On this inspiring episode of the Mastery Unleashed podcast, host Christie Ruffino welcomes Julie Caprera, a dynamic published author and homeschooling advocate, to share her transformative journey into home education. Julie recounts how her initial skepticism about homeschooling evolved into a passionate mission after meeting Christy at a conference. With Christy’s unwavering support, Julie embraced a new path that led her to become a published author and empowered her to guide homeschool moms through the challenges of unconventional education.

Drawing from her background as a critical care nurse and her personal experiences with her children’s diverse learning needs—including those of special needs children—Julie explains that homeschooling isn’t about replicating traditional classrooms at home. Instead, it’s about nurturing independent thinkers and fostering a mindset that values flexibility, creativity, and real-world skills. She introduces her CARE framework—Create your vision, Assess your variables, Restructure your schedule, Evaluate, and Encourage—to help parents navigate the journey with clarity and confidence. Julie’s heartfelt story and practical advice underscore the rewards of a debt-free, personalized education that equips children with essential life skills, making her a motivational and actionable message.

ABOUT JULIE

Julie Caprera didn't expect to be a pioneer. In her early years, her Norwegian Lutheran family echoed Lake Wobegon of Garrison Keillor fame. Her father went to work for the Apollo space program, moving the family to Cocoa Beach, FL. Life is bathing suits, T-shirts, and flip-flops when one lives six blocks from the beach. Julie earned her BSN at Florida State University. Being a member of the FSU Student Circus was great therapy during nursing school. Next came 15 years as a critical care nurse. Marrying Rob Caprera brought Julie to Massachusetts, which was quite a culture shock after Florida.

As new parents in the 1980s, Julie and Rob became pioneers in the emerging world of homeschooling. They didn't plan to be so out of the box, but doors kept opening. Life became an adventure of learning opportunities. Pioneers try new things to find the best match. For the Capreras, homeschooling included lots of national and international travel. Julie's search for personal mentors led her to help new homeschooling families. Helping others became the Capreras' passion over the next three decades. Julie and Rob served over two decades on the MassHOPE Board of Directors. Julie was also a regular homeschool conference speaker. An unexpected turn came when Rob's mother moved in with them due to her Alzheimer's. Homeschooling continued as they pioneered multi-generational living. For eight and a half years, Julie served as primary caregiver. A side benefit of homeschooling has been studying art and working in oils and acrylics.

To better mentor more moms, Julie became a student. She then entered the world of online entrepreneurship. A recent out-of-the-box challenge was completing 75 HARD on her first attempt. Connect with Julie at www.CAREhomeschool.com.

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Mastery Unleashed is a podcast for success-driven women who want to empower their thoughts, design their dream businesses, and build beautiful lives that are aligned with their destinies—hosted by Bestselling Author and Business Strategist Christie Ruffino.

Each episode features today’s top influencers and entrepreneurs on the rise as they share empowering stories and ninja tips meant to become the FUEL that will ignite a positive change in YOUR life and the lives of others.

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Well, hello everybody and welcome to today's episode of the Mastery Unleashed podcast. I am Christy Ruffino, the host of the show, and today I have a special treat for you all. So if you're here for the very first time, we are doing a series where I have the pleasure of introducing some amazing women to our audience.

Uh, these are women that have incredible stories. Uh, they've been featured in our most recent Mastery Unleashed book. You may have actually heard from some of them in one of our group sessions that happened a few weeks ago. Uh, but today I specifically get to introduce you to Julie Caprera. Welcome, Julie.

Welcome and thank you so much for this opportunity, Christy. I'm really looking forward to it. Uh, we're going to have a great time together. I'm so excited. I know we always do. We always have a great time together when we're on the phone, but, or I should say Zoom. I don't think, who, who goes on the phone anymore?

I don't know. At least not in business. Zoom. Right? We all do Zoom. Um, which is great. And today we're going to have just as much fun, even though the recording button is on. So we're not going to worry about the recording button. We're just going to have fun. We're going to talk. Uh, I met you, gosh, you were one of the final women to say yes, to be in our book.

And you didn't know anything about this whole. world a few weeks prior. Uh, you learned about it and I learned about you and your incredible story. And I invited you to join us and you said yes, which I love that. Um, but you just didn't worry about. Anything that you didn't know about, you just said, yes, you wanted to get your story out there because it's super incredible.

