Guest: Charles Lucero, Sunshine Acres House Parent

House Parent Charles Lucero, known to his TikTok family as @raising.boys.1776 has dedicated his life to strengthening society. He and his wife and two bio sons live in a house at Sunshine Acres where they collectively mentor 10 bonus boys. Join us as he shares a day-in-the-life of overseeing a group home along with four pillars he recommends to others for success through the lens of faith-based morality and common sense.

Transcript

Charles 0:00

I wanna talk about Jesus, but I wanna talk about parenting and I wanna talk about being a father, and I want to talk about how being a leader in your home is not toxic, because if we as men did more of that, our homes would be happier.

Speaker View & Screen Share 0:21

Welcome Charles. It's my pleasure to have you here this morning. On From the Heart. Conservative American Woman Podcast. You are a house parent with Sunshine Acres, and that's one of the reasons that I brought you here today to talk about family. So welcome Charles. Yes, ma'am. Um, my wife and I have been fostering for 19 and a half years. We have been at Sunshine Acres for 11 and a half years. We've worked for the state, we've worked for different organizations, and I'm just a blood bought child, uh, prodigal child of the king. And I didn't get saved until late in life. And God has used me in ways that I would've never, ever picked for myself. And, um, one of those being, working with kids, I didn't like kids, kids didn't like me. And, um, I have absolutely loved finding my purpose and that was helping kids and helping restore the family. one thing that we, I think we found in common right away on TikTok also is I have worked with kids also, and I'll, I'll bring that up at another point, but just the fact that we have in common, for me it was working in. Juvenile detention. The kids who needed more, more care than the kids over at Sunshine Acres, which I'm sure Charles will tell us more about, but that was one of the early reasons why we were able to connect. So what led you into this career? I know you said that you didn't think all that much about kids in the beginning, but you eventually got there. What, what brought you from where you were before to I'm gonna work with kids, you and your wife and, and what's your wife's name? My wife's name is Michelle. Okay. Um, oh my gosh. I was running restaurants in Colorado. I was doing everything that the world said that I needed to do to be happy and for a couple of years, um, God and I kind of fought and had different conversations about what it was that I was gonna do and how I was gonna trust him. it was like turning the Titanic. It, it took a little while for, for God to get my attention. And then when I turned 33, I had a really, really hard night. Um, a lot of crazy things happened in my world for my birthday. And I just came home and I, well, I was sitting at the bar and the bartender leaned over and gave me a kiss on my cheek and she looked at me and she said, I love you, brother. She goes, but if you don't leave here, she's like, you're not gonna make And I went home and I got on my knees and I told God that if he was really real to do something with my life and, um, he said, move back to Arizona. And I said, no, I don't wanna move back to Arizona. Arizona's hot and I don't really like Arizona, so no, I don't really wanna do that. And the next morning I was packing a small bag and I was gonna come visit my parents who live here in Arizona. And my father and I had both been recently decided that we were gonna trust God and that we were gonna submit to what he wanted us to do. And my dad and I made up for everything real and everything imagined that we had against each other. So there was some tension between the two of you when you were gone in Colorado. So coming back home involved kind of making some repairs it sounds like. Yes ma'am. I was, uh. I was not an, I don't know, I don't if you can believe this or not, but I was not an easy child. Um, and I definitely wasn't an easy teenager. And then when I got out of the Marine Corps, I was, I had PTSD and I was just, I was in a really bad place and I didn't think anybody Where did it lead next? So I, I was running restaurants in Colorado. It's what I had known. So I started applying for restaurants and jobs and they started turning me down, or I turned them down and we were listening to Family Life Radio and they were talking about needing guys to come out and work with kids at this camp at Youth Haven Ridge. And my dad looked at me and goes, you should go do that. And I was like, nobody wants me working with kids. I was like, that's a bad idea. I don't, you know, I don't like kids. Kids don't like me. It's just, it's not a good idea. And um, the next day I filled out an application and I was like, I'm gonna show God and I'm gonna show my dad that neither one of them know what they're talking about. And so, like, I was bluntly honest, I'm filling this out and I'm talking to this guy and, it was the first time I'd ever written my testimony And the next day this man calls me back and he goes, you're exactly