Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Sage Lynn” is the pseudonym chosen by the author.
I absolutely love being a big sister. In the darkest times of my life, thinking of my siblings kept me going. I would do anything in the world for them, and they know it.
However, my relationship with my siblings is also complicated.
When, as a kid, I expressed concern that I didn’t get to hang out with kids my own age and wouldn’t know how to do that when I went to college, my mom quickly told me that “if you can get along with your siblings, you can get along with anyone.” Naively believing this, I struggled with the guilt of wishing I had perfect, loving relationships with my siblings (“Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends,” anyone?) and the reality that we just didn’t get along all the time, even though we loved each other fiercely.
As the oldest of eight siblings—a small family by the standards of the church I grew up in—I grew up with mega responsibility. Early on, I learned that my role was to take care of younger siblings. I babysat, cooked, sewed, cleaned, taught, and filled dozens of other parental roles. My younger siblings would accidentally call me mom, something that landed me in the middle of a fury storm as my mom raged at me for usurping her place before retreating back to her room to try to deal with the depression she refused to seek help for. I was proud that I could run the household.
Luckily, schoolwork was incredibly easy for me (even though the material was comparable to a standard traditional school education), so I managed to get a great education even though my time was full with chores and housework. I would often get installed in the kitchen, doing schoolwork at the table while I watched several of the youngest children so my mom could teach the middle ones. From the age of seven, I took on making breakfast and lunch every day—by the time I was nine, I was making dinner as well. I have a knack for involving kids in whatever activity I happened to be doing, something that was honed in my years at home. Some of my happiest sibling memories involve making meals in the kitchen. My mom never had much patience with them, but I loved nothing better than to find something for them to do and have some company while I worked.
Our bond was not always nurtured under such happy circumstances, though.
My mom had anger issues and could flare up at short notice. My dad’s way of dealing with it was to ignore it, leaving for work early and coming home late. We had an unspoken rule of covering for each other as much as we could. Any animosity we felt was laid aside in the event of an anger outburst.
Walking on eggshells is the best way to describe what our life felt like.
When my mom was fine, our normal sibling arguments and jealousies sprang up. We loved each other, and we also fought; this was when life felt the most normal. When my mom was angry, though, we worked like a well-oiled machine. Each older child took a younger one under their wing, and even the babies seemed to realize they needed to be quiet and keep sweet. We came to look forward to when my mom would leave the house for hours or days on end—although we never knew if she was ok or not, we were able to have fun. We didn’t have to worry that any laughter would be shushed and any argument would incur violent punishment. We’d clean the house, make meals, and care for our younger siblings under and unspoken agreement that delegated certain jobs to each of us. It worked, and it provided the most security and schedule we ever had.
Sure, we were acting more like adults than kids, but we also got to tease each other and come up with goofy rituals that made the chores seem easier. For example, my next older siblings and I often cleaned up dinner together. We split the jobs into three main parts and each took one. While we cleaned, we’d tell jokes, sing songs, have arm wrestling matches, and talk about our days. When my mom was home, however, we were expected to do our work in silence.
It was easier with my younger siblings. I left home for college out of state when they were still fairly young. While it tore my heart apart to leave them, since I was their surrogate mom, it was the best thing for me and them. I still have good relationships with them—I feel more like I’m their aunt than their big sister. When I’m at home, we will do activities, go out to eat, and have fun. My parents have loosened up some with them, and I am no longer afraid of my parents, so things go much better. Even though I still have a lot of anxiety about leaving them and feel more responsibility than most older siblings probably do, I know that I am no longer responsible for them.
I also know that I don’t have to get along with any of my siblings perfectly.
In fact, socialization is an entirely different thing altogether. My older siblings still believe a great deal of the fundamentalist teachings we grew up with, but they are also all still living at home. When I’m at home, I walk the fine line of not disagreeing with my parents’ worldview, principles, and positions in front of my siblings while simultaneously believing that their attitudes are often dangerous and harmful. If I want to continue to interact with my siblings, I have to keep up this balancing act. At the same time, as my siblings get older, I hope that they see me as a safe person who will accept them for whoever they are and whatever they believe.
