[00:00:00] Alice Reinhardt: Oh, yes, they could say, “Yes, I want to be a doctor,” when they are 12 years old. You don’t discredit that. You ask questions like, “Really? Tell me more about that. What about that interests you?” or “What is your path to get there?” Then you keep having this conversation because, as we all know, no 12-year-old knows what they want to do with their life. Most 18-year-olds don’t know what they want to do with their life either.

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[00:00:34] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to 2026. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to welcome my friend, Alice Reinhardt, today to talk about educating your child beyond high school. We have so many things to talk about. Really, what we want to do with this conversation is we want to reframe your thinking so that you can have a reasonable conversation with your student and dwell in the world of possibility. We, Alice and I, are from the generation where the American dream was that you went on to college.

That American dream has changed. It’s changed financially. It’s changed emotionally. I think we do our kids a disservice when we just make the assumption that the next right step forward is a college experience. Alice and I are here today to help you think differently. Between the two of us, we have 13 children. I think we can probably give you some different perspectives. Our kids range in age from 20 to– How old is Caleb?

[00:01:56] Alice: 44.

[00:01:56] Gretchen: Okay. We have effectively spanned two generations of kids. We have the opportunity now to talk to you about some kids who’ve gone to college, some kids who haven’t, some kids who have chosen different paths. A lot of that information we’re going to share with you today. Let’s begin, Alice, with letting you introduce yourself, if you would be so kind.

[00:02:21] Alice: I’m Alice Reinhardt. My husband and I own Rhino Technologies. That’s a recording company that we do for conferences, such as the homeschool conferences. I also am the founder of Speak-Easy. Then it’s a life coaching and homeschool consulting business. I’m down from my last class and a half to have my degree and my certification done, which I’m very, very happy about that. As Gretchen said, we’ve got a lot of kids between us. I have seven and homeschooled for 35 years. All but one graduated from home education.

His is the story that really changed my perspective on a lot of things. What I like to bring to the table, I like to bring to the table the things that I’ve done wrong, or the things that I missed, or the things that I looked at and go, “I wish I’d done that for my kids and that.” Gretchen, I’ll say, I really like how you mentioned that it is about reframing our thinking, because what I’ve learned is that unless you become aware that you are thinking in a given path, and this path is there because that’s just what you’ve been shown and taught, and it’s what you do, you’re just going to continue doing that with your child. I’m with you on that. I like reframing. It’s not easy to reframe. I’m old, and yet my kids say, “Mom, continually, you are challenging your thoughts, the ways you believe, just how you think about things.” I think that’s really an important thing that parents learn to do.

[00:04:16] Gretchen: Yes. I know that my younger children benefited from maybe the inflexibility I had with my older children because I learned along the way. I learned the things I needed to sweat and the things I didn’t need to sweat. Really, today, we want to talk about how the career landscape is changing. Now, let me also say at the outset that this conversation with Alice today is a two-part conversation. We’re going to have this conversation today, and we’re going to talk about parental mindset. Then later in the month, we are going to have the opportunity to talk with Hannah Maruyama. Hannah is the founder of something called The Degree Free Way. On the last week of the month, we’re going to talk about what if your student’s path to success is not through college?

Hannah is going to bring the receipts, as far as what do we know as far as how a college education affects your ability to earn income as an adult. I’m looking forward to that discussion. Alice and I are also prepared with a set of receipts. I’ll tell you the first thing is we’ve been acculturated to believe that the path to success is through college. I’m here to tell you in the state I reside in alone, in North Carolina, we will be 56,000 electricians short by 2030. The average age of an electrician is 61 years old. The reason this is relevant to me is because that is the path forward that my youngest son chose.

