Shownotes
PTP:112."Dying to Win" with author Teri Capshaw
Learn Grow Go is the theme of author Teri Capshaw's work who is Dr. Brad Miller's guest on Episode 112 of the Pathway to Promise Podcast
Teri has the following to share on her website tericapshaw.com
I write about the things that used to keep me up at night.
My first book takes on a topic that’s affected most of us to some extent and poses an even greater risk to the next generation: school stress.
Dying to Win was inspired by my family’s move to Asia where I expected to find the secrets to great teaching. Instead, I discovered the horrifying truth about our competitive global education system.
Then I turned back home, to my own unconventional upbringing, to uncover seven principles we can use to inspire a love of learning for the children in our lives.
In an age when we can compare our lives with those all over the world, it’s difficult to keep what matters most in perspective.
I’m on a mission to help families experience the joy of learning together.
I also provide encouragement to homeschool leaders, educational choice advocates, teachers, and other educators passionate about impacting students and families in a stressful world.
Teri Capshaw is a former journalist and homeschooling mother on a mission to help families overcome limitations imposed by an overstressed world.
She knows what it’s like to be held back by fear—and the incredible opportunities available to families courageous enough to live life differently.
Teri authored Dying to Win: How to Inspire and Ignite Your Child’s Love of Learning in an Overstressed World, and helps families craft their ideal lifestyle at HomesteadLarder.com.
Dying to Win: How to Inspire and Ignite Your Child’s Love of Learning in an Overstressed World provides parents with a “big picture” view of international education issues—and simple, practical, strategies to implement at home.
Grasping for academic success takes a toll on families around the globe—with parents in China spending up to 30% of their household income on tutoring and students spending up to 17 hours per day studying.
Moving to Asia opened my eyes to the dangers of emulating a system so intense it pushes some students to the brink of suicide.
When we give our children freedom in how they learn, we fuel them with a passion for life and equip them for academic success.
Transcript of The Interview with Teri Capshaw
Brad Miller 0:00
Dr. Brad Miller back with you here on the pathway to promise podcast where it is our mission to help folks overcome adversity in their life in order to achieve their life or God given life of peace, prosperity, and purpose. And we do that in many ways by teaching you leading and helping guide people to resources including great authors. One of those authors is with us here today on the pathway to promise her name is Terry Capshaw. She is dealing with the issue of stress in the academic world. In her book, dying to win, how to inspire and ignite your child's love of learning in an overstretched world. She comes from a background of education and broadcasting and of homeschooling, but most of all, she is a dedicated mom and she's on a mission to help families to overcome limitations imposed by an overstressed world. Terry CAPTCHA was pathway to promise.
Teri Capshaw 1:00
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Brad Miller 1:05
Well, awesome. It's good to have you with us here on the pathway to promise I have to admit I'm a little bit biased in that you are an educator and a teacher and a person who loves learning. I come from a family of teachers and leaders, two of my sisters are educators. And my mother is retired educator, my dad who's deceased now was an educator and a pastor. So and I have a daughter who's got a master's degree and I went to school for longer than I want to admit. But so it's good to have you here on the on the, on the on the pathway to promise but we're talking today about the stresses of the academic world, particularly on younger people. And but why did you write this book and why is this issue important to you?
Teri Capshaw 1:51
You know, I have an interesting personality in that I was raised to think differently to question everything. Yet I really like to please people. Right? And so, when I first went to Asia, I was so excited because I was finally going to learn how to give my kids that education that was really the best education. Right. And so,
Brad Miller 2:20
just as positive as I assume you had heard or learned, or just been around this, this vibe that Asian education was somehow different, in some way superior to American education. Is that a part of what you were thinking?
Teri Capshaw 2:35
Absolutely, yes. I wanted to, you know, help my kids catch up. It's one of the least controversial political endeavors out there is our kids need to catch up with the rest of the world right. Very few people will argue with that concept, right. And I had grown up being homeschooled, it started out it was not very well accepted. And at this point, In 2014, when I was heading to Taiwan, homeschooling was now accepted, but as Plan B, because our schools weren't good enough. It's an acceptable alternative, right? And so now I was kind of like going to the part of the world where people had it together, right? I was going to see these perfect schools because this is where kids were facing these tests. This is, you know, this is what we're aspiring for in America. Right. That's why we had no child left behind. That's why we had Common Core, agree with or disagree with it. That is the goal of these education reforms is to catch up with the rest of the world. So I was excited to find what I would find there. And I was horrified when I actually got there,
Brad Miller 3:46
you found something different. So what did you find that was different than what your expectations were?