what I've been praying for. And I was like, wait, what? I was like, I've, I've known Jesus for like a month and a half. Um, like there, I'm not the guy. And he goes, no, no. He goes, I get all these college kids who know who Jesus is. But they don't have your life experience. He goes, you know, these kids. And so I went out and worked a weekend for free and he put me with six, 12-year-old boys. And I had this lady who I was technically supposed to be helping her, and she was gonna run the thing within 15 minutes. She looked at me, she goes, we're gonna switch. She goes, you're gonna run the program and I'm gonna help And so I taught archery to the boys. We played dodge ball, we sat in these great big covered wagons and shared stories and talked about our lives. And one of the boys accepted Christ. And, um, I was hooked and I went back into the guy's office the next day and I was like, Hey, I, I, I wanna do this job. Yeah. And he smiled at me and he goes, I knew you were supposed to be here. I love it. There's nothing like someone saying that you are an answer to their prayer, How long did you stay there? Um, I went there in 2005. Um, the summer of 2005. I met my wife. She was a camp counselor there as well. Ah, okay. Perfect reason for you to have been there. for the first time in my life I wanted to be friends with someone of the opposite sex. I actually wanted to know who she was, not just know her enough to get her to go out on a date with me, but I wanted to know who she was. And we spent time in Bible study together. We spent time hanging out and going to movies. I think for the first time in my life, I wasn't trying to hit on somebody. Um, and as a guy that, that was a very, you know, I mean, that's what the world tells you you're supposed to do all the time, right? And, uh, a couple months later I met her family. She had met mine, and I asked her to marry me and her grandmother, who just recently passed away. Um, her grandmother said, so you, you wanna marry my granddaughter? And I said, yes ma'am. And she said, well, how are you gonna take care of my granddaughter? Are you going to, uh, go back to running restaurants? I smiled at her. I said, I'm, I'm not gonna take care of your granddaughter. I said, we're gonna take care of God's kids and God's gonna take care of us. And she smiled at me and she patted my knee and she goes, oh honey, we all work for Jesus, but what are you gonna do for a job? And I said, I'm gonna stay at the camp until God moves us somewhere else and she's gonna teach across the street. Mm-hmm. And that's what we're gonna do. And I think everybody was really floored because they, my family, her family, everybody expected us to just get back into the business world. And I kept trying to explain to everybody that this was no longer gonna be about money. This was gonna be about taking care of God's kids. And that's what we were gonna do. It's a calling for you, not just a career. And I think I kind of knew that anyway. I'm, yes, ma'am. That's what I'm hearing. I believe I found my purpose. I finally found what it was that I was supposed to do and who it was that I was supposed to be. So what continues to drive that passion? The passion behind it is because we are supposed to be the hands and feet of Christ. We've been doing this for almost 20 years. There's not enough men who are willing to do what it is that I do. There's not enough men that are willing to jump into the fray, get dirty, have these kids who have been through unspeakable things the kids at the camp, they still call me, they still message me. They find me on TikTok. I have seen one of them I hadn't seen in 10 years, and he found me on TikTok and came across one of my lives and stopped and was like, coach, that's you. and it was just, I wanna have an impact on men because the world tells us that we're supposed to sit down and shut up and not do anything That if we talk too much, we get our words used against us, and I wanna contradict I wanna show people that if we are man enough to trust that what we're saying is the right thing and that we're glorifying God's kingdom, that he'll take care of everything else. And we went from the camp to a place called Gap Ministries down in Tucson. They used to bring kids up to us, and the lady who runs it, her and her husband, she grabbed my wife and I and she goes, oh, so you guys have been married for a year now? And I was like, yeah. She goes, uh, we want you to come run a house. And so we went down and interviewed and talked to them, and we did it for 22 months. I loved working with the kids, but I spent more time at the courthouse. Fighting with the system about how they help our children. We had just had our first biological child and we decided it was time to go back to the camp they called and they wanted me to come back and run it. And so I was the program director at this point and, it just seemed like a better fit for us. And so we did that for about two years, and then I took the summer off and we had my second child and, I spent the summer just with my two boys. We had enough money in savings. My wife was, summer school