Gradually, perhaps, they will see that the girls have other options than being wives and mothers, although that is perfectly fine if that is what they truly want. They may see that women and men are inherently equal, and that neither needs to conform to traditional expectations of gender from any source.
I will always love being a big sister. For most of my life, though, I did not know what being a sister meant.
Today, I am truly a sister, not a parent. And I love it.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Asenath” is a pseudonym.
Since my siblings were my main source of “friends” during my K-12 homeschool experience, I didn’t learn much about how to choose friends or how to maintain a friendship. Maintaining a relationship with a sibling who lives with you 24/7 and cannot leave is very different from maintaining a friendship with someone whom you may have to make an effort to get together or stay in touch with and who can leave if they don’t like the way you are treating them. Also, some friendships are temporary and in my adult life I have tended to be far more loyal to friends than they have been to me and far more crushed by losing friends because I didn’t learn at a younger age that it can be normal to move on from certain friendships.
I have spent a great deal of my adult life being very lonely because I expected friends to come to me and didn’t take responsibility for developing my social life and doing the work of leaving my house and meeting new people and developing friendships. At 31 yrs. old, I am finally realizing that there is not a shortage of friends and that I can go out and make and choose friends rather than grasping at the few people I already know, hoping they won’t leave me.
Since I didn’t have peers in my homeschool experience, I went through my childhood constantly comparing myself to my sister who was two years older than me.
She and I were often grouped together for classes like history and science, and I would be working one to two grade levels above the normal grade for my age, so that my sister and I could work together. I was in college before I finally realized that I was in fact smart. I had pretty much concluded that I was dumb because my sister had usually out-performed me, and I had never taken into account the advantage she had in being two whole developmental years older than me.
My next sister, who is two years younger than me, is extremely smart. She is a lightning fast reader and also talented at math. While I was trying to keep up with my older sister, I was also very motivated to stay ahead of my younger sister, and I would get very discouraged whenever she out-performed me.
There was a strong sense of sibling hierarchy in my family, which I am still coming to terms with.
When my older sister left for college, I was sixteen. Losing her was devastating to me, and I went into a depression in which I felt like I was walking through a dark mist and might fall off a cliff at any moment. I didn’t know how to live without a big sister because my entire strategy for living was based around watching her and imitating her successes while avoiding her mistakes. When I turned eighteen, I didn’t go to college because I was still so depressed about losing my sister that I thought I would surely die if I left the rest of my family. I didn’t really have any plans for after high school, so I spent two years in limbo, staying at home and helping my mother before I finally went out and found a job.
I have three younger sisters and seven younger brothers, and I felt pressured to provide parenting for them from a very young age. I was also spanked into compliance at a very young age, so I never resisted and in fact actively participated in trying to please my parents by parenting my younger siblings. I also spanked some of my younger siblings, which is the biggest regret I have about my whole life. Today, I don’t believe in spanking. No one has the right to hit me and no one ever did. I do believe that there are peaceful and non-violent ways to set and maintain appropriate limits for children and to teach children how to behave and make good moral decisions.
As an adult, I am still in the beginning stages of developing separate relationships with each of my siblings. However, I am not close to most of my siblings because I am afraid to let them know who I am today and the ways in which my beliefs differ from those I grew up with. I have also really struggled with being able to interact with my siblings while resisting any pressure I still feel to parent them. It helps me to remember that each of my siblings is smart, capable, able-bodied and of sound mind. If they need help, they can identify what help they need or want from me and ask for it directly.
Their happiness does not depend on me.
I am not loving them (or myself) when I act as though I think it does.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Salome” is a pseudonym.
Dear Homeschoolers Anonymous,
First, thank you so much for giving us a voice. It’s so important that we speak — and are heard. Just telling our stories has value, and you’ve done a phenomenal job. We are watching. We are listening. We are learning. And we are healing.
I’ve tossed around the idea of telling you my story for some time now — but I couldn’t figure out how, and I’m such a goddamn private person that writing about my childhood is like prying my teeth out with a crowbar. I’m finally writing because I don’t often get the chance to brag safely about my brother, and I think it’d be foolish not to take the chance.
