Become a Writer Today

How to Write For Parents with Dr. Paul Reeves

April 14, 2021 Bryan Collins Season 2
Become a Writer Today
How to Write For Parents with Dr. Paul Reeves
Show Notes Transcript

Could you write about your family? And if so, how would you decide what to include and what to take out?

I've just finished writing a book about my experiences of being a dad to three children, and I've had to make some decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. After all, I want to be fair to the children.

And although my editor has given me some good advice, ultimately the best person to look over it and give their opinion will be my wife!

It was whilst researching the book that I came across former school principal Dr Paul Reeves. His book is very cleverly titled A Principal's Family Principles. His book is full of stories of his own family and his experiences as a high school principal.

I was interested to know why he decided to write a parenting book, how he got it into the hands of other dads and what it's like to write in this particular type of genre.

In this episode we discuss:

  • Where the idea for the book came from
  • How to decide what to leave in and what to take out
  • Paul's take on bullying
  • Which chapters especially resonated with the readers


Resources:

Support the show

If you enjoyed the show please leave a review on Apple. And if you have any questions you can find me on Twitter @BryanJCollins

Thanks for listening!

Paul:
My biggest piece of advice to parents is to be present. They talk about quality time and quality time is important, but I like the term quantity time. If you give your kid five really good minutes a day. Well, that's good. That's five more minutes than other kids get, but what if you gave them a few hours?

Introduction:
Welcome to the Become a Writer Today, podcast with Bryan Collins. Here you'll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan:
Would you write about your family? And if so, how would you decide what to include and what to take out? Hi there, my name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today podcast. The reason I'm asking that question is I just got off the call with my editor for a book that I finished. The book I finished is about parenting. It's actually about my journey as a parent. So I've got three kids and our first son whose now 15 was born back in 2006. Our daughter is 10, and we've also got a two-year-old who's running around the house as well. And the book is kind of more about my journey as a parent, rather than necessarily about medical advice, about parenting or something that's full of facts, figures, and research.

Bryan:
But when I was writing a parenting book, I figured out there's a lot of these parenting books out there already. So I wanted to do something that was a little bit different. The reason why I wrote this particular book is the last book I wrote was a business book and it was full of all that kind of research. And it was full of all of those kinds of takeaways and full of all those interviews. It's called, This Is Working and it's on Amazon. So I wanted to do something that was a little bit more creative and a little bit more personal. And I want it to include a lot of the stories that I journaled about over the years with the kids. That's why I wrote the parenting book. I also just want to do it because I guess I thought it would be fun. I also didn't think it would take this long.

Bryan:
So for context, I started outlining the book last April, excuse me, it's now March. So we're almost a year later and I thought it would be out by now, but I spent quite a lot of time re-writing it and re-working some sections of the book. I've re-written it maybe four times. And now my editor suggested some changes that I should make. One of the questions or problems that I had was how to decide what to put into the book so I'm being honest about my experiences as a dad, but also how to decide what to leave out so I'm being fair to the kids because at the end of the day, they don't get a say in the book so to speak because they're not actually writing it. And this is just my experiences, not their experiences. So what I'll probably do is give a draft of the book for my wife to read and ask her, is there anything that's unfair? For the kids and maybe I'll give it to my old son to read as well.

Bryan:
But I sent this to my editor because I also wanted to know, did she think there was anything in the book that I should take out? And one of the thing's she suggested was to use pseudonyms, which I'm doing. I also wanted to figure out how to get a book like this into the hands of other dads, because that's their target audience for this particular book. And there's actually not a huge amount of books out there for dads, at least books like this. So when I was doing my research, I actually came across Dr. Paul Reeves, he's based in Detroit and he runs his own radio show. He's a former principal and he's written a book called A Principal's Family Principles, which I thought was very clever because he was a high school principal. So he's got lots of experience with kids and he shares lots of those experiences in his book. His book is full of his stories within his own family and also experiences he had in high school.

Bryan:
So I recently had the chance to catch up with Paul. And I asked him about how he decided to write a parenting book, how he got it into the hands of other dads and what it's like to write in this particular type of genre. But before we get over to this week's interview with Paul, if you'd like to support the show, I've set up a patreon, patreon.com/becomeawritertoday. You've got three tiers. So for a couple of dollars, you'll support the show because it takes me two to three hours to record each episode, maybe a little bit longer, depending on the length to record the episodes, to get it produced, research the questions and so on.