teaching and she's like, I just want you to spend time with the boys. She goes, you're never ever gonna have this chance again. And as much as you pour into everybody else, she's like, you need to pour into your sons. That's why. And she is, she's amazing. Is that where the handle that you have on TikTok comes from raising boys? No. It comes from the job that we currently have, because where we're at now, I have 12 sons and I have two biological and 10 bonus, the 10 bonus change. But, that was where Raising Boys came. If I had just put Charles on TikTok, there's about 700 million of Right? And raising boys tends to get a little more attention. That's how I got involved., On TikTok. I went in to check on the boys in November, October. And I had six friends and all of them were my children. And I ended up in a live, and I met a guy named True Lyon. And, um, he saw my handle and he goes, raising boys. He goes, I'm a football coach. He goes, what's this all about? Right? And so he brought me up on the panel and we started talking and ironically enough, we had started having conversations about being fathers and about being husbands and what that looked like. And then we had a lot of the liberal ideology come in and just start attacking us because how dare a Hispanic male and a black male wanna talk about family and wanna talk about wholeness of children and, and wives and, and what that looks like. And so we spent about an hour and a half that first day arguing with people, literally about family and why the family unit was important. So, yeah, I knew that was the topic for you. There's any number of topics we could have gone with, for what you do, but when I was thinking, okay, how do I write the questions for Charles? I thought, you know, the heart of it, the real heart of it, if you are trying to help these kids is the family and making the family better in society, making it stronger so that these kids have the resources and support that they need What kind of philosophy goes into that that you could share with listeners that they might be able to use to help them? Strengthen their own home because we all have, you have kinda like strengthen your own home first and then strengthen society. So at home, what I challenge the boys is that I want them to be better fathers, husbands, and God chasers than their biologicals or that I am. And we challenge in the way of almost like a sports metaphor of how do you wanna get where you're going? And if you do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, that's the definition of insanity, right? So we have to have a timeline, we have to have a pattern, and we have to have a desire for change. And when the boys very first come, we use a lot of love and logic. We give a lot of choices. Because I've learned that although the Marine in me would really, really just like to tell them what to do and have them listen, it doesn't make sense. They will listen to the coach in me because they don't wanna get in trouble. But if I can give them choices about what kind of men they wanna become and what kind of boys that they wanna walk into the room as, it has to do with choice. And it, it's simple things when they're little, it's, well, do you wanna clean your room now when everybody else is doing it? Or do you wanna do it while everybody else is watching tv? and it's amazing. but it follows through with everything for their grades. They have to have season better, um, to be able to play video games or have their phones if they're teenagers. Um, for the littles, they don't get to play video games until they're in junior The brain function is, um, is something that we try really hard to pay attention to, and little boys just don't need to play video games, in my opinion, all So you limit the screen time until they're at a certain age where it's not as much of an impact on their, um, their brain development basically. Yes, ma'am. So I, I like that, that you give them choices because it helps them. It's kind of logical. Do I really wanna be cleaning my room? It's not, am I going to clean my room, but when am I gonna clean my room? And Great. Yeah. I like that, that, that makes a lot of sense. Can you give us a, a little bit of a rundown of what Sunshine Acres specifically is like and the home and the family that you have. Okay. So Sunshine Acres started. 71 years ago, they prayed for 17 years for Sunshine Acres to happen. This pastor and his wife, I don't know anybody who prays for a year for something to happen anymore. The fact that they prayed for as long as they did, they agreed when they started this place that they would not ask for a brick or a buck. So we don't accept any government funding. We do tours, um, 10 30, 12 30, and two 30 that you can call the office and check on. Okay. And they do a tour and they show people what it is that we do and, and how we take care of our kids. Um, we don't build a home for children until we have all the funds there to build the home, so they don't owe anybody any money. Which means they can take better care of their staff, they can take better care of the kids, and we're not in debt, so we're not