We’re all home for the holidays, and I find myself struggling to reconcile the emotional manipulation, patriarchal ideas (which BTW have completely screwed my life up — I can’t even get married, because I can’t seem to shake my patriarchal conditioning — so thank you for speaking up about patriarchalism too), and sometimes simple cruelty that I remember as a kid and the relatively stable family who jokes around (at my father’s expense — which would have been heresy when I was a kid), allows my teenage sister to wear normal clothes, and practically force-feeds me some weird herbal goop my mother concocted to soothe my raw throat.
IDK what changed.
I can’t forget all of the horrible things they said and did (I’m still keeping my recent decision that I don’t think I can be a Christian anymore, as well as the surrounding circumstances, from them, just in case). I can’t forget the constant friction that comes from being the oldest child in a cookie-cutter family whose inner rot was concealed beneath our conditioned responses. We were punished when we made our parents look bad, not when we actually did bad things. The incongruity was hardest on me — and I tried hardest to conform for awhile, until I set out on a campaign to break my father’s heart when I got into high school.
That made me target #1.
My brother bucked their rules from a very early age. Let’s be clear: he is objectively a good man, and was a good kid then. No drugs, no sex, no porn (that I know of… Mom did put a lock on the computer pretty inexplicably once, and gave me the password with instructions not to give it to my brother, so I guess it’s possible). Both my brother and I developed an appreciation for heavy metal (the raw honesty speaks to me), and have anger issues (I have a host of other emotional issues, but I haven’t talked to him about it, so I don’t know if he shares any more of them), but considering what we went through, I think we’re justified. Mom was convinced he was a terrible person, not a Christian, morally lax – the list goes on.
I apologize for the long and garbled introduction.
The point I was leading up to was this: my brother and I fought like the world was gonna end if the other person got their way, but we also stuck together.
We warned each other in hushed tones when our mother was in a particularly vicious mood, and helped each other skulk around outside her sight. We spent long hours outside, because she was likely to forget us if we were out there, but in the times that she did remember us and screamed our names in that tone of voice that said we were in for a rough day, we gave each other looks of pity as we walked back to meet our fate. We didn’t tattle on each other. In the times that the emotional abuse turned into physical abuse, after my brother got bigger and stronger than both my parents, he stepped in.
When our little sister came along, we made an unspoken pact to protect her too.
I’m a little jealous of her sometimes, honestly. She missed the worst of it, and we shielded her from much of the rest. She joined me in my campaign to break Dad’s heart — and succeeded to a degree I could not. Our joint efforts may have something to do with the change in my family, actually. I hope so. That call to protect my siblings has affected me hugely — I still find myself staying in dangerous situations just to protect the people who are still too naive to protect themselves.
Sacrificing my safety for theirs comes naturally. I’ve always done it.
One incident is firmly lodged in my mind. My parents had decided that it was a good day to sit me down and lecture me (more like screaming cherry-picked Bible verses at me and telling me I was worthless) — for hours (I don’t remember just how long. It may have been anywhere from 2-4 hours). It had something to do with my campaign, although it quickly spread to include anything and everything my mom could think of, whether it was true or not.
Think Communist China Cultural Revolution-era denunciation meetings.
I was an emotional wreck, because I had been trying to ease into a closer relationship, which meant that my normal policy of emotional numbness was not in effect. I was crying, they were screaming, and then my brother swooped in to my rescue. He said, “Stop. Just stop. Can’t you see what you’re doing to her? Stop.” When they turned their ire on him, he explained further — he was intervening because he loved me. I didn’t stick around much longer — he had given me an out, and I spent the rest of the day outside (this time beyond earshot). That day remains both one of my best memories and worst memories — it was one of the only times I can remember my stereotypically strong and silent brother telling me he loves me without any coaxing.
I’ll never forget that.
I’m sure there’s more I could say, but sifting through all of these memories, trying to remain true to the story, while leaving out the shit I’m not ready to deal with, is kind of exhausting and painful. I feel bad criticizing the people who are showering me with love and gifts, but I’ve got to deal with at least some of the memories rattling around in my mind.
Thank you for listening. That’s more than can be said about most.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Mahalath” is a pseudonym.
I have one precious little sister. Let’s call her Susannah.
When I was nine, I decided I’d had enough of my parent’s rules, belittling, and humiliations. It was time for a rebellion. In my childish ignorance, I fashioned a sword and shield out of paper to fight them. My isolated little brain convinced me that these were effective weapons. At nine years old, I had no real concept of reality because I’d never seen it.