Bryan:
Now I do have the help of an audio engineer who helps me with some of this and a virtual assistance, but your support on patreon will help me publish more episodes of the Become a Writer Today show. And that's one of the things I would like to do is to record more episodes and publish them more frequently this year. So I've got a couple of different tiers, which you can check out. Depending on which tier you pick, I'll give you access to all of my writing books. I give you a discount for Grammarly, and I'll also give you discount for my writing courses. I'll put a link in the show notes, but with that, let's go over to this week's interview with Dr. Paul Reeves.

Paul:
Thank you, Bryan. Glad to be here. And yes, the busiest heck keeps me off the street and out of trouble. Good way to look at it, right?

Bryan:
So I'm in Ireland. You're out in Detroit. Is that right?

Paul:
Yeah. Born and raised in Detroit, still here. I won't be here for much longer. We're going to move to the Southern United States where it's a whole lot warmer than Detroit, but been here a long time.

Bryan:
Yeah, I should move there too. It's not that warm in Ireland these days. So, would you be able to give listeners a flavor for who you are and what you'd like to write about?

Paul:
Yeah, I was a teacher for a long time and then I became a principal for an even longer time. So I got to know kids really well and teachers and the educational system and did all that good stuff, have several degrees, including my doctorate in education. And I spent my whole career there. I also worked as a musician for a long time, and I had a newspaper column and I decided to retire from education and focus on radio, the radio station, writing, writing music and performing as well. So still keeping busy.

Bryan:
And you wrote your book Principal's Family Principles in 2015, or at least it was published in 2015. What was the key ideas in the book and what's it about?

Paul:
It originally started off as a blog. I was writing a blog post every week as a school principal, trying to help parents guide their kids through life and to be happy and healthy and well adjusted and signs to look out for, trouble signs also good signs. And then it evolved into a book after I got to a certain point, I realized I have enough for a book, but if I add a few more details, we can actually make this work. And so it came out in 2015 originally and then got republished later on.

Paul:
But the main gist of it, as it says on the cover, after a Principal's Family Principles, raising your kids to be happy and healthy while enjoying them to the fullest. And then we have to remember, we only have our kids for a limited number of years, and then they grow up and they move out and get married and have kids of their own. So we have that window of opportunity to influence them and guide them toward the right things in life. And that's what the book is all about, the good, the bad, and how to get out of the bad. And how to enhance the good.

Bryan:
When you were writing the blog posts that inform the book, did you write these while you were raising the kids or when you were looking back on your life with the kids?

Paul:
My kids were still here. I think the youngest was about 14 at the time. So they were 14, 17 and 20. So some of the stories were pertinent to that exact moment, but other stories were from when they were younger as well.

Bryan:
Okay. I'm actually writing a book about parenting, it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to, how did you decide what stories to put into the book and what to leave out?

Paul:
Yeah, that was a labor of love, there were so many stories to tell. So I tried to find a diverse cross section of stories. We dealt with drugs, we dealt with alcohol, we dealt with the kids excelling in life and music and sports and in class. And I tried to get one or two of everything in the book. So it would be pertinent to anybody who picked up the book and learn something from it as far as raising kids or working with kids.

Bryan:
Okay. Did you show the book to your kids before you published it?

Paul:
No, I didn't do that. I told him that I was doing it and that it was coming. And then I presented each of them, a copy of the book gift wrapped for Christmas later that year. And they read it cover to cover and they recognized everything in that book is true. Now not every story is about my own kids. It's also about kids I dealt with in schools, as well as parents I dealt with in schools. So not every story is about them and I didn't make them look bad. So they were happy and life has been going on pretty well since then.

Bryan:
I was curious about when you said you didn't make them look bad because one of the things, or the issues I have when I was writing the book is a conscious, that you have to be fair to the kids. And that they're not necessarily getting the say in the book because they're not writing it. So did you have a rule where you said, "I can't say this and I should say that?"

Paul:
Not really. I had one story in there and it involved my daughter. She always wanted to go to these school dances and we said, "No dances until you're in seventh grade." And of course that made her upset because all of her other friends got to go to these dances. And well your other friends don't live here. You do. You're not going until seventh grade. And so the very first dance in seventh grade, she said, "Well, I'm in seventh grade. We have a dance Friday. Can I go?" Well, I didn't want her to go, but we made a promise. So off she went and it was a seven to 10 o'clock on a Friday night, which I thought was way too late on a Friday for seventh graders to be having a dance. But it wasn't my school, it was somebody else's school.