put in positions where we have to look for handouts or that we have to try to do things. The great grandparents have passed on. But the grandmother is in her eighties now and she's, she's still the, uh, the CEO and aunt Carol has the most amazing heart. When we came almost 12 years ago to take a tour, we, we showed up and the lady said, you know, she goes, there was supposed to be 27 of you on the tour. And she goes, the entire tour canceled except for you two. And my wife and I just kinda smiled at each other and we were like, okay, God, what are you doing? Right. So we got this little intimate tour of the place Uhhuh, and she's explaining all of this. They do horse therapy, they have a four H program, all of these amazing things. So we got to ask some more intimate questions'cause we'd obviously worked for Gap down in Tucson. And so we knew the kind of questions to ask. And when we get back up to the office, this lady says, well, I want you to meet Aunt Carroll. And so Aunt Carroll comes out and back then she was in her late sixties. And, um, she says, uh, Charles, she goes, you, uh, you're an answer to prayer. And she said the same thing to me that my buddy Kyle said, when I started working at Youth Haven. And I had never heard that again. And so for me it was like, oh, okay, God. And so I. She said, you need to go quit your job and you need to come work here. And so we kind of chuckled and we left and we prayed about it. And the next morning I went into Canyon State and I had some issues there. Um, I actually got written up because I didn't restrain enough kids in my cottage. Oh yeah. And that was an issue for me. So I called back and I said, was she serious about the job? Mm-hmm. And the guy said, you have to have your fingerprint clearance card. You gotta do all these background things. It takes a couple of months. And I said, well, because we've worked with the state and we, I currently work for the state at Canyon State, um, I have my fingerprint clearance card, level one. I have, you know, and I went through the litany of stuff and he goes, well, all we have to do is double check that all of that works. He goes, you need to come in for a formal interview. But you can totally come work. And so we went in, we sat with everybody, we loved everybody here. And two weeks later I had given my notice to Canyon State and we were here. Um, that's an story. I mean, it just, my heart is just so full hearing that, that you've kind of not only been guided or led upon a path, but you've followed and you've answered, and you've got this sense about you to, to be open to promptings of where should I go, Lord? What, you know, I'll go where you want me to go. I love it. so you're there now and your home life. What's, what's the Lucero home? Um, all about, I've seen a tour of it on video on TikTok, but since I'm not there Yes. I don't have the video camera to show everybody. If you could just kind of tell us, and, and I'm not just talking about what it looks like, but kind of what's, what's a day in the life of being a house parent with 12, I mean, I raised five kids, but I can't imagine 12. It, it's, it's amazing. I get up at five 30 in the morning. I start waking the first one up because, oh my gosh, I can't remember the name of the movie. There's an Adam Sandler movie where he goes in and he wakes his kids up and he says, you don't have to get up yet, but you have to start waking up. Okay. And so I do that. I go in, I turn on the hallway lights, I start nudging everybody in that direction. I go get my coffee, I do my devotion while I'm sipping my coffee, I walk back through and, okay, you gotta start thinking about And that way by six o'clock when I start telling them that they need to get up and ready for school, it's not that jolt awake, oh my gosh. Kind of thing. And we go from six o'clock in the morning till the last kid goes to school at nine. Where it's the regular humdrum of food, making beds, fighting over backpacks. Where's my shoes? The litany of stuff. We have to be down at the front for the buses. And if you're not on time for the bus, then you have to drive them to school. We come back, my last one, my biological, goes to school at nine at the junior high. So we drive him and then we come back. My wife and I typically take the dogs for a walk, reconvene with each other about what's going on, make sure we're on the same page. And then we come back and we clean the house for an hour, hour and a half. We mop, we make beds. we make it ready because the kids have chores. But let's be honest, kids don't clean very well. And so our job, we look at it this way, my job that I get paid a paycheck to do is to clean the house. Okay? My ministry is to take care of the kids, And if I look at it from that angle, I get paid quite a bit of money to clean the house You put it that way. I absolutely agree. I mean, if I was in Japan and I had an hour a day to talk to kids about Jesus and the rest of the time I was cleaning bathrooms and that's what God called me to do, I would do It, you know, it, it's a little different, but it's the same principal., So They're all in school.