Um, and I'd love to have you share that with our audience today. Julie? Um, well, thank you, Christy. And in many ways, Christy's relationship with me mirrors my relationship with homeschool moms. Because When I had my first conversation with Christy, I'd met her through a conference, but I didn't know any, I'd never occurred to me to be in a book, write a thing, how would you market it?

It was just beyond overwhelming. And within our one conversation, Christy was able to convey to me that she believed in me. More than I believed in myself and as a result from mid October to by mid December, I was suddenly a published author and under her tutelage and guidance and other people who knew much more about what they were doing.

I was able to do something I would never, ever have expected that I could do. And it's exactly what I do with homeschool moms. Um, but, that's not how it always was. When we first heard about the idea of homeschooling from my sister, um, I had a one year old. And my sister who had a child, uh, she'd gotten married two years older, I mean two years before me, so her child was three.

And who wants to spend all day with their kids? And all I could think of was all this negative stuff. Now this is in the day before the internet. And I literally didn't know anybody. homeschooling. And so the idea was, I mean, it was almost like you had extra ears or extra noses. I could not conceive that this could be good.

Well, I went to visit my sister to see the new baby that she'd had and basically, I just could not get enough information because I wanted to figure out what this was. By the time I left visiting her, I had a pit in my stomach that it wasn't a matter of Could I do this? It was a matter of was I willing to be willing and ultimately, and that was really, really, really hard.

Was I willing to be willing to give up my money to income, get up something that I knew I was good at, to step out of my comfort zone, to do something for which there was no training and where I'd be alone. And, um, ultimately. What led us to doing this was, I didn't want to live a life of regret, wishing I had tried something.

And, and when we were first starting, we had a few years to kind of get used to the idea. Um, but when we were, I mean, we didn't know people who were really doing this. And so it was very, very challenging. So that's how we got started. Okay. And now years later, your kids are grown. Talk a little bit about the story of how things turned out for your kids.

Cause honestly, if somebody's listening right now, they either may have kind of thought about the idea of homeschooling or they had no, like this never even occurred to them. And so we want to kind of share the end of the story, because I think this is an important piece. And we're going to talk a little bit about Um, you know, the logistics and you're going to share a lot of great wisdom in a minute, but I want you to share the incredible ending of your story with your kids.

Well, first of all, if I thought it was going to be easy, that was totally naive. But, everything that is worth something has a price. And in homeschooling, you pay more of the price up front. Um, because you're Watching your children develop maturity, develop, um, the ability to become independent thinkers, and most of all, to become people who are fun to be around.

And those were our goals. Um, it wasn't. necessarily college. We wanted to have children who knew how to function in the real world and to have real relationships. So my kids ended up, we had two sons with special needs. They had all sorts of learning challenges. You couldn't tell when you saw them, but I mean, they couldn't learn the alphabet, they couldn't learn to read, so those were challenges.

Um, and our kids are now 41, 38, and 31. There's six, while we didn't say, oh, we have to have them go to college, they ended up running a business and going to college, and between the three of them, there are six degrees. Um, and so, but we did something unusual. We would not allow our children So they had to come up with, we, we came up with ways to do college without debt and to do it faster.

And so it can be done. Um, and so we did not want them to come away indoctrinated. We wanted, and my kids, when they got to college, were shocked by how many kids didn't know how to work, didn't know how to study, didn't know how to do other things, and didn't know how to function in real life. Yeah, well, just the whole concept of no debt, right?

To raising little humans that know how to interact in the world. They know how to have their own businesses. They've got degrees, they're able to like, uh, have the, the common sense skills that aren't like not only common sense skills, but basic life things that we need to know how to balance a checkbook and how to run a business.

Like there's a lot of things you learn in school. College, but there's a lot of things you don't. I mean, as an entrepreneur, like I've learned more in my entrepreneurial journey than I did through all of my high school and college years. So I love that. The like you said, there's a little bit of work up front, but there's a lot.

There's a lot of work as you have. Well, it's just you don't know what you're every day is a new day because you've never had children the age that they are and just because you've taught one subject doesn't mean that the next child will learn. If you have three kids, you've got at least two different learning styles and they're not necessarily the same as yours.

So you're kind of Bumbling and stumbling along in one sense, but this is the thing I know that you can't fail because I'm coming from a faith based background, and I know that God didn't make a mistake in giving my Children to me, and he didn't make a mistake in giving me. me to my children as a mother.

And so learning how to navigate. Oh, you know, you always love the kids. You don't always like them, but that's like regular relationships. But then how do you navigate? And we, there's always been challenges. If there's no drama at times in life, somebody's not breathing. And so, so it's learning how to have navigating, and in fact, we have a family text chat and almost every day there's pictures and things that go back and forth and jokes and stuff.