Paul:
So she went and I said, "You can go seven to nine, I'll be there at nine." You come out and see me, and then we'll make a decision on the final hour. And basically I just wanted to check her overall appearance or disposition because she was a pretty good kid. You get swept up in these environments with a bunch of kids having a party. And who knows? I said, "You come out and see me at nine and we'll talk about the final hour." Okay, great. So we got to there in time for seven, went back at nine and she didn't come out, 9:05 she still wasn't out.

Paul:
And finally about 10 after nine, she came out and said, "Sorry about that. I didn't see the clock. So I lost track of time." So I say, "Get in the car." And she goes, "Okay." And so she got in, I put the car in reverse. What are we doing? I said, "We're going home." And she said, "Well, you said we can talk about the final hour." I said, "That's right. If you had been here at nine o'clock, we would have talked about the final hour." You were late, which kind of confirms that I'm a little uncomfortable about this to begin with.

Paul:
So we're going home and maybe next time you remember that when I make a statement. I really mean it. It's not just kind of a suggestion. And of course she broke down in tears and all heck broke loose and that's the way it goes. But from that moment on, I really believe now that seventh grade girls she was 13. I really believe that set the tone for the rest of her life. And she never did that again. She was never late again. She never tried to bob and weave and circumvent the rules and she's grown up to be a very responsible adult.

Bryan:
Is that story in the book?

Paul:
Oh yes. Yeah. Very much so.

Bryan:
Okay. So when you publish these as blog posts on your site, and then you decided you wanted to write a book, did you go back and rewrite them or how did you put them all together in a book?

Paul:
Yeah, I took what I had written before because they had been written written over a period of five or six years. And although I hadn't touched them in about four years. So I went back and rewrote several and rewrote some new ones as well to kind of freshen it up because there was a period of years there where I had written nothing about kids. And so I wanted to add those stories in as well.

Bryan:
Did you decide on a particular order for the stories that go into the book, in terms of chronology or did you edit these in a different format?

Paul:
There was a definite purpose to how they got in the book and the order they got in, but it had nothing to do with chronology had more to do with topics and heaviness. I didn't want to have three or four really bad stories about drugs in a row. So I have a funny story then maybe a story about alcohol and then an uplifting story. And then maybe a story about a kid who had a rough time at home. So I tried to mix and match all over the book. So you weren't caught up in one particular idea as you floated into the book, you got the whole flavor, no matter where you were.

Bryan:
So one of the things I'm wondering about parenting books is do you have to write this for a particular type of parent? Is that something you thought about when you were working on this book?

Paul:
No, this is pretty much written for anybody who's a parent. I used to joke on my radio show it's written for anybody who's had kids, knows kids, has ever seen a kid, or ever was a kid because it reaches out to everybody. It's just good, solid high quality parenting advice based out over 30 years of working with kids in schools. And I worked with thousands of kids and saw everything from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs and then my own three kids, I was very close to them as they were growing up. We did everything together. I monitored everything. And so we kept an eye on things fairly closely. So the fact that I've been successful working with kids, if I can help other people that maybe that's what I'm supposed to do. So that's exactly why it got out there.

Bryan:
And do you know if mothers or fathers bought this book or both or is it skewed in one direction?

Paul:
No, it's written for everybody, whether you're a mom or dad, there was advice for parenting in general, male or female. And there might be a few that are slanted, a little toward a mom or a little toward the dad, but for the most part, good parenting is good parenting, male or female.

Bryan:
Well, what I'm curious is would dads actually buy this book themselves or do they need the other parents in the family to buy it, give it to them and say here, read this.

Paul:
That's a good question. There are a number of dads who have purchased it and they don't necessarily tell the world they've purchased it for the very reasons your sort of hinting at they don't want to admit, "Hey, maybe I need to learn something from this guy." But if you don't work with kids every day, now again, I work with thousands of kids over the years. There are people who never work with kids. I have a lot of friends, especially on my street who are engineers for a major automotive organization, Ford Motor company, General Motors. Well, kids don't work there. So they never see any kids at all except when they get home and they see their one, two or three kids, that's all, they get two or three kids a day. I had thousands every day.