Charles 24:13

All go to school. We clean. If we have a dentist appointment, a doctor's appointment, a therapy appointment, all of my boys go to therapy. My biological and my bonus, everybody goes to therapy because we all need somebody to talk to. And as teenagers, I know that if I would've had somebody to talk to back in the day, I wouldn't have gone through half of the things that I went This way, you learn how to communicate. You learn how to share your feelings. You learn how to process with somebody who's not attacking you, but helping you, and that avails you the opportunity to be able to trust more So that's something that you recommend to families everywhere. If they can set something up for their kids, give them a place where they can talk. That's, I mean, you want them to have communication with you, but it's good for them to have another outlet where they can, kind of figure things out. Well,, the goal is that if stuff happens, I don't want it to go, oh crap, dad's gonna find out I need to hide this from I want it to be, oh crap, this happened. I need to go talk to dad. But the reality is, when they hit that testosterone stage, I'm not the guy that they wanna come talk to. Right. And if they've been going to counseling since they were little and talking about their feelings and kinda making the heart and head connections, then they're more willing to have those conversations with me. Or with their therapist about why. And what I've noticed is the kids that we've had since they were little, they need to go to therapy like once or twice every other month. The kids that we get that are teenagers, they have to go to therapy every week. But when they were little and they got to go to therapy, they learned to start processing things in such a way.

Speaker View & Screen Share 26:17

For the first up until about three years ago, both of my boys were homeschooled. Because we had Wednesdays and Thursdays off, it made more sense to homeschool them so that on our days off we could go up to the mountains, we could drive up to flag and go snowboarding. We could go do all of those really cool things because the last thing I wanna do is sit in therapy when my boys are in their twenties and be like, well, you love those other kids more than you love me.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 26:50

How do the boys feel when there's two of them and then these 10 other kids? how do you balance that?

Charles 26:57

So my biologicals, at the end of every summer we ask, okay, why are we here? Are we still a team? It's the four of us in ministry helping these kids who don't have a family. And my boys, since three and five have been able to say, yes, we're here because this is what we do as a family. They are 100% bought in. They also have their own bedrooms.'cause we have a three bedroom apartment. Mm-hmm. So they can come hide on their side when they don't wanna be around everybody else. And, um, they can just have their chill out time. Sure. But when we're off, For five days with our other church, we're gonna go to Mexico, we're gonna drive down to Rocky Point, we're gonna go build houses. Me and my two boys. Oh, how fun. And so we're gonna go do missionary work, even though we are full-time missionaries, we're gonna go and do a different missionary work, just the three of us with our church, just because I want them to have that experience as well.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 28:05

Sure. So it's a service mission,

Charles 28:07

Yes, ma'am.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 28:07

Your own boys are probably learning just as much, if not more from this experience of how to treat others around them, and giving service, in more ways than one.

Charles 28:18

They're learning how to set boundaries. And, as people period. But as men, I don't think we really understand how to set boundaries. we either bring people in or we cut them off, but we don't ever learn how to set boundaries. And I think that that's why it's so important with my sons, with all 12 of them, we have conversations about boundaries, if we learn how to set boundaries and hold those things,, we teach people how to treat us, but we teach ourselves how to treat ourself. Yeah. And when we start to do that, our self-esteem starts to rise. Who we are and who we want in our life starts to change and we gravitate people towards us who want the same things. I'm also a gentle parent. Every once in a while, the marine in me has to come out and it has to be dad's way, period. But when I'm a gentle parent it's, Hey, you made this mistake, you're failing this class. You don't get to play video games. It doesn't have to be this, it just needs to be understanding compassion and empathy. There's still the consequences there, and I think that's what we get away from is. People think that gentle parenting is permissive parenting, and that's not the case. Gentle parenting in some senses is harder because if my boys do something and they're grounded for a month, I have to have that conversation over and over again versus if I'm just this way about it, it's just harsher. And then they can focus on my anger or my irritation versus what they did wrong. And so they're not learning the lesson

Host RuthAnn Hogue 30:05

That's really insightful. so they go to their therapy and then

Charles 30:11

there's days where we don't have anything. And there's days where my wife and I go to the gym or we go do TikTok or we go do whatever it is that we do. And then, about three o'clock the boys start coming home. I'll make cookies, she'll put out snacks. We do homework time. We've also learned to have room time when they very first come home from school, whether it's a teenager or a little, when they come home from school, they go into their rooms and they clean their closets, reset their footwear, do these little things because when they have to organize their rooms, they organize in their head, and you watch them come down. And that way when you start snack time and you start, homework time, it's not, utter chaos. They're actually regulated and they're self-regulated because they learned how to clean their own room.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 31:08

I've never looked at it that way before, but that makes a lot of sense. And then I guess we're coming up on dinner time, homework and all that good stuff.

