Parenting Against the Stream of Culture with Angie Tolpin

Jennifer Pepito (0:00)

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This is Jennifer Pepito with the Restoration Home Podcast. This is the show where we talk about life-giving habits for flourishing family culture.

Today on the show, I'm so excited to be chatting with Angie Tolpin. Her and her husband run Courageous Parenting, and they have a new book out called Courageous Parenting. Thanks so much for joining me today, Angie.

Angie Tolpin (2:02)

Thanks for having me. It's an honor.

Jennifer Pepito (2:05)

As we get started, I'd love for you to just introduce yourself to my community. Tell me about your big family and ages and stages.

Angie Tolpin (2:12)

Sure. Well, Isaac and I have been married for almost 27 years, and we have nine kids that range in ages 25, almost 26 She turns 26 next week, down to five years old.

We're actually expecting our sixth grandchild in a couple of weeks. Our oldest three kids are all married, and we've been homeschooling. This is our 23rd year homeschooling, and so we just graduated our fifth. I have four left. That was my tipping point of over halfway done with homeschooling. That's crazy.

Jennifer Pepito (2:47)

Yeah. So exciting, Angie. What a blessing to have all those grandkids as well. One of the interesting parts of your story, you guys are church planters and you did a big move probably right around 2020, 2021

How did you transition your big family from one community to another?

Angie Tolpin (3:06)

Yeah, that's a big, big question. I think a lot of people are actually in that position of immigrating. You know what I mean? There's just been a lot of that in the last five years. One of the things that's been the most helpful for me as far as my attitude and contentedness, I guess, is the best way to put it, when we started building new community is that it usually does take about three years to build that community. And so that kind of helped me having that realistic perspective helped me to have grace because we left an amazing biblical community in Bend. And we're still very close to a lot of the people that we were in church with and close to. In fact, our sons just got back from spending a weekend with a whole bunch of family and friends that live there. And so we love them very dearly and it was a hard, hard decision to move. We had lived in Oregon our entire marriage, our kids had been raised there.

But when COVID happened, we went on an RV trip with our kids because we usually do that in the summers or we had been for the for the eight years before that. And we saw how local government impacts local citizens lives on a very real level. And when we got back to Oregon, we just realized that even though we had a wonderful community, we needed to make a decision for our legacy. And so when your perspective changes off of you and your friends and your family, and you start looking at your kids and them getting close to the age of having their own children, which might were because my oldest was in her third year of college, both Isaac and I just realized we have to make a move to a more like minded place where our kids are potentially going to meet and marry people who are like them and that it's just a more advantageous environment to be homeschooling, to have all of the different rights that we have. And so when we moved here, we found a lot of like minded people right away. We live in Idaho now and we love it where it's going to be six years in October.