My little sister Susannah came along and saw what I was doing. Seven at the time, she wanted to help her older sister out. So I made her her own sword and shield, coloring with red markers along the edges of the blade. “That’s blood. So they’ll be afraid of us,” I explained. She nodded solemnly.
Our eight o’clock bedtime was deemed the perfect time for our small coup. When summoned upstairs for our mandated bedtime prayers, we charged up to our bedroom with weaponry at hand. Our parents watched us approach with a sort of bored amusement. But I meant business, and I said so: “This is a revolution! You have to do what we say or we’ll kill you!” Pointing my flimsy sword at their noses, I gave them fearsome glares.
My dear, darling little sister was unfazed by all of this. She ran up to our mother and sat in her lap. “See, Mommy! I have a sword! See all of the blood!”
“Susannah,” I shrieked, “get back here! We’re rebelling!”
Fortunately for us, our parents saw this display as a cute little historical reenactment and laughed it off and put us to bed. Indeed, as I look back on the incident, I find it sort of funny. But I was serious at the time. I was deadly serious.
My sister Susannah was sometimes my greatest enemy, sometimes my only friend.
At times we helped each other survive the isolating, emotionally abusive environment that was our home. Yet at other times we turned on each other, every girl for herself, and used the other as a tool to gain at least a little sanity. But she will always be my sister, and I will always love her.
I whispered her stories at night that I made up myself to help her fall asleep. We created word games and did shadow puppets, always listening for the footsteps at the door so we could duck under the covers and pretend we were asleep.
When our parents demanded confessions for real or imagined offenses, we’d whisper in our room again, this time to decide who would take the fall. Often I would bear the burden as the oldest, but both of us sacrificed months of television and rare social events so that the other would walk free.
When my parents would fight, my sister Susannah would run to me. She would sob and I would rub her back. I’d tell her it was all okay when it all was horribly wrong. When they came with their fake apologies and forced grins, I’d wrap my arms around her and have to be pried off.
I taught her how to sneak food from the fridge when we were hungry and steal answer keys when our mother refused to give us help with our schoolwork. We sneak-watched forbidden TV shows and cracked computer passwords to search the internet. When I got a job and was denied access to my money, I figured out a way to sneak money out. I’d ride to the gas station just outside our subdivision on my bike when my parents were at work and buy sweets. We’d eat them in secret and hide the wrappers. I’d also visit the library box in the next subdivision over and obtain precious books. Books that didn’t have the swear words whited out, books with magic, books with African American protagonists. We’d devour them eagerly and then hide them in a secret drawer.
It wasn’t always smiles and games, however. It was true that we knew each other’s secrets, but they were often used as blackmail material in our spats. That I had read Harry Potter in secret, Susannah had a crush, I was cheating my way through French and she through science: these were often whispered in each other’s ears to get our way. But we never told these secrets, because we knew if one of us let a precious secret out, our own would be forfeit.
It was an endless stalemate.
We were both very good at manipulation. I would threaten her dolls if she didn’t let me copy off her history, she would call me names and poisonous insults for a turn at the forbidden cable show while I kept watch. I remember both of us hitting, damaging possessions, and stealing money from each other at ages when we should have known better. She went through a phase in her teen years where she enjoyed biting me. Later she switched to having me lie down and jumping on my back. I yelled at her, “forgot” to include her in hidden pleasures, and gave her the wrong answers for geography on purpose.
Today we are on good terms. I love her, and have come to a greater knowledge of this since moving across the country for college (and to get away from home). She, in turn, loves me in a sort of distant way. I fear a lot of the good feelings she has toward me are due to the presents I send in copious amounts and the valuable cultural information I pass on. (I can hardly blame her. I had that survival mindset, too!) But she does love me for more than that. I know it.
Many times at night I lie awake and worry. Is she okay? What does she do when our parents are fighting? Does she remember to change the channel to where it previously was before our parents return home? Can she make it through her science course? Will she even get out of there (I barely managed, and it was a huge fight.) ? Someday, will I have to rescue her?