Paul:
So I had a lot more experience than they did. And again, I saw everything from the bottom to the top. So when I wrote the book, a lot of people bought it just for that, "Okay, this guy has seen it all. I'm going to find out what he learned." And it got to the point, even before the book came out, people in my town where we live, if their kids wanted to do something, they would call me to find out if I'm letting my kids do it. And if I said, "Nope, she's not allowed to do that. Then they wouldn't let their kids go." And we kept that secret. The kids never knew about that until they got to about 25 years old and somebody spilled the beans. They said, "You got to be kidding." Especially my daughters. So parents called you to find out if their kids could go places? I said, "Yeah, that's basically how it works." So they knew. I mean, I was around thousands of kids every day. They were around one, two or three so my book has helped them quite a bit in that regard.

Bryan:
Yeah, one chapter that stood out to me when you sent me a copy of the bullying chapter. So I actually have a chapter in my book about bullies as well. Would you be able to explain some of the advice that you'll have about bullying in this particular chapter? What your approach is?

Paul:
Yeah, that's a tough issue. And it finally came to light, I'm guessing about 10 years ago, at least in the United States, it was kept quiet before that. But kids as well as adults can be mean, they can be cruel to each other and call each other names or close them out of groups or kind of mess them over. And there are different techniques to overcome it when you're a kid anyway. One of them is you have to report it and somebody has to know what's going on. If you don't tell anybody that, "Hey, this guy twice my size is hitting me in the arm every day. No one's going to ever know." So you got to report it. And then for awhile, try to avoid them.

Paul:
Now we had a guy, he played basketball in Detroit. He's in the hall of fame, Isaiah Thomas, he grew up in a very bad part of Chicago. He said it was so bad every day he had to fight, literally fight to get to school. And he would have to fight on his way home because that's just the neighborhood it was. You walking down the street, someone's going to fight you. And he was smaller than a lot of kids but he fought them. And he said, I found out when you fight a bully, they're going to walk away and find someone else to pick on. And so sometimes that's the rule in life too. I don't mean go punch somebody in the nose. But if you meet a bully, head on with some of his own nonsense, it tends to go away because they don't want to mess with people who are going to mess with them. They want to mess with people who are weak and won't tell anybody.

Paul:
So definitely report it, but it's also nice if a third person, a witness happens to see it and they report it and then it gets taken care of fairly quickly. And in my school, we set up a program that if you see any bullying at all, name-calling, pushing somebody down the hall, tell an adult, make sure it gets to me and we'll take care of it. So I won't say we never had bullying in my schools, but we reduced it greatly. Just because of that, we had everybody on alert and it wasn't allowed, if you do this, we're going to send you home. And if we catch you, we're going to send you home even more days so don't do it. So that's kind of the unspoken rule, but really the spoken rule, you have to speak out about it otherwise the bullies get away with it.

Bryan:
Good advice. Are there any other chapters in a book that have resonated a lot with readers?

Paul:
Yeah. Mostly the ones that involved day to day activities or specific activities, maybe that involve humor. One time we thought my three-year-old son was going to die. We had to rush him to the hospital. The doctors couldn't find out what was wrong. And it turned out he had a pretended he was a dinosaur the day before eating the grass. And I had just put fertilizer on the grass. So basically ate poison. And eventually it got out of his system. And the doctor said, "We don't know what happened here. We couldn't find anything wrong. And now he's a hundred percent fine." And so we went home and it wasn't until years later, maybe 10 years later we were discussing it. And he said, "Oh, I can tell you what happened." And he told us the dinosaur eating fertilized grass story, and all those years we were on pins and needles like we got to watch what he eats-

Bryan:
In case something happens again.

Paul:
Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure if we should put you on eBay and sell you or keep you for another 10 years, but we kept him around. So stories like that, the personal stories that people seem to like a lot, the positive stories. And my biggest piece of advice to parents is to be present. They talk about quality time and quality time is important, but I like the term quantity time. If you give your kid five really good minutes a day, well, that's good. That's five more good minutes than other kids get. But what if you gave them a few hours? What if you came home from work everyday on time and didn't go out drinking, didn't go out bowling with the boys, just came home and spent that time with your kids? Your kids are going to, first of all, they want that. They want that security of their parents being around. But secondly, you're going to get to know your kids better. You'll have more of an influence on them as far as guiding them toward the right roads in life.

Bryan:
Yeah. I like that. I like that. So you also have a radio show, Dr. Paul's Family Talk. Your radio show, despite the name covers an awful lot of topics. So we were chatting just before the podcast, you were explaining that you have a lot of writers on the show?

