“I really need a new swimming suit,” she said as we walked down the aisle of a local department store. I could believe it, considering I couldn’t remember the last time I had bought my pre-teen daughter a swimming suit. She has, after all, really changed a lot in the last couple of years. As we headed to the swimwear, she said, “I’d really like one that comes with shorts or a skirt... like the ones I used to get. Those are the most comfortable.” I told her I wasn’t sure that suits in her age range came with a skirt or shorts anymore. As I perused racks of one-piece swimsuits and tankinis, she went to a rack across the way and pulled out a blue and white floral... old.lady.suit. It was straight up like what I would wear to cover up stretch marks and cellulite. I said, “I doubt they will have that in your size, honey.” She grabbed the only size small they had, and I quickly started handing her a few others that looked a bit more her age and went toward the tankinis. She said, “I don’t want a tankini. I want a one piece. Tankini tops float up.” Message.received. She went into the dressing room and came out a few minutes later smiling shyly her approval of and wearing The Suit... the one I had hoped she wouldn’t pick. I don’t know why I felt like that. So as we drove home I tried to wrack my brain. “Why would I have a problem with my daughter picking a modest, pretty swimming suit?” One reason: I was afraid people would think I made her pick it... because we are Christian... because we homeschool.
Make no mistake, everyone is judged and everyone judges. I’ve just felt and read a lot of homeschool judging lately. We have one TV with Netflix at our house. We don’t and never have watched the Duggars - not a single episode, but we know they exist, and we know their basic premise. We also have more children than average. We are Christians. We homeschool. So many people would lump us in a “category” with them. I saw a blog that a few friends had shared about a recent Duggar scandal. The article said that the reason one of their adolescent sons had sexually abused some family members and friends’ children was attributable to many reasons - all of them having to do with their Christian faith and their homeschooling (because, we all know that sexual abuse doesn’t happen outside of the Christian homeschooling community?). The blog reasoned that home schooling should not be allowed, because home schooled children don’t have any “safe adults” to talk to outside of their own families like they would have if they were in any other school. (Never mind that those same children also wouldn’t be exposed to as many “unsafe adults” being home schooled either - just by virtue of the fact that they are not around as many children or adults not known to them - for better or worse). Another reason this blogger announced that homeschooling was bad was that home schoolers did not participate in comprehensive sex education (which, of course, prevents children, adolescents, and adults from making bad decisions about sex and prevents them all from committing sex crimes). The sheer amount of judging that took place in that article - even assuming that I’m not telling my children about sex - was stomach-turning.
My 11 and 14 year old daughters would tell you that we have and do discuss sex, sex trafficking, sexual assault, pornography, birth control, abortion, and just about anything else that they are likely to encounter in the world outside our home or see on TV or movies inside our home. They would also tell you that, since they were young, we talked about good touch/bad touch, how babies are conceived and born, and whatever other age-appropriate sexuality information they should have. These conversations are not shrouded in secrecy or mystery. They are not embarrassing or shocking. They are just part of life on this planet. Many parents of desk schoolers and home schoolers should and DO talk to their children about these things when they feel the time is appropriate. We feel like it’s part of our responsibility in protecting and, yes, even empowering our children to respect and protect the hearts, bodies, and minds of themselves and others in a world where people do bad things. These conversations haven’t always been easy ones to start, and I will be honest. If I knew that someone at school or part of a community education program was going to be talking about these things to my kids as part of a curriculum of some type, I would feel relieved in that I could trust that they would get that information from someone else. I probably wouldn’t feel as much pressure to talk to them about these issues.
The night my daughter picked out The Suit, I realized something... I’m glad that she had the opportunity to pick out something to wear that made her feel comfortable being her very tomboy self without fear of what other girls her age would think and say to and about her choice of swimwear. She’s the one doing the splits in the air off the diving board. She’s the one wearing big ol’ goggles, practicing dives, playing water sports, and walking on her hands to find change at the bottom of our pool. She feels that, with a suit that offers more coverage, she can better do those things without worrying about body parts falling out or going askew. She feels, dare I say, empowered by her choice of practical, modest swimwear, and that, my friends, is something of which I am proud. I know many girls - from all different schooling situations - who dress modestly and practically because it makes them feel good about themselves. This situation also made me think: I feel that the basic two ways of dressing that are left to us females both have the ability to give us “power” - we have power over men, just by virtue of being female after all. Dressing in clothes to display and exploit our bodies gives us the power to make more men look at and notice us. Dressing to respect our bodies gives us the power to not merely be reduced to the size of our dresses and of certain body parts. It gives us the ability to have deeper conversations, to offer input, to be respected, to be valued, to be truly heard for what we have to say... not for what we have to offer in a physical sense. It’s taken me awhile to figure all this out, you see. When I was the age my older daughters are, I just didn’t think about these things.
The second article I read - which was just last night - had to do with a parental rights issue - that of a mom who was led away from her child’s school in ankle cuffs because her child had too many unexcused school absences. One of the most liked comments said, “...Kids should be forced to attend mandatory public schooling so that they will learn to get up at a certain time, go to bed at a certain time, eat healthy foods, wait in lines patiently, be obedient to and respect bosses, keep a stringent schedule, socialize, and work hard. They will never learn those vital skills at home, because parents who choose to home school are lazy, undisciplined idiots who don’t want to follow a schedule and are too selfish to get their kids to school on time.” Wow. I don’t even know where to start. Now, this is hardly the first time I’ve heard criticisms of home schools. Everything from “home schoolers don’t appreciate education” to “home schoolers aren’t aware of cultural diversity” to “home schooled kids just aren’t tough enough to handle real world education” have been leveled at me - and, of course, the “anti-social” myth as well. These are all just laughable... ask any adult or child who’s spent any time with our children, and they’ll tell you that, even the ones with shyer personalities are very verbally engaging with all ages/races/genders of other humanoids.