Someday, my dear Susannah will be free. Whether she breaks out on her own or not, she’ll get to taste the real world, and I’m excited for that day. I’ll do whatever it takes to help her. I’m not going to wave paper swords around, but I will let her live with me if she wants, help her find a job, teach her how to make it in the world.
Susannah, if you ever read manage to read this, take heart. It gets better.
Eleanor Skelton blogs at eleanorskelton.com, is the news editor of the UCCS student newspaper, and is majoring in English and Chemistry.
“Dad, can I please have two friends from church over for a tea party sometime this month? Pretty please?”
No. No I could not, because:
– I hadn’t been doing enough housework or schoolwork.
– The house is Dad’s castle, and he doesn’t like having people over.
– I shouldn’t need friends, because my parents gave me two siblings.
Sometime in first or second grade, my A Beka penmanship book had a writing assignment called “My Best Friend.” I wrote about Abby, a girl a few months older than me whose dad was one of my dad’s colleagues. Someone I’d played with about four or five times, once or twice a year.
My cousin Bethany, five months younger, was another “best friend.” We only saw each other one afternoon out of the year at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving.
I formed deep attachments in an hour timespan. I once told the neighbor’s granddaughter we would be best friends forever after a summer evening in the front yard. She said, “Until I move to Houston.”
I was an only child until I was nearly seven years old. Then my little sister was born. My dad bought me lemonade in the hospital cafeteria and cried, telling me he was so happy I wouldn’t be alone if something happened to him and my mom.
She was cute, but she cried a lot and I couldn’t do much more than soothe and bottlefeed her until she was two.
My little brother was born when I was about eleven, so I also helped mother him.
You don’t need friends, you have your little brother and sister.
You should care more about your family than friends. Friends are temporary, family will always be here.
My parents have barely allowed communication with my siblings since I moved out two years ago. I’m told this is their choice, out of their own free will.
My sister left home for Bob Jones University this fall, but she barely speaks to me. She says she can’t associate with me, because my life choices demonstrate that I’ve turned my back on God.
She says I don’t keep in touch, so I call once a week or so and leave a voicemail so she knows I’m here when she’s ready.
You and your sister will always have each other.
Until I go to college and decide Dad is overprotective, until I decide to move out and be independent.
Until I believed that the church was outside these walls.
If my family is always there, where are they now?
After moving out, I called two roommates my sisters, because they escaped the fundamentalist box, too. Our souls know one another, and I love them.
But my heart still has two holes. My brother and my sister.
They were the only close friends I knew over my first 23 years. I found friendship among my peers beyond acquaintance after leaving.
Murray Bowen’s theories on differentiation of self and emotional cut-offs provide an excellent lens for viewing the complex relationships that exist between family members who were raised in quiverfull and Christian patriarchal families. In such situations, family roles are artificially skewed by religious influence and the necessity for sibling-parenting due to sheer numbers in the family.
Bowen’s theory on differentiation of self describes how people are inherently dependent on each other. At the same time, each individual needs to balance how much to conform to a group for acceptance (a universal need) and to what extent to be emotionally independent in order to deal with unavoidable conflict without having to take sides or dissolve emotionally. (You can read more about Bowen’s theory here.)
Bowen’s theory of emotional cutoff describes how sometimes people with complex relationships in their families may choose to create distance from family members or declare a permanent separation from them. The theory explains that this is not always a good solution because there are patterns of relationships that are formed in childhood that dictate how the individual relates to new people in life, because they may look to new people to fill emotional roles that are inappropriate to the relationship.
I left my quiverfull family when I was 17. I was the oldest daughter (second child) of nine. For a while I remained in contact with many of the people who contributed to the safety of the patriarchal environment, including my father and leaders of the church he attended.
Acceptance in a group is a universal need, but a problem arises when the cost is too great.
I had not really found a new group yet at this point, but the cost of acceptance in the former group was to return home and submit to my father. That was not an option for me.
*****
Conflict happens, it is unavoidable in order to take part in social connections. By conflict I do not mean drama or arguments. However, not everyone will agree with everyone else. Thus there needs to be a way of dealing with this between friends or loved ones without meltdowns and emotional cut-offs, simply because instituting an emotional cut-off when the going gets rough is not a sustainable method of remaining in social connections. Even if you were surrounded by people who were willing and able to float in and out of contact on a whim related to an emotional incident, at some point a complete lack of trust will be reached and one side will not be willing to reconnect.