Charles 31:17

When I worked at Gap, I had to go buy the food. I had to make the food, I had to do all of that. Here we have a chef who makes me breakfast. I go down, I pick it up, and I bring it up and I give it to the boys for dinner time. Monday through Friday, I actually get to take the boys down there. We have a team. They make us our food. We feed the kids. They get to see, like some of the kids have siblings that are in other houses, and because they're parentified or they have different issues, they have to be separated. Okay? So we all go to dinner together, we all go to playground together, and we start to learn how to mend those,, issues and those relationships so that they're

Host RuthAnn Hogue 32:04

You're just living your life and at the same time all these good things are happening and you're able to provide for yourself

Charles 32:11

yeah. Well, and that's, that's it. It's, my wife is phenomenal when it comes to our budget. We don't owe anybody any money. So the money that we have is actually ours. We actually get to do the things that we wanna do. We got to take a vacation and we went to Hawaii and my youngest and I swam with sharks. And we got to make memories with them and, and do some really cool stuff. And I think that's part of why the whole TikTok experience started was I started coaching dads a couple of years ago I would run into a guy at the grocery store and he would watch me, with boys that clearly weren't mine. Whether it was the melanin in their skin or just different body appearances, you could tell that they were not my children. and so I would get questions and I had one dad say,, what do you do? And so I explained to him and I said, and I also coach, and he goes, so you could help me with my kids. And I smiled at him. I said, well, I can help you with yourself. And so this guy in particular, I coached him for about six weeks. We helped him learn how to have some boundaries with himself He was playing too many video games and he couldn't understand why his wife was always chirping at him. He was doing it to self-regulate and he was doing it to kind of just breathe and decompress. But when I explained to him if you actually walk in the house, look at your wife and go, Hey, you have me for 10 minutes, what do you need? How can I help contribute to the house? Oh, the trash needs taken out. These things need done. Okay, what else can I do? How are you? I said, you would be amazed at what a half an hour of you walking in, setting everything from work aside, sitting down with your wife, sitting down with your children, suddenly everybody's regulated, and then you can go play video games for an hour so that you can have your time. But if you walk in, throw your hand up and be like, I can't talked to anybody. I had a rough day at work. And you go storming off, you're acting like a teenager, you're not acting like a father. And so we're able to have some of these conversations. It took him a couple of weeks and he started to understand and, and be able to put those into perspective. And suddenly his relationship with his wife was phenomenal. And suddenly his relationship with his teenage daughter and, younger son was awesome. He was super thrilled. And he's like, okay, but I wanna still do coaching with you, but I don't, I was like, no, no. My job is to get out of coaching. I don't wanna take your money. What I want to do is help you become a successful father. What I learned was, if I don't charge you a little bit, you don't have any skin in the game, and then you blow me off after I've spent time preparing for you, and that's what I don't wanna And so then the TikTok experience started because we raised boys, but the only thing that I wish that my job could do differently, whether it was Gap or Canyon State or here or Youth Haven, is we do a phenomenal job in the different areas that we are of training the boys and the kids how they're supposed to become what they're supposed to become. Some of it works and some of it doesn't. And the reason is we take them for a year or two years and we pour all of this foundation into them, but their foundations are cracked. And then we send them back to the Libre Tar Pits where nobody changed where they came from. And then we wonder why these teenagers, why these children are suddenly back in their old habits and back in their old things, and it's because of where they came from. So the TikTok experience started because I wanna talk about Jesus because he's the foundation that needs to fill in all those cracks. But I wanna talk about parenting, and I wanna talk about being a father, and I want to talk about how being a leader in your home is not toxic. And how being a man who actually walks into his house and goes, Hey, how can I contribute to my home? Not, oh, I'm gonna do my part. no, it's your home. Come in. Oh, the trash needs taken out. Take off the trash. She shouldn't have to tell you that. You can tell that it's full. Walk in and look at her and go, oh, hey, you're dysregulated. Sit down. What are you doing? Let me do it. Because if we as men did more of that for our wives, our homes would be happier. Our marital relations would be happier and our children would see harmony and so they wouldn't be trying to work the system against one against the other to try to do the things that they want. If we can teach men how to lead again the proper way. We can teach women how to submit. And by that it's more not being in their masculine energy because they've learned how to have to be that because their husbands are acting like little boys. We need their husbands to act like men so that women can submit and be who it is that they're supposed to be. If we look at the yin and the yang, um, that's how I look at marriage. it should be both of us being equally parts of who we are. At the end of the day, if we're having a hard conversation and my wife and I can't agree on something, I have to make the hard decision. But I would be a complete fool to not listen to the brain and the wisdom that my wife has and if I can help her by doing what it is that she's asking. I can listen to her. She feels heard. Even if I don't make the decision that she wants me to I can also explain myself because I've learned how to have boundaries that are appropriate and I understand how to explain myself without feeling like I have to defend myself. And there's a huge difference with that. Yeah, we try to role model that for all 12 of our boys, but what I would really, really love to do is to be able to go into a church or go into a school and say, Hey, give me your top five hardest families. let's work on teaching them some love and logic so that they know how to have conversations with their children so that they're not just screaming and yelling at'em when they do the wrong thing because they're dysregulated. So now they're making their kids dysregulated. Let's teach'em some financial peace. So that they understand how to manage their money. You and I got taught in marketing class and in DECA in school And then whether they're married or not, we need to do some marriage counseling. We need to teach them how to have arguments without going out and getting drunk and fighting with each other, without slamming and breaking things and without being in a defensive posture, actually working on, it's us against the problem instead of us against each other. And then I believe that men especially, but men and women need to go to counseling to work on their past traumas so that they're not bleeding all over their families and the people that they meet now over stuff that hurt'em a long time ago. And I think if we could start with those four pillars, we would watch our society change back into an even better than what it used to be. As we become more aware of traumas and triggers and all of those things, being able to actually learn those things and put'em into practice. And my favorite statement to the boys is, you know, that's great that you can tell me that that's your trigger. But you sitting in that is like sitting in a poopy diaper and expecting not to get a rash. you have to be willing to change the diaper and go, okay, that triggered me. Why did that trigger me? Let's learn how not to let that trigger And it feels like the world is in this place where it just wants to let you be triggered and nobody can say anything to you because that triggers you. Well, that's not trauma informed behavior at all. It's just a trauma informed excuse.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 41:08