He’s 20 years old. He’s six months from his certification. As a certified electrician, he will be able to write his financial ticket. I’ll be honest with you all, he’s earning more money per hour than a couple of his college graduate siblings, but we don’t talk about that in the family because nobody would be happy. It required of me a change of my thinking about what is really important. What does your child want to do? This is a conversation that doesn’t begin as a senior in high school. This is the conversation that begins with your middle schooler. Alice, you say this so eloquently about this is an ongoing conversation. Can you give us some insights into why the conversation needs to be ongoing?

[00:07:08] Alice: Gretchen, first thing that I just want to say is that as a homeschooling parent, I really want parents to understand what a gift, what a wonderful opportunity they have been given to develop this relationship with their child. That it goes beyond education, that it’s part of that in that regard. My husband, Mark, and I, we are continually saying, “I never had these conversations with my parents.” I’m talking about conversations that even now, with my adult children that I have, but also with my grandkids, that I will go in and listen to them.

I think that’s the thing. I think as a parent, we tend to be the ones that are always telling them what to do. We get on this. We are on this loop. If you ever notice that they’re not saying anything back to you, it is time to hit the pause button because that’s what our goal needs to be, Gretchen, is hearing them, listening to them, asking them questions, finding out where they are as a middle schooler. Oh yes, they could say, “Yes, I want to be a doctor,” when they are 12 years old. You don’t discredit that. You ask questions like, “Really? Tell me more about that. What about that interests you?” or “What is your path to get there?” Then you keep having this conversation because, as we all know, no 12-year-old knows what they want to do with their life. Most 18-year-olds don’t know what they want to do with their life either.

[00:08:58] Gretchen: Some 60-plus people don’t know. [laughs]

[00:09:00] Alice: Oh, yes. We’re not going to go there. We’ll discuss that another time. It is an ongoing– Truthfully, yes, academics are so important and being serious about the academic work that you do, but I’m telling you, you have got to establish conversations with your child, not communication. Communication is very sterile. I’m talking about conversations, asking hard questions. I also think, as a parent of seven and having gone through the various launchings and the coming backs and the re-launchings and the coming backs and all of that, it was a lesson for me to learn to start seeing them as an individual, and start seeing this person not as just my property, but as an individual who is looking to find their journey, and me getting to just be allowed to be a part of that. Again, those are some mistakes that I made that, in hindsight, I look back, and I go, “Oh, I was allowed to be a part of this,” and appreciate that, too, instead of feeling threatened.

[00:10:30] Gretchen: Yes. There’s something that comes with the ability to mature in our own space to be able to give our kids the space to breathe. I know I saw that evolution in my own homeschooling life when my eldest daughter was approaching the age of college. I said, “I don’t, frankly, care what you major in, but I want you to have a college degree because it’s a ticket punch to a better life.” Now, that was 20-plus years ago. If you look at the average cost per year, when you and I were preparing last week for this conversation, we had the infinite ability of the internet at the end of our fingertips. We looked up the average cost per year for a college education, and it was $38,000 a year.

[00:11:22] Alice: Yes. Just before this podcast, I was talking with a young lady that I work with, and she was like, “Why are you doing this podcast?” I was telling her, and she said, “What’s it on?” I was telling her this, and she said, “I will be $40,000 in debt.” I said, “That’s with the bachelor’s?” I didn’t want to be disparaging to her, but anymore, you can’t do anything with a bachelor’s. Before I could even say that, she said, “Yes, and my master’s is going to cost me another $50,000.” Now, I did not ask her what she was majoring in. It could be underwater basket weaving.

I don’t know, but that cost did not keep in line with the cost of living that we are experiencing. Back when you and I were in college, I read something the other day, and I may have sent it to you, that a kid could work during the summer, a teenager could work during the summer and end up being able to save enough to pay for their college education. That doesn’t happen now.

[00:12:28] Gretchen: Right.

[00:12:28] Alice: That doesn’t happen now.

[00:12:31] Gretchen: That ship has sailed. Exactly.

[00:12:32] Alice: That ship has sailed. Yes, it has.