If a person flees from painful social and family connections to others, they will come to new relationships with a greater emotional need than is typical in a friendship. They may find others who are also looking to fill that greater emotional need in themselves, which is how co-dependent relationships are formed. This is also not a good solution because co-dependence will eventually harm someone, whether one side moves to a new co-dependent relationship and drops the other, or if they sink too far into their emotional relationship to the detriment of their own mental health.
The goal of differentiation is to avoid emotional cut-off but also stay away from inappropriate emotional connection while remaining in acceptance in a group.
For me when I left the patriarchal system, I had to find a new social group to obtain acceptance from, while learning how to avoid the pitfall of an inappropriate emotional connection. Those inappropriate connections did take place, but eventually I learned what was happening and how to avoid it.
Differentiation means being able to be a whole person in spite of what is going on for other people or what negative stimulus is experienced.
There is a saying that other people are not responsible for how you feel. This does not mean that people can treat each other poorly by any means, and if they are involved in a social contract that states that they will treat each other well, they are bound by that contract. Triggers and negative stimulus will happen all the time in life; it is impossible to exist in a safe vacuum without these. The bottom line though, is that you are responsible for how a trigger makes you react. Everyone is at a different place, and there cannot be an expectation that everyone will be able to take responsibility all the time. Self-awareness and growth takes time, and people deserve the help that is required to get there.
When I was working on my social work degree, I provided counseling to women who had experienced domestic violence. This was obviously a very triggering experience for me, but I was working with two very wise women who suggested that rather than hide from what was triggering me, I actively face those triggers and deconstruct them. This means that rather than dissolve emotionally when I heard a sad situation, I perform my job in that room and help the survivor process what had happened, and then later when I became sad about it, acknowledge why I was feeling sad, that it was because something happened to them and I could relate to it, instead of just feeling sad and then taking that sadness into other relationships.
There are a very large number of intricate relationships in my family. Some of us do not talk at all. Some of the siblings talk rarely. I have made it clear to a few of my siblings that if they have something that they would like to talk about, they can text me and let me know what they would like to discuss and we can do that, but that I will not take surprise phone calls from them. Interestingly, the siblings I have that arrangement with do not text and let me know when they want to discuss something. They try to call and I let it go to voicemail, and they do not leave voicemails. They just try again and again, and I usually send a text asking what is going on, and get no response.
I have one sibling I get along very well with. We do not share exactly the same views on everything, but we certainly respect each other’s right to hold different views. We spend time together but respect each other’s space. We have fun times but only discuss the past when we both agree to do so. I have another sibling who has quite a different lifestyle than I do, but we still get along. We discuss what is different about our views without the intention of getting the other to change her mind. We do not spend much time together because our different lifestyles put us on such different time tables and locations that it is rarely possible.
I have another sibling with which I have a more confusing relationship, and we have a relationship when she wants one. Currently she does not, although she didn’t end a relationship in a dramatic fashion, more so she faded out of my life. I have three younger siblings who still live with my mother. I do not see the two little brothers much because I do not go to my mother’s house. I do see my youngest sister on a regular basis, and we have a good relationship.
My relationship with my mother is complex; I am not spending social time with her. I do not have a social relationship with my father. On the few occasions I have seen him in the last several years, I have taken a moment to make sure he knows I think he is an abhorrent human being. I’m not loud about it, but he knows. I have refused opportunities to meet with him in the past several years to discuss our relationship, and he doesn’t try anymore. As far as I know, it has been quite some time since he has even mentioned my existence to anyone. I have sometimes seen him around town without talking to him.
In the past, I would have described some of these relationships differently. Some of what happens in these relationships is triggering. However, I believe that I am responsible for how I feel after interactions with my family. I don’t think I always was responsible. I had to learn that I was responsible and learn how to take care of my own emotions, so there was a time that I was not responsible. There is also the chance that at some point there will be such an overwhelming amount of negative events and triggers that I could lose responsibility for a while. However now that I know, I am still responsible to eventually move on or to get help to do so.