So you've given some really good advice, and, you've told us some success stories, but what has been one of the biggest challenges that you've had as you've gone through this experience and how did you overcome it?

Charles 41:26

The greatest challenge was learning how to communicate effectively, because the entire time my wife and I have been married has been in ministry. So it's been in one fishbowl or another. And we didn't always communicate the way that we needed to have conversations. We go to marriage counseling every two years, because we know that we need And you take your car in for maintenance regularly because it needs it. You don't wait until it's broken down to do that, or it's a lot more expensive. That's probably my biggest challenge My wife she's probably the strongest willed woman I've ever met in my life. And I know that when I am on my game and I'm doing everything that I'm supposed to do as the leader of the home, we're good. When I'm off my game and I'm not leading the way that we're supposed to, I. It's very evident.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 42:28

How did you learn to be the leader,

Charles 42:32

Because we've watched it. I think that's probably been the best part for us is, we've watched it. we get children that come into our home that, that got raised by a mom who, she shows up with a 12-year-old boy who is hit that testosterone's peak and, and he doesn't wanna listen to her anymore. And, and he needs a dad to be rough and tumble with him and, and to challenge him to do things and tell him no and, and to do things. That a mom just isn't built to do. Moms are built to, to love and, and to, to adore and, and to do all the mom things that they're supposed to do. Nurturing comes to mind. if mom's able to nurture the right way instead of having to parent both the father's side and the mother's side, it's amazing what her relationship looks like with her son or her daughter. Mm-hmm. And that's why God created it, man and woman to have a family and to lead because it's, again, it's that yin and that yang. The more that we try to push away from that, and we don't need each other and we don't need this or we don't need that. We're actually stealing from our children and our grandchildren and we're setting them up for failure.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 43:55

There's been an attack on the family in recent years, coming from all directions, some of it subtle, some of it not so subtle, and the impact that it has on individual kids, on society, all of those things. I think we're starting to see enough of that now that people are starting to push back. how important is it that the family becomes front and center again? That we start paying attention to what our kids need, how to build the family and rebuild society.