And it doesn't mean there weren't challenges, but we know that relationships matter in the long run. And that's one of the strengths that you see is because you don't have the luxury of just living parallel lives in a house. You have a lot of cross section and interactions. And that helps you learn how to work as teams.

Right, right. So look at all the life lessons that you've just mentioned in just the last few minutes, right, to be able to know how to have it play as a team and how to have right have parallel lives and how to be a functional adult. And I still keep going back to the whole concept of no degrees with no debt, like how amazing is that to be able to you.

be able to like, you know, push your kids out of the nest and not have them to be struggling for years and years and years just to get that college debt paid off. Yes. Well, um, college debt is the only debt that's not forgivable thanks to the Biden administration. I mean, not Biden, um, Obama administration.

And so somebody has to co sign. So if a student dies, the parent or whoever co signed. They can lose their house. They can do other things for it. And, um, so, we did not want children to be crippled and not be able to get married, not be able to buy a house, and not be able to have children because of quarter million dollars of debt is nothing.

for many people for college. It can be approaching way more than that and so I You have to learn to be creative and you don't always get your first choice But every one of my kids is so Grateful that they have the freedom and flexibility and other things to be able to do things that they're not trapped by debt because they see So many people, their peers, their friends, who are trapped by debt, or the parents are trapped by debt that they took in for the kids.

Yeah. Okay, so we are, I love the fact that you were able to paint an amazing picture of the end result for anybody that's listening right now that maybe, considering this for their children. Um, but if they are, how does this, like, how does this even come together? Like, how would somebody begin homeschooling?

Are there lessons? Are there teachers? Or, like, how does this all get started? Well, What we have been so surprised by is that in this age of preschool, um, where men, kids are signed up for preschool when the woman becomes pregnant, because if they don't get in the right preschool, how will they get in the right?

They're school, how will they be able to go on? Their whole life will be destroyed if by three, they're not in the right preschool. And we work at, we were at some homeschool conventions and people would talk to us and say, my child's one, what do I need to do to homeschool? So we actually started a course of bootcamp for them because It's like, we want to help them get off the ledge.

You can watch the collective sigh of relief as we, as they discover you're, you, you, if you are killing yourself, you'll never make it to second grade. And much less make it the long haul. Because homeschooling is, whenever you start, to whenever you end. And if you want to go on, I mean you can actually homeschool through college for a lot of things.

Um, I tested out of my first year of college, um, which, you know, for 25, I got 24 semester credits. That was a long time ago, but In starting, it depends on where you are. It's really the mindset. Are you willing to explore? If somebody is working, that doesn't mean they can't do it. So we have a framework. We help teach people.

That applies at any time. And care is that framework. Um, care. Uh, create your vision. Where do you want to go? Mostly, where do you want to end up? Where do you want your kids to end up? And then assess your variables, restructure your schedule, life, what do you have to work around? And then, evaluate, is it working or is it not working?

And then, encourage! Celebrate. Figure out. And that works no matter where you are in life. It's a tool. But we help people gain practice and skill in being able to use that. Because when you're starting, you don't even know. How to do that and that's how we help them get off the ledge and when you go along as you encounter different things, you don't know what the difficulties are going to be.

So, it's always something new and we help people get back into the, especially for teens. When kids are 10 to 12 years old, they should be able to be thinking, where do they want to end up? And parents get so caught up in the dailiness of life, in just all the things that they're overwhelmed and they think, and then they just start to think, if I can just get them to graduate, if I can just get past these hormones, if I can get, if, if I get them to college, that'll be okay.

And, and they end up short changing themselves. In short, changing their children, not because they're bad. No. They're just exhausted. Well, and they don't know. I think a lot of parents think that that is stuff that's going to be covered in school, right? That in the public school system, they're going to be talking about big life goals and what is the next step.

And yeah, you may get a career counselor, um, may, um, and that career counselor may care and help you. But I know there's a lot of kids that don't have that kind of support. Yeah, well, and also many schools get money by sending kids to college. Yes. They don't get, and college isn't a good fit for a lot of kids.

Yeah. They're just not, they're not mature enough to be able to handle that yet. Yeah. And so how do you help your children be prepared to launch as functional adults? And we help people figure that out. Great. So let's get one challenge. So somebody may be considering this. What would you think would be the biggest challenge that you want to prepare that person for based on your experience?