People need acceptance, and people need other people. They need to take part in a social contract where they receive help and help others. It facilitates such relationships if they can take responsibility for their own emotions and be whole people in spite of what happens. No one can be perfect all the time and shouldn’t feel pressured to try to be perfect. People can work toward emotional independence and an ability to stand firm in their own heads even when everyone around them is doing something that they shouldn’t.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Patrick Gannon. Image links to source.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on November 10, 2014.
I recently came upon a post titled 3 Ways Homeschoolers Socialize Differently than School Kids. Curious, I clicked. I should have known better. Predictably, the post was written by a homeschooling mother who has no idea what it’s like to actually be a homeschooled child. In this post I will respond to the points made by blogger Jennifer Fitz, speaking from my experience as a homeschool alumna.
1. Homeschool kids break their own ice.
I picked up my son from his Confirmation kick-off event, a true microcosm of suburban 9th grade living. We were delayed in departing, and I noticed he was chatting with a boy I’d never met before, who had “Chris” written on his name tag. We got in the car. “So I saw you were chatting with, um, Chris? Is it? Nice kid?”
Usually the boy has a few interesting stories to share about the people he meets. This time he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just started talking to him when you showed up. We were so busy doing ice breakers we didn’t get to actually meet anybody.”
Yeah, homeschool kids don’t get ice breakers. You show up at a new event with people you’ve never met, and your parents leave you to the wolves. “Go find some kids. Or make yourself useful somewhere.”
They always do. It can take as long as five or ten minutes, if it’s a large group event the kids are joining midstream. But my kids never sit in a corner neglected. They are in the habit of introducing themselves, striking up a conversation, and finding something, anything, in common with whomever is tossed their way.
Some children are more extroverted and others are more introverted. What exactly does this have to do with homeschooling? My public schooled daughter walks right up to other kids and introduces herself. My shy homeschooled little sister does not, preferring to hang back much longer until she feels comfortable. Trust me when I say that this isn’t about homeschooling.
2. Homeschool kids spend the bulk of their time with people different from themselves.
Sitting at a lunch table with the same five friends every day, exactly the same age, same academic track, same clubs, and same fashion tastes? Yeah, that never happens in homeschooling. Mixed-age, mixed-neighborhood, mixed-ability social circles are the norm among homeschoolers. Cliqueishness is a no-go, because 1) the parents lose patience with that nonsense fast and 2) on any given day, you might have to be friends with exactly that one person you would have happily excluded if only this were the lunchroom and you had the choice of your favorites.
Growing up, I never, ever had a friend who was not also able bodied, middle class, white, evangelical, and the child of two married heterosexual parents. Heading off to college came as a huge shock because I was suddenly thrown in with people who were completely different from me. But this makes sense, if you think about it. When you are homeschooled your social world is whatever your parents choose to give you. Some homeschooling parents will expose their children to a wide diversity of people, but others will keep their children in a homogenous bubble.
My daughter is only in kindergarten, but already she has been exposed to more different people than I was through high school. There are black and white kids in her class, middle class and poor kids, children with Christian and atheist parents, children with single parents and children with parents who never married, and disabled children. My public schooled daughter is experiencing more different people in kindergarten than I experienced until college.
Jennifer adds this:
From there, it only gets more different: Homeschool kids spend a lot of time with grown-ups. Not just their parents. Not just teachers. (As a kid writing fiction, I could only ever think up “teacher” for a profession for my adult characters, because that was the only profession I was ever exposed to enough to have an idea of what the job entailed.) Homeschool kids spend their formative years going wherever their parents go, doing all the adult chores that grown-ups do. The people who live and work in their community aren’t stage hands for a me-centered teenage drama; they are the community. Homeschool kids get used to having spur-of-the-moment adult conversation with grown-ups of every age, profession, and cultural background.
Actually, socializing with adults is very different from socializing with other children. As a homeschooled child, I never had a problem socializing with adults—I knew they would praise me for how mature and smart I was, how hard working and diligent. Other children, on the other hand? Haha, nope. I got on fine with the other homeschooled children in my social circle, but I was literally afraid of public school children. They were so different from me that I had no idea how to relate to them. They were scary. I had to enter a public high school to take the PSAT, and I was so anxious I was sick that morning—not because of the exam, I wasn’t worried about that in the least, it was the entire idea of being surrounded by public school kids. I couldn’t handle it.