Paul:
Yeah, that's how we started off. And it's a long story as to how that evolved. The book came out in 2015 and that's when I got my radio show in 2015. So the radio show was being used to promote the book. So we would talk about that and have people on to discuss family. And it went very well. And then eventually we branched off into other areas, music, politics, government, sports, humor. And after a few years of doing that on Detroit radio, I started my own radio station on the internet called Impact Radio USA and took my show there, which was Dr. Paul's Family Talk. And we talk about everything under the sun. There's really nothing that's off limits. We are still family oriented. So we don't swear or discuss inappropriate topics that we wouldn't want kids to hear.

Paul:
So it's still appropriate, but it's not necessarily strictly family. The other day we talked about, let's see, on Monday's show, we talked about socialism, for example, and the aspect of every kid gets a participation trophy. And we talked about how that's not really good, at least from my viewpoint. When I was a kid, I worked really hard to win awards and to be number one. And now you show up and if you finish in last place, you still get a trophy.

Bryan:
You still get one. Yeah.

Paul:
So we talked about that on Monday's show, which I guess could be somewhat geared toward family, but it's really more geared towards society. So we talk about everything. Initially, we had writers on the show because writers are always willing to go on shows to promote their books. The other guests are a little bit tougher to book. They're not used to promoting themselves. I mentioned engineers. I'd love to have an engineer on this show, but engineers aren't normally geared to going in public and telling everybody how great they are and what they did today to design the latest car. But authors are, and musicians are, artists are to a degree, but especially authors because they're constantly expressing themselves anyway. That's what writing is all about. And so they love to go on shows and promote their books. So it was an easy way to get guests fairly quickly. But over time, now we've branched off and we're back to having anything and everything on as long as they add some value to the show.

Bryan:
And do you have a lot of writers who are listeners? It sounds like you will do if you can focus on that over the years.

Paul:
Yeah. Yeah. We've definitely picked up a whole bunch of writers who listened to the show fairly regularly now and we exchange ideas back and forth.

Bryan:
Yeah. So I was curious, you said that this is a radio show over the internet. So does that mean it's podcast? I can also get it's using radio when I'm in my car or in the kitchen in Detroit?

Paul:
Yeah. Well, because it's on the internet, you just have to have an internet connection. It won't be on your car radio, but if you have an internet connection you can get it wherever you are in the world. We broadcast 24 seven around the clock, but we also have a podcast page. My shows are on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And that's the 11:00 AM Detroit time, which I think is 4:00 PM Ireland time. Right?

Bryan:
Yeah.

Paul:
I think you're five hours ahead. And then after the show is over, we take the entire show and put it on the podcast page. So if people couldn't tune into the live show, they can hear it on the podcast page whenever they want to.

Bryan:
Okay. And how do people find the show or find the radio show?

Paul:
Just go to our website and that's impactradiousa.com, easy to remember, impactradiousa.com and on every page, there's a button that says, listen now, if you just click on that, it'll take you right to the live feed of the radio station. And there's also a link to the podcast page on there as well.

Bryan:
Okay. Okay. Did you have any plans to write any other books or any other parenting books?

Paul:
Yeah. There are several in the pipeline. One of the issues with writing for me right now is the radio shows and the radio station taking so much time that there's not a lot of focus time left for writing. And I have to be able to have hours at a time maybe three, four or five hours to write. Some people can whip out their computer at a restaurant or in the airport and write for 10 minutes. Well, I'm not one of those people. I need to have serious focus time. And it's hard to find that now, but those days will be coming shortly.

Paul:
We're finding ways to branch off and send some of our radio work to other people, which will free me up to do more writing. But yeah, definitely. I have a book that's almost done now it's geared toward school principals and we don't have a final title, but it's along the lines of the 10, most significant things that every principal needs to know. And we get into staffing and budgets and personnel dealing with the community. And while it's geared toward principals, at the same time, it's geared toward anybody who is a leader or a CEO or a president of a company shows them how to navigate and get in and out of situations successfully.

Bryan:
Yeah. I'd imagine you have a lot of experience that you can bring to a book like that. For your own research process, do you read other parenting books?