The biggest challenge is you have to undo your mindset to understand homeschooling is not reproducing school at home. And if you go to start to try and reproduce school at home, what's going to end up happening is the mom will be killing herself trying to find the perfect curriculum, trying to get the perfect setup, find the perfect co op.

And none of those exist except in her mind. And so what happens is she'll, she'll be working, killing herself, trying to get all these things going, thinking her kids are going to rise up and call her a blessing. Right. And the kids say, no. So the emotional thermostat goes up on the mom, and the kids say, she's going to blow, let's back off.

So what we want to do is to help people understand, simplify and aim for sanity. Because you want to be able to enjoy your children. And enjoy the process and not look and say, this, I, I can't believe I'm doing this. You may be saying, I can't believe I'm doing this, but you want to be saying, I can't believe done this and my kids, while they're not always going to respond great in the time, there's going to be difficulties in the end.

You can look and say, wow, you could do this, you can do this, and they'll, they just surprise you in so many ways. And you can enjoy that, and to be able to have conversations with people that you enjoy. Now they may not all happen all at once, but I can tell you, they do happen. And, So good. It's wonderful.

Yeah. Um, so you have an amazing resource that you're going to share. And before we get to that, and, um, I want to, I just want to thank you for offering this, but before we get to that, What is there any last thing you want to share with our audience, any words of encouragement or any final tip? Well, first of all, you don't have the wrong children.

Your children don't have the wrong parent. That's huge! This is all opportunities for you to learn to laugh and enjoy it. And the other thing is Why make life harder than it has to be if you're being thinking if you're thinking I want to homeschool my kids I want to explore it then you can make it as hard as it is by doing it all on your own or you can find somebody who's been there done that has basically 40 years of experience in that world and who loves you and believes in you guys more than you believe in yourselves and if you I mean, it's your choice.

You can choose to make it as hard as possible or say, well, I'm going to save it. Or you can say, why don't I get some help from somebody who's already done it? Yeah, I see that a lot. People that think they're going to try to figure it out. Um, and there's anxiety that comes with that, of course, but there's also mistakes that come with that.

And when you try to go on a journey that you've never taken before, you don't know what to do. You don't know what, what to do in the right order. So you'll end up by making mistakes or you'll end up by doing things not You know, not in the right time. And so I love that you are a resource for people that are on this journey.

That's great. Well, I tell people you get jewels in your crown for suffering for righteousness sake, but you don't get any jewels in your crown for suffering for just being stupid. And so if you have resources, um, there are a lot of things that are going to be hard, but not everything has to be hard. And if it's hard because you're so busy saying well, that's not worth it or this isn't worth it, well, that's okay.

We all do things like that. And sometimes you don't know how much you're going to appreciate help until you've struggled on your own. Right. Sometimes just the whole concept of peace of mind is worth it to get the help because when you're anxious and when you're worried, that alone can create a lot of drama, a lot of tension in the situation.

And so getting that help will allow people to kind of be able to just go through the process with ease. And that's really what we want. Yeah, so I want to thank you first of all, because you're going to you're sharing something that most of our guests don't share, which is time, and you're offering guests, at least for a little bit of a time.

We have a calendar link that we're going to share in the show notes And if it doesn't work if you're listening to this months down the road, we apologize We're only going to offer this for a little bit of time, but julie is gifting a 20 minute call To help you with your decision or help you with struggles that you're that you're under So julie, you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yes. Well, they're um While every family is unique and every family is different, there's a lot of struggles and a lot of difficulties that, um, we've seen. I mean, because we've covered almost 40 years, uh, there's an awful lot that we've seen, and we're not phased by it. In fact, one of our great strengths We found out is being able to offer people help and perspective and practical direction and encouragement.

And that's what we do is we're able to help identify things and give them practical direction and hope. Awesome. Awesome. All right. So if you want to connect with Julie, we will have her contact information in the show notes, as well as a calendar, calendar link. So you can get 20 minutes of her time and she can.

answer any questions you may have, or maybe share some resources, or maybe even possibly talk to you how she could support you on your journey. So I want to thank you, Julie. This has been great. I love what you're doing in the world. And most importantly, I want to thank all of you as audience members. Um, we continue to get amazing guests like Julie because we have an amazing, amazing audience like you who support us, who show love on the platforms you listen, who give us reviews and share your feedback throughout the week.

So I want to thank everybody and we will definitely connect again next week as we bring on another amazing woman from our Mastery Unleashed series. So thanks everybody and thank you, Julie. Thank you so much, Chrissy.