[00:12:36] Gretchen: One of the things that I want to include as resources, so make sure that you pay attention to the show notes, because I’m going to include two webinars, maybe three, that we did in 2025 that were talking about the importance of having the soft skill set. One of them was with a gentleman named Danny Rubin. Rubin Education is all about helping individual students understand that it’s not just the degree you get. It’s the ability, how you relate to others, how you can converse, how you can have conversational interactions, how you interview, how you bring your presence to the table.

That’s something that we can affect as homeschool parents. Right around our kitchen table, we can make that happen. The second webinar that I also want to include was an interview I did with a young man named Dan Cimento. Now, I say he’s a young man. Dan is in his 30s. That’s young, compared to me.

[00:13:41] Alice: That’s young. [laughs]

[00:13:43] Gretchen: Dan is a software engineer. He talks about being in the management position of, he doesn’t care what your hard skill set is. If you can’t bring the soft skill set to the table, you’re not the employee he’s looking for. One of the questions that was asked of us several times in registrants is, what jobs will be safe from an AI takeover? The truth of the matter is, it’s not the job. It’s the skill set. Do you have the ability to think flexibly? Do you have the ability to switch horses in the middle of the stream? Do you have the ability to be a consensus builder? Those are the soft skills that today’s college graduates are desperate to produce in order to be successful.

[00:14:40] Alice: That is right. For our listeners, would you go ahead and develop exactly what you mean by soft skills?

[00:14:49] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:14:50] Alice: Give us something here to run with. Okay?

[00:14:54] Gretchen: Can you sit down and have an interview conversation? Have you thought through the questions for an interview? I’ll give you an example. My daughter-in-law yesterday was to be interviewing a potential new employee in a Zoom call, and they didn’t show up. They didn’t send an email and say, “I’m not going to be there.” Nothing. 24 hours went by, and she reached out and said, “Hey, what happened?” That potential employee did not apologize, did not own the fact that they had missed the appointment. They just said, “When can you schedule me for another appointment?” That’s a lacking set of soft skills.

[00:15:45] Alice: That’s exactly what people need to hear and understand that we are talking about here. We’re talking about the skills of being able to look someone in the eye as you’re talking to them, and say complete sentences, and also possibly use your manners, such as, “Yes, sir.” Those things are not lost on people when you can be mannerly and polite in a conversation. How you dress. This is really important. I have to laugh because we were actually talking about this, this last weekend, when our oldest son was getting his driver’s license, or he had his permit, and he hit a speed trap.

I was with him. He had to go to court. When he went to court, he was 18 years old. He was a senior in high school because our kids delayed getting their license. He goes in, and I told him, I said, “You will wear a dress shirt, you will wear a tie, and you will wear dress slacks.” He’s standing in front of this judge, and this judge is going, “Why are you here?” He said to him, he said, “Young man, in two weeks, I want to know that you’ve gotten a full-time job.” Caleb is looking at him, and he looked back to us, and finally, Mark spoke up. He said, “Sir, he’s in high school.” “Oh, well, okay.” The point being is that his attire caught that judge’s attention. Right?

[00:17:20] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:17:22] Alice: The number of people that will go into an interview with a ball cap on, no. You need to be able to present yourself. You need to know how to talk about yourself. You need to know how to advocate for you and your skills. I was very late to the game in learning this, and actually had a class in which I had to do it. It made me so uncomfortable, but it’s an important thing. Those are the things you need to know about the company that you’re applying for.

[00:18:01] Gretchen: So many of our parents said, “What are the skills that I need to best prepare my child for life after high school?” I think both of us would say the academics will come. It is these set of skills that we’re talking about, being able to interview, being able to ask cogent questions, being able to field questions that are asked of you that aren’t monosyllabic answers. When our kids were young, our older kids, there was a phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen, and they had to learn to answer the phone. Kids don’t have to do that anymore.

