeah, it would be really nice, it'd be really nice to get, you know, one set of statistics that really helps to put to bad this idea that it's that the success is driven by by privilege, by, um, there's a, and there's, wait, it's not, it shouldn't be that hard. There's, it's just a question of money. I know how to do that study. But last time I asked somebody at an ORC, what that would cost. They said, well, that would cost us $20 million. It's like, well, that's great. Come back, I'll come back to when I have $20 million. So anybody listening has $20 million. You want to fund that study? Give me a call. You know, Eric and I would be really glad to build that. Okay. Great. So let's go back to a little bit of a practical question, right? So we know that these schools tend to be high identity. So they can create a good fit for more kids. Yeah. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, but it seems like from the family's perspective, it would be so much more work than dropping your kids off at a full-time school five days a week, right? But at the same time, these schools seem to be drawing families with large numbers of kids. So that feels like a contradiction, right? I don't think it is, but why do you think a school like that would be, would be more likely to draw from this, you know, these 20% of kids that you mentioned at the beginning who are being born to these? Yeah. Why can make that question even harder, but I can still answer it. And I can say, like, why would I as a now, now I'm a working mom, why did I benefit from home education when it looks like it would be easier to drop your kids off? Yeah. And there's so many interesting answers to that. I think the first one which is easy for people to see is, is, you feel like one kid in school. I forget about two or three, you have one schedule for that kid and that schedule is no longer your schedule. It's not your schedule. The schedule that your kid has is the school schedule. And if you signed up for this school, whether it's public school or private school that you're paying for, you the mom, maybe the working mom, you are answerable to someone else's schedule. Right. And that is a, that is not easy. It's like you have to get out the door at a certain time, to be home at a certain time. Now you've got two kids, three kids, four kids, now you've got four separate schedules. You've got four separate homework assignments. You've got four separate days where somebody needs a freaking costume or something. You know, like you're just, and everybody listening to this knows what this is, you know, there's like this endless menu, permission slips and things you need to do. Now that's partially a function of how schools operate today. They don't, I don't think this is necessary, but it's the way it's become. So in fact, keeping track of three or four kids in school is, you know, is, you know, almost impossible. And it's, it's actually sort of, here's where I describe it. It's like a full-time job. Now if you add sports into that, the different drop-offs, the pickups, the, the pick, okay. And so what I just said is it's a full-time job. Well, okay, now let's pose you also have a full-time job. All right. Okay. So what, what happens with home education is a couple of interesting things. One is that everything's on your schedule. And as soon as you get that out of your mouth, anybody out there that's dealing with 10 different school schedules wants to try. It's like, it's like, that's a kind of wealth that, you know, you, you'd pay a lot of money for. When I say your schedule. I mean, what? Like if you're a night. person and you like to sleep late in the morning, everything in your home is going to happen in your schedule. If you're a morning person, you like to get up early and go to bed early, everything's going to happen in your schedule. That's the first thing. Second thing is if you're working mom and like say, you know, two days a week, you're out of the house, well, you're schooling your children can happen on the days when you're home. So I've often said this like for me when I'm traveling to speak or give lectures, well, I'm away from my home and at that point, my children become my partners in taking care of the home front or keeping things going in the kitchen. But the educational intensity, that is safe for the days when I'm home. So it's like, you flip the whole thing around and it just feels a lot more relaxed, a lot more kind of, it's just less frenetic. And then if you do this longer, it actually seems like why doesn't everybody do this? This is amazing that people do is they wake up in the morning. And so in this sense, like school is at one for one. It's not like, you know, you just drop your kid off and like, it's not like for every hour they're there, you just get a whole hour yourself. That's not how this works. And so it depends on the school and the situation, but I think it's like, you know, maybe you get 10 or 20% of that hour because you have to, it's just so, so it's not less work. It's just different work. I guess that's the way I think about it. Yeah. So I know it seems like a paradox, but as soon as you kind of lay that stuff out, a few people would, I mean, just sort of like lunches, the amount of time that people have to spend making sure you have the kind of food in your kitchen that could go in a lunch box and be wrapped up in plastic. Home schoolers never have to worry about that. Never have to think about that at all. You just, you have one type of food at your kitchen. That's what you eat. That's it. So yeah, I just think people because it is so normalized that your kids get in a car or a bus and they go someplace every single day, families just aren't noticing the sheer amount of time and logistics they're putting into making that all happen. And if they were serious about it, they would see, yes, maybe not as like good of a bargain for my time as I thought. Yeah, you speaking as an economist, you know, your, your description of it as a different kind of wealth is actually really accurate, right? Like it really is. You really are gaining something back. Yeah, your time is really worse. Yeah. Yeah, or I mean, I could, I could just like, years that, I, I mean, my, my last two kids, I'm like, they're growing up and I'm, you know, kind of like sad that they're growing up. Like, you know, it's like, that's it. That's the end of the baby years in my house. But their last couple of years as like, you know, four and five year olds, you know, every morning, they were, you know, sitting in my bed like we, I'd have coffee there in my bed reading some stories. I just like, man, that as well. Like, I mean, I'll have this forever that we spent those years. And we didn't have like our mornings robbed from us by like getting into cars when it's still dark outside. And I hate that. Yeah. Okay. Great. So last question for you, Catherine. You do a lot of things. What's the most interesting thing you're working on right now that people involved with these kinds of community crafted schools as founders or potential founders or leaders or parents would be, would want to know that. Yeah. Well, maybe, you know, well, so, okay, so the first book we just, we discuss a little bit really has focused on moms and how moms think about having, you know, having kids at all in the relation between their education and what they're doing with their kids. But the thing I'm working on now is dads and how dads think about about all these things. So I think that overlaps a lot. And I think, I think in part because like my very arms length view, I don't study this as carefully as you do. My arms length view is that we have largely seen kind of homeschooling and home education as being like a mom's domain or like women's domain. But my arms length view is that we're starting to see a lot more dads kind of see like, oh, actually, I could, maybe I could make this a career. Maybe there's, maybe I could hang a shingle and I could educate like 20 kids because now I can do this in a different way than my wife could do this. And that has got me really encouraged and really excited about kind of encouraging some of those would be educational entrepreneurs. I just met one who lives in Austin, Texas, a dad who, you know, works in tech and, you know, is kind of interested in exploring different ways that he can incorporate, you know, his expertise. But so, yeah, so that's basically, I'm going to talk to dads about like, you know, why they have a lot of kids and, you know, that'd be an interesting thing in and of itself. But yeah, I'm really intrigued by the possibilities of, we'll say, small batch education, handcrafted, whatever that is, community crafted, turning into the kind of thing which could allow, you know, not just to bring the mom back to the home like we discussed, but even bring dad back to the home, not, you know, for those that are interested in that kind of work. Yeah, that is amazing. I'm very excited. Please let me know when it comes out and you come and talk about it again. Catherine McCollock, thank you so much for joining us today. You're welcome. Thanks, Eric. God bless. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.