All Under One Roof: Why We Started Kinjiro Learning

I should start at the beginning — not with our kids, but with how Natalie and I found each other.

We met at a church in beautiful, sunny California, the same one both our mothers attended. What drew us together at first was something simple: we're both Salvadorian. Our parents emigrated from El Salvador, and as the children of immigrants, we understood each other in a way that's hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.

Our families carried a lot. They survived the Salvadorian civil war and everything that came with it — the fear, the loss, the trauma. When they came to the United States, they didn't start from scratch; they started from somewhere below it. My mother arrived when she was just sixteen, and that's where she met my father. Our parents worked relentlessly to build a life here, and the hard truth about that kind of work is that we didn't see them much. They were busy surviving.

That shared background made Natalie and me fast friends. But the more we talked, the more we realized our stories weren't just similar — they were almost identical.

Almost the same story

Our family structures mirrored each other in a way that honestly stunned us. Both of our fathers had multiple families — my dad has three, with three different women. Both of our mothers had four children: the first three with our fathers, and a fourth later, after they married our stepfathers and built a more stable home. In both of our families, you can see the difference between how the first three of us grew up and how the youngest one did. Natalie and I had lived parallel lives without ever knowing it. We were blown away.

The pain that shaped me

I won't pretend that growing up like that didn't leave a mark. When you don't see your parents — when you're more or less raising yourself — you feel it. There's a particular kind of pain in being left to figure life out alone, and a particular kind of trouble you find when no one is there to guide you.

But that pain did something in me. Even as a kid, it made one thing absolutely clear: I wanted all my children under one roof. I wanted to be there. I wanted to raise them myself and help them become everything they could be.

I'll be honest — for a long time, I was headed the wrong way. The influences around me were the streets and gang members, people who weren't leading me anywhere good. What changed my life was being put into a Christian school. It pulled me out of my environment and surrounded me with different values and real mentors — people who showed me another way to live. I give God the credit for that. It changed my perspective completely. Instead of becoming a man who repeats his father's pattern, I became a man who wants to nurture one family — mine — and show up for every one of my kids.

The change I want to see

These days, the best part of my life is simple. I get to see my kids every single day. I hug them, kiss them, play with them, and just be with them. After everything, that ordinary, everyday presence is the thing I'm most proud of and most grateful for. I want to be the change I hope to see in the world — and for me, it starts at home.

That's why Natalie and I started Kinjiro Learning.

We're not here because we think we're amazing parents — we don't, and we're not. We're here because we're trying our best, learning as we go, and gathering the resources and ideas that have genuinely helped our family. This website is simply us sharing that out loud: what we're learning about raising our children with intention, in the hope that it helps yours too.

Thanks for being here. We're glad you found the nest.

— Samuel