Teri Capshaw 3:52
So I expected that children's learning was being inspired right. You know, you mentioned you come from a background of People who really took academics and learning and it's it's something that I've always treasured, I've loved learning, right and, and I expected to find kids being taught that when I got there, I found kids, even young kids in school from 8am and finishing up activities and tutoring around 10pm at night. And there was not a love of learning.
Brad Miller 4:21
And not much of a life I wouldn't think outside.
Teri Capshaw 4:25
No, I mean, we're not talking about a sit down dinner, we're talking about grabbing a snack on the way from school to tutoring or activities every night. And one day I was watching kids cross the street on a weekend in their school uniforms. And I thought to myself, isn't this making them suicidal? And the answer is, yes, not so much in Taiwan. My friends in Taiwan would describe themselves some of them described themselves as kind of slackers in their region. But if you look deep, you find long lots of stories of students suicide in that region of the world. And in China, China's this big economic power that we're all worried about catching up with, right? In China, the government says that there's about 500 kids a year dying because of academic pressure committing suicide.
Brad Miller 5:20
that's a that's a big number. And yet, I wouldn't be surprised if it's an underreported number, just we probably don't know, anyway, knowing that, but a lot of times those things are
Teri Capshaw 5:31
absolutely and even the government number said about 24% of kids are considering suicide. And, you know, putting out this book, I was very, very careful to make sure that I had these numbers I didn't want to exaggerate. And a couple weeks ago, you were there I spoke at I spoke at a conference. And I'll tell you, I think my numbers are way low. That anecdotal evidence is really terrifying that number of stories. I've heard of kids in the US that there's one story that's just heartbreaking. You know, one story, that's all it takes for this to be unacceptable, okay? It's not about the numbers, right? But there's one story a family member told me about her community where a young boy I believe he was 14 years old. His dad talked to him about his grades. And in this was a kid who was always you know, that kid who can't sit still can't listen, can't you know, whatever they're all over the place is data, talk to him about his bad grades. And he went to a church meeting. And when he came home, his son shot himself. Oh my gosh. And I mean, I don't know how much this is out there because it's not being studied to my knowledge. And if anybody knows about it, please send me an email because I
Brad Miller 6:53
read a lot. It's been a long time. I read a study a long time ago when I was doing some research and some of the stuff I was working on about basically high level academic schools, Ivy League and so on where the suicide rate of those folks there is, you know, really greater than, like a state school, for instance, or something like that. So I don't I don't, I don't want to speak to too much. I want to hear more what you have. But I just want to affirm that I agree with you that there's probably nothing more devastating than a young person suicide. And we're talking here about how pressure that may be able to be avoided or dealt with in a different manner can be the case. And that's apparently what you're working on here in your book and what what you're about. But I'm also interested in your story, Terry, about some of the things some of the things difficulties, you've had to deal with an overcome in terms of getting to the point where this was your passion? What did you have to do within your life in order to overcome that you knew that you had to do something about it? And maybe this book was one of those things you had to do?
Teri Capshaw 7:54
Absolutely. Well, you know, I'm, I'm one of those people that I do. Well with the dramatic challenges in life, right, and, you know, I have seen, you know, the growth that I dealt with as a young child dealing with deaths of my grandparents, different traumatizing events. And, you know, those things are always hard to deal with. But you always see so much growth over time, right. But what is really difficult and I think what I wasn't prepared for as an adult, was dealing with those little everyday pressures from our society. And I think those pressures lead to anxiety and depression, those kinds of things, you know, everything a mom is expected to do today,
Brad Miller 8:43
you know, give me example what you mean by those little everyday pressures can be some, like some of those things that may stack up and impact you.
Teri Capshaw 8:51
Right. So we have a lot of modern traditions and one thing that I've I am not like the Pinterest Mom that goes out and does these big birthday parties or all these types of things. But there are a million of those little things that are expectations for parents. So even just from the moment, you know, you're having a baby, like the number of things that people these days worry about, that our parents never worried about our incredible you know, it's this access to this world of information. That now it's really overwhelming. And one of the hardest things that I have and one of the things I had to process that helped me help push me to write this book is wanting to give my kids all the experiences wanting to give them the best, because
Unknown Speaker 9:44
we
Teri Capshaw 9:46
there are too many good opportunities to the point that we can involve our kids in so many things that we would not even have a relationship.