Charles 44:28

I think that if we start with our communities and we start to go out and meet our neighbors again, like you and I used to when we were kids. Mm-hmm. I think that that starts to help things. I think if we start to go, okay, hey, how do we hold our children accountable? How do we hold each other accountable? Nobody wants to be told what to do anymore, and that's the biggest lie that we've gotten told. Everything has a consequence. And if we would work on our communities, like specifically, I grew up in the south side of Tucson, I can tell you more gang activity, more drug activity, more any of that that we never once said, Hey, don't do that. But if we got pulled over by a cop, because we look like so-and-so who was dealing down the street, we were mad at the cop because we look like so-and-so. Versus being mad at so and so. Okay. and I think that if we would teach people, if we could bring the family unit back to being the center, just to touch on it, the reasons that we had the Leah Thompson deciding to swim against Riley Gaines. I think if you look at that, he didn't have a father in the house that was doing the things he was supposed to do, so he didn't want to be a man because it was easier to be in the feminine energy like his I think that we do a disservice when we teach people that they are not who God made And I think we could take the family unit, make the man the patriarch that he's supposed to be again and lead the way he's supposed to. We've tried it for the last two decades where the men have slowly been swept out, not held accountable, not asked to do anything, where the women are like, I can do it all without a man. And look at where we are as a society. It takes both of us to raise children. my favorite thing, I've gotten to marry a couple of my kids and their spouses. I got ordained so that I could do that. Okay. Um, but one of my biggest things that I tell them that I got was, God's going to use your spouse as a chisel or a battering You get to decide which one of those things that he's going to use, by the way that you make your choices, because he's after your heart. He's not after a clean heart. He's after a cleansed heart because a cleansed heart he can use. To glorify his kingdom. And that is our entire purpose of being on this world, is to glorify our creator. And when we don't do that, we have this huge hole in us that we're expecting everybody else and everything else to fill. And it just doesn't work.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 47:35

So in that perfect world, what would home and family life look like?

Charles 47:40

In a world where we're healthier, I think it's when mom and dad actually can hold themselves accountable for their stuff where they can work on the problem together as a unit. Instead of it being them against each other, it's them against the problem. And I think that would help our children to be able to grow up and actually be able to be children. What I watch too much of is the children have to grow up to be teenagers or grow up to be adults so fast that they spend the rest of their life trying to live like children because they never got to be kids.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 48:20

That makes a lot of sense. That's insightful. Is there anything that I have not asked you that, that you wanna add before we sign off?

Charles 48:29

I am raising boys 1776 on every platform that you can think of. I need 13 more followers on YouTube before I can go live on YouTube, and I am going to start going live with parenting topics, with marriage topics, with dad topics, on all platforms, and then on Wednesdays, on TikTok, on Raising Boys, number one, um, we're doing something different from every other church. We share testimonies and we sing worship songs for 12 hours from nine o'clock in the morning till nine o'clock at night. Mountain time, and we've never seen another church do that. We've never seen a church that actually just has different people come up and share their encounter with Christ that they couldn't walk away And last time we had over 6,000 people come to almost 6,000 people So please join us, come take a look at what we're doing and tell me what we're doing. Good. Tell me what we're, we should fix, come and join us.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 49:45

Well, thank you for coming and speaking with us today, Charles. I will post information about the things that we discussed today in case people want to learn more about you, more about Sunshine Acres, more about the social media accounts that you have. Thank you so much for sharing not only your testimony, but your feelings on the family and how we can, as individuals influence community to help build families, to help build society and get this ship back on track.

Charles 50:17

Yes, ma'am. It's been my pleasure. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

Host RuthAnn Hogue 50:23

Thank you for joining us today. For From the Heart Voice of a Conservative American woman, find us online at www.conservativeamericanwoman.com and anywhere your favorite podcasts are available. See you next time.