I have a suggestion for parents. If you have a child and they don’t know what they want to do, maybe it’s time to go to someone, an adult that’s not in your family, but someone that they would respect, and to have your student say, “Ms. Alice, what kind of skills do you see in me? What kind of personal skills do you see?” To be able to take that question and then learn from that what they might want to explore. In all honesty, Alice, I know I’ve heard you say this, that exploration needs to be the student’s, not the parent’s.

[00:19:31] Alice: Yes.

[00:19:32] Gretchen: Can you talk in a little bit more depth about that?

[00:19:35] Alice: Absolutely. I know that the term helicopter parenting has been one that has been around for a while. I’m not suggesting that we are a helicopter parent. I do think that home educating parents tend to have a little bit more of a hovering, that they need to just chill. They need to quiet those engines a little bit. The tendency is to do something for your child. Like, okay, they missed an appointment. “Hey, Mom, would you call?” “No, I’m sorry. You need to be the one on the phone. You need to be the one calling for this. You need to be the one learning how to apologize.”

That’s a simple thing of, “I recognize that what I did was wrong and it inconvenienced you. I’m really sorry.” It’s not just saying, “I’m sorry.” Having your kids be able to have those kind of conversations, and they need to be, what your role is to say, “I’d like you to interview four people in our church and find out what jobs they held in their life, what is the story of their life,” so that they can get comfortable to talking to older, more experienced people, but to bring those stories back to know how to ask the questions. Again, this starts in middle school, Gretchen. You start them, you send them up to get the refill at the counter. You let them order their food. It’s like you capitalize on all these seemingly very small opportunities to just give them that boost of encouragement.

[00:21:20] Gretchen: It’s funny. One of my children was on the phone with me last night, and she has the opportunity to interview for an interim assignment. Now, she works full-time, but she has had the opportunity to do something additional for a period of time. She said that she’s waiting for the interview time. She said, “I know that if I get the interview, I’ll have the job.” She said, “I want to thank you, Mom, because I vividly remember sitting around our kitchen table and you firing interview questions at us and saying, ‘How would you answer this question, and how would you answer this question?'”

She said, “That was a really low-stakes proposition for us because we were talking to our mom, but if we could answer the questions in that situation, then we could answer them somewhere else.” She’s about to be 34 years old. In passing, as we were drifting away from this portion of the conversation, she said, “You know what? I’ve never interviewed for a job I didn’t get.”

[00:22:34] Alice: I understand that.

[00:22:34] Gretchen: That starts at home. This is what we, as parents, need to recognize, that this is on par with the academics we’re trying to impart to our children.

[00:22:48] Alice: It really is, Gretchen, yes. In the similar vein, one of my youngest girls, her first job was at Cracker Barrel at 16. When she went in to interview, her first interview, she was hired on the spot. The manager walked out because she knew we had other kids that worked there. It was said to her, yes, that was her first interview. She said, “It was not.” I said, “Oh, yes, it was.” From there, she started moving up into management into every job that she got. When it came time for a nice job with the state to come along, in which she had to know how to manage, she needed to know how to have those hard conversations, that she needed to know how to organize her time and her day, yes, she nailed it.

She got that interview from a phone interview. She got the job. Again, those things need to be introduced into you. It’s not like you can just take a book and study and go, “Okay, yes, I’ll take a test and pass this.” No, this needs to be just everyday experiences for your kids.

[00:24:07] Gretchen: Talk a little bit about the validity of doing something without compensation. I know I’ve heard you talk about this, about getting an unpaid internship and getting the experience of doing something, about volunteerism as well.

[00:24:27] Alice: It hurts sometimes, but it’s such a good experience. It’s something that you can put down on that resume when you are making applications to college, if you choose to go to college, or at a job. We had a program around here. I honestly don’t think it’s still in existence. Our children volunteered at our local hospital. They could choose which area to go into. Our son chose food service. I think our daughter, she chose something like a candy striper, so she was in long-term care.