Paul:
Yeah. I try to read everything I can get my hands on. Over the years, after you've read a number of books on a particular topic, you find there are certain authors who are better than others. And so I'll try to go with those people, including Dr. James Dobson. I don't know if you know him. He's a significant guy in the U.S. and I think throughout the world and in different areas, he started focused on the family back in the seventies, and now he's branched off into his own thing. And he writes on the family all of the time, sends a monthly newsletter, writes, I don't know how many books he has out there, tons. And so I'll try to read whatever he puts out. But yeah, if there's a good book on parenting, I'm always willing to read it. Even though my kids are all grown up and gone and moved out of the house and live elsewhere, but you're never too old to learn. And so I will learn new information anytime it's out there.

Bryan:
Do you think a parenting book needs to have a lot of science in it, or is it okay to draw on personal stories?

Paul:
Either way. People enjoy reading the personal stories and that's why I put them in my book. Now, there are some where I quoted research, very specific research on alcoholism and bullying and drugs, because my kids were not into that. They didn't sit around drinking every day, but some kids do and some parents do. And so I went to the research on that. So you can get the hardcore facts based on research in my book, but you can also get the personal stories. They just reflect how kids interact every day. And before all of this came together, I mentioned the blog and then the book. Before all of that, I used to send a fairly detailed email every Sunday night to all of the parents in my school. And it would talk about what's coming up.

Paul:
The testing is coming up. The basketball game is on a Wednesday, whatever we had going on, but I started each email off with a personal story. Something that had happened in my family, my kids were much younger than... I was a middle school principal. I had two kids at middle school age. So I would tell stories of what happened, how we interacted, what happened over the weekend. And people absolutely loved that. There were people who couldn't wait to get my emails every Sunday night, just to read the latest, what happened to Paul and his family. And that was pretty cool because I was their principal and they felt like they knew me personally and they didn't. We got a thousand parents. You can't know them all personally, but they felt connected to me. And that led to the blog being done a few years later, which led to the book.

Bryan:
Yeah. People relate to other people that they can recognize themselves in stories.

Paul:
Yeah, definitely.

Bryan:
I'm curious. Have you read Erma Bombeck?

Paul:
Oh yeah. I used to read her all the time. I know she's passed away, but she had a lot of good information, always under the cover of humor. But if you read between the lines, she had very good sound information.

Bryan:
So I read a lot of her during the summer and I though she was really good, but I guess some of the advice in what Erma has in her books, it's probably a little bit dated now. So how do you approach giving advice about parenting when that advice has changed or when things have moved on?

Paul:
Yeah. Well, the biggest changes over the years has been with technology and social media. Even when my kids were little, I didn't have to worry about Facebook or Twitter or all this other nonsense going on out there that kids get wrapped up in fairly early. Almost every kid has a smartphone now, for example, and they could get a text at two in the morning from some fool who's being inappropriate with them. Well I didn't have to worry about that when my kids were little, but now you do. And so you have to have rules and parameters in place within your home to safeguard your kids against this. And if you don't, bad things are going to happen and you might not even know about it. So I always tell parents to stay vigilant, stay on top of things. Don't leave anything to chance pay attention at all times.

Bryan:
Yeah. And I agree with you with the technology piece. I have three kids. I was complaining about one of them being on their phone a lot to my parents. They said that they didn't have that problem when we were kids.

Paul:
And I even got to the point as my kids got a little bit older, I bought a device or downloaded some software that the computer would shut the internet off at a particular time. I think I had it set for 9:00 PM. They couldn't sneak in the computer room at midnight and do whatever they were going to do. At nine o'clock it was going off. Now, if they had work to do after 9:00 PM, which they sometimes did, they'd have to come in and get me. I'd have to turn it back on. And then when they were done, they let me know and I'd turn it back off. But that's what I mean about the safeguards. If you just leave everything wide open, because the internet right now is kind of, sort of wide open. You can find anything you want and really bad stuff is out there. And you don't want your kids exposed to that. So if you don't keep them away from that, they'll find it one way or the other.

Bryan:
Maybe that's something I should write about more in the boom. So Paul I think we've already covered the podcast and the radio show. Is there anywhere else you'd like listeners to check out your work?

Paul:
No, that's basically it. You can find me a couple of places. I mentioned the radio station impactradiousa.com. You can check out my personal page paulwreeves.com, paulwreeves.com. And that gives you some more information on my background as a principal, as a musician, as a writer, as a radio host, it's all there.

Bryan:
It's very nice to talk to you today.

Paul:
Thank you, Bryan. You too. I enjoyed it. Very good questions and a very good job today. I appreciate it.

Bryan:
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