Brad Miller 9:55
Let me give you a quick example of my own life here because I just resonate what you're saying so much Today, as we record, this happens to be my granddaughter's second birthday. And I just know that in the last three years since I knew where I was just my only grand child, and my, my daughter is probably about the same age as you. But so her experience of being a mother was much different than my experience of being a father when I was, you know, when she was cooking a wall. For instance, I had no idea about this whole thing a couple years ago of the reveal party, you know, the gender reveal whole new thing to me, and I couldn't believe in every birthday and every Christmas and every, like, you know, every is all these, like, the biggest thing for her right now. One of the biggest things for my daughter was, are we going to get Disney streaming channel or not for all the things from my granddaughter, but But what I'm getting at is the myriad of opportunities is making my head hurt. And I'm the grandfather and I'm only involved with a miniscule part of it comparatively to everything else, is I'm having a hard time managing the stress that people are going through. So they may interrupt you too much, but I'm just was thinking about that today but what I need to do for my own granddaughter, so go ahead.
Teri Capshaw 11:04
Absolutely. So part of looking at this is I really had to start asking myself a lot of deep questions. How am I going to raise my kids? Are they going to be in T ball gymnastics ballet for age scouting? You know everything imaginable? Are they going to do everything under the sun? And how am I going to handle that? How am I going to handle having the Smash cake for the first birthday and I did do the Smash cake. Okay, that's probably like the only cutesy Pinterest E and it was not Pinterest. You know these things, but these things might not seem that traumatic. But I truly feel like they are oppressing so many people today stack don't
Brad Miller 11:49
they they stack
Teri Capshaw 11:50
right and they pull us they suck us into this vortex of comparison. And that's really what it comes down to. If you look at To the international testing, and you look at what's happening on Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook feeds, there's very little difference. It's people comparing themselves to other people, which is an excuse not to recognize their own importance and potential, and to look at them that look at themselves the way God looks at
Brad Miller 12:22
them. That's awesome. That's awesome. So you've got this stress in your life, and you experienced that. So it sounds to me like part of what you're trying to help us to discern here, out of your own experience and your experience with the educators both here in the States and in in in Taiwan, is how to discern how to narrow that focus down how to have quality as well as quantity in your life in order to get a good education with well rounded and still have a well rounded human being not just a an academic machine. So tell us what are some of the ways that you sorted this out? What are you doing here in your book or what are some things that weekend, some applicable principles that we can apply to our lives.
Teri Capshaw 13:05
Absolutely. Well, what I think is most important is for people to have this solid understanding of, they need to have the courage to go against some modern traditions in our life, and really choose what's best for their child to look at their child. And one thing I talked about in the book is that you need to both be an authority over your child, because we've had, I think, a few generations of people who have felt this sense of abandonment. And so it is important that we're there as authority figures over our children, but not nearly as this person who is in control, but to actually be authorities on our children.
Brad Miller 13:51
Hmm, interesting turn of a phrase Yes.
Teri Capshaw 13:53
So we actually know them well enough that we know deep down what this individual trial takes And the biggest thing that we need to be able to do that is to protect their time. So that's the number one thing I talked about is protecting your time but also protecting your children's time so that they have downtime to get to know themselves. You know that Blaise Pascal, quote, I'm going to push right here, but basically all of humanity's problems stem from a man's inability to be in a room alone.
Brad Miller 14:29
Oh, yes, I was sort of trying to sort that out for a second to state remains still is such an important manifest manifestation. It's a meditative practice, really, you know, it's learning how to meditate into focus on something on a deeper level.
Teri Capshaw 14:47
Absolutely. So that's one of the biggest things is in our busy world to really say, okay, we're going to put up boundaries, we're going to put up borders and we're going to have time for kids to you know, be bored to Get to know themselves to get comfortable with themselves and both active time and quiet time.
Brad Miller 15:08
Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing dude. There's something to be said for being bored. When I mean by that is there's something to be said for that times of quiet and, and without distraction. Of course our world is all about distraction, you know, whether it's 1000 thousand TV channels and you know social media and you know all those activities you mentioned, you know, t ball and ballet and all that good stuff. Absolutely are pressures. Go ahead
Teri Capshaw 15:34
and then. So what I actually ended up doing is I was looking at this situation where in China we have kids studying for up to 17 hours a day. If you look online, you can find pictures of children sitting in a classroom with IV tubes hooked up to them. That's crazy. I know But there's fetchers actually delivering amino acids directly into their bloodstream so that they can study a little longer without stopping for lunch break. That's how intense this crazy academic rushes and. And you know, there's another thing that just killed me. There was a picture of suicide barriers, they put up in these open air balconies at one of the best schools in China. And they put up the suicide barriers just before their big high stakes exams, because they'd already lost a couple of students the year before that year, I don't remember perfectly, but they put up the suicide barriers and then they put these huge banners on them. And so I showed the story to my Chinese tutor at the time I was living in Taiwan. I showed it to my Chinese to her and she looked at it and she said those banners said Study hard
Brad Miller 17:01
Okay, I'm not following in a way, study hard and but forget seems like a mixed message there doesn't
Teri...