[00:25:05] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:25:08] Alice: It was an unpaid thing. It was a volunteer. That went in the record books as their schoolwork. The thing about that is that, again, that’s another situation to where you’ve pushed them out from underneath your hovering. Okay?

[00:25:23] Gretchen: Right.

[00:25:24] Alice: They have to learn how to function in an adult world, but they don’t realize how much experience that they’re gaining when they do that. Going into situations and volunteering, and/or encouraging your children to volunteer into something that comes along, it gives them a skill that’s really, really important. Our son-in-law, his internship, I was shocked at this. Now, when I was in college, an internship didn’t pay. You did it. It was you got your grade for it, and that was your payment. The experience was the classroom.

[00:26:04] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:26:08] Alice: Since then, a lot has changed. You can get a paying internship, but our son-in-law did not get that. It was tough on him for a while, but there was an experience that he gained in that process that you can’t really attach a dollar amount to. Get your kids to volunteer. Get them into situations because it’ll also change them. A lot of these volunteer situations will also change them as a person because they get to see life through different lenses. They might get an opportunity to see people in need that they would not have had. Again, that just brings a real deposit into those skills and their life.

[00:26:59] Gretchen: Yes. One of my children loved everything fuzzy, brought home every squirrel that fell out of a tree, every bird with a broken wing. When it came time to look for her to have her first internship experience, I suggested that perhaps she inquire at the local veterinary office, which was walking distance from our house. That was as far as I went as far as the suggestion. She was far enough down in the pecking order in the number of kids in the family that she knew if she wanted that internship, she’d have to have the courage to walk through the door and ask if there was something that she could do.

What she started doing was emptying trash cans and cleaning up exam rooms. She did it for free. Today, she’s a research biologist. Did she start in the right place? Absolutely. Was she able to take something that fascinated her and create a career from that? 100%. Was it up to her to create that career, or was it up to me? I can’t live her life for her. I did not go to college with her.

That’s one of the things that we as parents need to talk about. Alice, you talk about this when we talk about high school transcripts when we present together at homeschool conferences. Can you talk about how it’s important for us to start separating ourselves from our kids and them being responsible for themselves as far as finding the internship and following through with it?

[00:28:51] Alice: Again, Gretchen, I think that we, as home educating parents, we want so much for our children to succeed. We want so much to spare them from mistakes that we made. We want so much for them to just– Oh, it’s like we want to be their cheerleader. That is really, really important to do that. I am perceiving that it’s harder and harder for home-educating parents to know how to start cutting that umbilical cord. There’s a couple of things at play in this, one pertaining the child and one pertaining us as parents. That child is an individual who is going to be an adult.

I love my adult children. It’s so much more fun to have conversations with them. I adore my teenage grandchildren because, oh my gosh, it’s like, wow, now I really can have the conversations without the guilt. It’s like our goal, we need to change how we’re thinking about what is our goal for our children. Our goal is to launch a mature and they’re not going to be mature, but on their way to maturity, social person who is able to integrate into society and be a functioning adult with that. You don’t want to deny them those pleasures. They’re going to make mistakes.

As parents, we hate that. We don’t want to see them making the same mistakes that we did, but sometimes they have to make those mistakes because they have to learn. We have to just really say, “Here’s the deep end of the pool, I’m sorry you didn’t bring your floaties. It’s either a sink or swim time.” It sounds so horrible, because typically, if I’ve got parents out there that have a 10-year-old that’s sitting there, they’re like, “I could never do that.” I heard somebody say one time, “When they start rearranging your kitchen, it is time to kick them out of the house.”

It’s like there’s a time that their individuation, that their identity, becomes who they are. Not what mom or dad wants them to be. Here’s the other thing. For us parents, that’s a control issue. You and I also talk in our homeschooling myths. We can’t determine if our children are going to be the success or not. We can’t determine if they’re going to make the right choices with their life, or we don’t even know what those right choices are. Our children are going to make choices that are different than ours, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.