However, here were some newer (to me) criticisms. Here’s what I wanted to say:
Mozart, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Robert Frost’s parents might well have disagreed with your assessment of the method by which they were educated. So might the parents of these remarkable women: Agatha Christie, Florence Nightingale, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Venus & Serena Williams, and Condoleeza Rice. These women didn’t have their rights trampled by not having state-sanctioned “safe adults” or a lack of state-written “comprehensive sex education”. Yet somehow they grew to become, not only good citizens, but some of the most confident and amazing and influential humans of their times. They were/are outstanding athletes, health care professionals, authoresses, Pulitzer Prize winners, human rights advocates, and diplomats.
Mozart, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Robert Frost’s parents might well have disagreed with your assessment of the method by which they were educated. So might the parents of these remarkable women: Agatha Christie, Florence Nightingale, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Venus & Serena Williams, and Condoleeza Rice. These women didn’t have their rights trampled by not having state-sanctioned “safe adults” or a lack of state-written “comprehensive sex education”. Yet somehow they grew to become, not only good citizens, but some of the most confident and amazing and influential humans of their times. They were/are outstanding athletes, health care professionals, authoresses, Pulitzer Prize winners, human rights advocates, and diplomats.
My almost 19 year old son has wanted to serve his country in the military since - pretty much since he could walk and talk. That has always been what he has had in mind to do, and we fully support him in that. I didn’t make him wait in line for lunch, but he somehow learned how to wait in lines quite well. I didn’t take him to a school building every day, but he still manages to wake up and attend college classes and work on time. I let him do homework in his pajamas; yet he somehow manages to wear appropriate clothing in public. I rarely tested him. Yet, he always performed in the 90+ percentile for private schooled children when given a once per year standardized test. My home-educated son just got one of the highest scores our local Marines recruiter had ever seen on an ASVAB test.
Hear me. There are plenty of examples of people who were state-educated who are brilliant and successful, but no one has accused them of being lazy, backward, anti-social, and undisciplined. Any kind of school can produce children who are lazy, backward, anti-social, and undisciplined. Are there desk-schooled children who are bright, driven, and energetic? YES! I’m happy to know many friends and family members whose children are just that. They thrive in the desk-school environment. Are there home schooled children who are lazy, ignorant, and irresponsible? Yes! It is primarily the positive involvement of the parent(s)/family unit, that gives children their strength, their belief-system, their confidence, and their respect for the lives, bodies, and property of others. Conversely, it is the negative or absent influence of the parent(s) of other children that gives their children rebelliousness, anger, laziness, lack of self-control, and lack of respect for the lives, bodies, and property of others.
I guess I’ve been discouraged at the fact that these news stories put all home schoolers (especially Christian ones) in a “freak” category... to the point where people are saying that our rights to school children in any way but by the state should be illegal. The Duggar story is tragic for everyone involved - including the 14 year old boy who abused family members. When I worked for the state police, we had a crime in which an adolescent boy was sexually molesting and abusing children on one of the local school busses. Not long after, we handled another case of older children taking younger ones to a secluded place on the playground to abuse them. Those boys could very well have never served a day in any kind of treatment, and I can almost guarantee that they are out walking around today. No one will ever know, because juvenile court documents are protected and sealed for a reason - because children are felt to be somewhat salvageable if their past is not used by their community to define them. That’s what people do. We want to put others in defining categories, because it makes us feel more safe and more in control of the world around us if we can put everyone else neatly into a box and label it. I say that to say that sexual abuse is a human problem that crosses ages, genders, and cultures. I don’t know why it surprises anyone that Christians sin just as much as everyone else. We all have our ugly “demons” that we face on a daily basis. Christians just have a different source of help (if we ask for it) and forgiveness (full and free). Those abuse cases years ago did not make up my mind that all kids who go to desk schools are abused and/or abusive. They did not make me feel that I should lash out at all parents who send their kids to school. They did not make me decide to home school. They just made me sad for the victims and for the perpetrators.
Freedom and Diversity are the rallying cries in our country today, but when I see people posting things that speak favorably of taking away freedoms from their neighbors or forcing a certain type of desk schooling that has no choice but to use cookie cutter style education (because of the sheer numbers of children being educated), we are not encouraging freedom or diversity. In schools where the lunch program has been changed as part of the federal government’s push to make kids eat healthy, there are now school cafeterias where a 6 foot 3, 200 pound 18 year old football player’s lunch is the exact same in portions and caloric intake as the 5 foot 1, 100 pound 15 year old sedentary kid next to him. This all because some of their classmates are obese. Communities and school boards used to have all of the power to choose what was and wasn’t taught in their local schools. They were able to offer a larger variety of classes, sports, and enrichment. Now, with the powerful forces behind Common Core, even curriculum will be the same across our mandatory state education country.
We used to live in a place where the mentality toward basic rights like free speech, free religion, and the right of parents to raise their child as they see fit was, “I may not agree with what you do or how you do it, but I will defend to the death your right to do it. I’ll never ask you to agree with home schooling or with the way we teach our kids. I’ll never ask you to try it yourself. I’ll never judge you for your educational choices. In fact, I’ll always encourage you to make the education choices that are right for your family right now - which is what we do each year - evaluate where we are and where we’re hoping to go with education and decide whether or not to keep them home or send them to a desk school. All I ask is that you remember, as I do, that we’re all just trying to do the best we can for our children - failing just as often as not, and that judging people based on the behavior of a certain few others you’ve placed in the same category in your mind is never going to be right, nor is it ever going to bring freedom and/or diversity.