You’re the parent, and your job is to love those kids regardless of their choices in that. What is happening, what I saw happening within me, I couldn’t cut their identity out of me. I could not see them as something other than my child. There’s a little bit of a painful carving that has to happen there. They are an individual. All right?

[00:32:38] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:32:41] Alice: It’s like we’re doing this to raise them to be functional, to be these great adults. Then we want to say, “But I want to hang on, and I want you to do it my way.” It’s like our goal is to raise them to launch them. Our goal is to raise them to launch them.

[00:33:02] Gretchen: That’s right.

[00:33:02] Alice: We have to do that launch. We have to quit feeding them. We have to quit answering the phone for them. We have to quit telling them to pick up their socks. You have to do that. It is better for their mental health. It is better for your mental health, too.

[00:33:19] Gretchen: Yes. I think it’s also important to understand that that’s a process. I think you’ve explained that in depth here, that it doesn’t happen overnight.

[00:33:33] Alice: No, it doesn’t.

[00:33:33] Gretchen: It happens with intentional conversations, and it happens well before high school. High school should be that transitional period of them slowly taking more responsibility and us loosing the reins of responsibility into their hands. Will they screw it up? Absolutely. My husband says it’s a process of giving them enough rope to hang themselves, and then being able to learn from their own mistakes. Alice, I can’t believe we’re already past the hour. What are your closing thoughts for our audience today?

[00:34:12] Alice: I’d like to remind people of a couple of things. This is a process, and it is a journey. It’s not a journey that ends when they’re 18. You’ve got to change. Again, think about how you think about this. Typically, they’re 18, and then you kick them out of the house. No, there’s a lot more to it than that. If you’re wanting to maintain that relationship with your adult children, you start forming that relationship when they are in this middle school and moving through high school. You learn to dance. You learn to listen. You learn to have conversations. You just accept that this is a journey. This is a journey. Yes, that’s all I got to say on this.

[00:35:10] Gretchen: There is one more thing I want you to say, and that is you have taught me over the years of our friendship that it’s important for us to be accountable for ourselves, and when we’ve called it wrong, to go back to our children and say, “I’m sorry.”

[00:35:22] Alice: Oh, yes.

[00:35:26] Gretchen: Can you elaborate a little bit?

[00:35:29] Alice: Here’s the thing. We can try to make our kids apologize or learn to apologize when they’re young, and that’s a good thing to learn how to say, “I’m sorry.” The fact of the matter is that when you can apologize, when you recognize you have blown it and you are wrong, admitting that to your child is, oh, wow, does that build credibility. It builds trust. It builds seeing that you’re human and that you are willing to humble yourself. I’m not talking about just saying, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.” No, this really needs to be the “I recognized I yelled at you, and that was wrong on my part. I hurt you. I did not need to do that. I was wrong. Please forgive me.”

You don’t make excuses for why you did what you did. No buts. “I yelled at you, but–” No, they stop listening after the but. They will not listen after the but. In humility, going to your children and say, “I made the wrong choices.” In that, you are also modeling for your children how they are supposed to live their life, too.

[00:36:47] Gretchen: Absolutely. I think all of you can see why it was so important for me to have this conversation with Alice today. I hope we’ve given you maybe a roadmap. Your journey will be different from Alice’s, as it will be different from mine. What we really want to encourage you is to sit with your children and recognize that the skills that don’t come with a textbook and a test are equally important for your child’s post-secondary education as the skills that require them to prove they know and have knowledge.

[00:37:29] Alice: That’s true.

[00:37:29] Gretchen: Thank you all so much for joining us today. It’s a privilege to come into your living room, and we’ll look forward to your joining us on this journey again this year. This is the kickoff. You can see why I wanted Alice to be the first conversation of 2026. We’ll look forward to joining you all on Tuesdays from this point forward. Thanks, everybody, for being with us today.

[00:37:53] Alice: Bye.

[00:37:54] Gretchen: Bye-bye.

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