Now I am not saying that every homeschooled child is afraid of public school children, or that this is the natural product of being homeschooled. Absolutely not! But Jennifer makes a mistake in generalizing from how she is socializing her son to how every other parent out there socializes their children. What kind of socialization homeschooled kids get is almost entirely dependent on their parents. Some parents are absolutely crippled by the lack of socialization they have in their homeschooled upbringing while others thrive and develop healthy social skills.
You cannot look at one homeschooled child and predict another’s experience, because the only thing different homeschooling families have in common is that the parents are in sole control of their children’s academic and social development.
3. Homeschool kids form deep, lasting relationships with the people they treasure most.
A reality of homeschool life is that you might have certain very dear friends you only see a few times a year. Of all the many friendly-acquaintances you gather everywhere you go, a few really resonate. They’re ones who understand you. They’re the ones you could spend hours talking to, and when you pick back up again six months later, it’s like you just saw each other yesterday.
School friendships are a little bit like this, in that you socialize all year with whomever is at hand, but very few of those friendships carry forward once you’re no longer in the same class or club. It’s easy to imagine at school you’ve got a real friendship going, when really those friends will drop you as soon as they find something better.
The homeschooling difference is that there’s never any illusion that you’ve got five best friends sitting next to you at lunch each day. You have to be intentional about cultivating your friendships, and you’ve got the mental space to do it in. When you find that one good friend, you make an effort to stay in touch. You learn to use whatever resources you have at hand to arrange a way to get together more often. Sometimes you discover that the friendly acquaintance was only ever just that, or the friendship wanes as your values and interests diverge later in life. But it’s not uncommon for homeschoolers to have multiple deep, lasting relationships that endure for years despite distance and long separation.
Does Jennifer have any idea how hard it was to be 16 and only see one of my closest friends four or six times a year? It wasn’t even that they lived far away, it was just that we weren’t in any of the same activities and we were completely dependent on our parents for transport. Jennifer thinks this is some sort of positive benefit of homeschooling? Does she have any idea how hard it was to go on stating that this person was one of my best friends even as I had no clue what was going on in her life because I hadn’t seen her in months? I just can’t here. Jennifer may look at the five best friends she had at lunch in middle school as only temporary friends, but at least she actually had friends she saw regularly. I didn’t.
Jennifer seems to be applying “absence makes the heart grow stronger” to children’s friendships. It does not work like that.
It’s absolutely true that out of a large group of people you will only resonate with a few. The problem was that, as a homeschool kid, I didn’t have a large group of people to draw from. I had to take whatever I got. Now yes, I had some good, solid friendships. I had to, because if I didn’t I would have had no one. But there were also times I hung on to a friendship with someone who didn’t really fit because, well, they were the only option I had. I read one study that said that homeschooled children have fewer friends than their peers, but that they value the ones they have more. Well duh, I thought.
So what if my public schooled daughter has five best friends sitting by her at lunch who will move on and change and grow different and branch off in different directions as they grow? At least she sees them more often than once every three months. And you know what? My friends from childhood grew and changed too, as did I. Being homeschooled didn’t magically make all of my friendships last forever.
If I had to come up with a list of how homeschoolers actually socialize differently than school kids, what would I include on the list?
1. They more dependent on their parents. While children who attend school see other children daily as a matter of course, homeschooled children only see other children as a result of involvement in various activities or making plans to get together with another family. These things rest solely in the hands of the parents.
2. Keeping up friendships takes more effort. I cannot even begin to count the number of times my siblings and I begged to have a friend over or to become involved in an activity so that we would see a friend. Public school children may be able to fall into friendships, but we didn’t have that option.
3. They can’t afford to be as picky. Mostly, I was friends with the children of my parents’ friends. After all, if our parents weren’t friends it was unlikely we would see each other often enough to have anything you could give the label “friendship.” In other cases, homeschooled children are forced to turn to the internet to find friends.
“What about socialization?” Homeschooled parents have been asked this question over and over again for decades. I understand finding it annoying to get this question so many times, but it’s a good question, and one homeschooling parents should take seriously. I’m really tired of reading blog posts by homeschooling parents arguing that homeschooled children are actually better than public schooled children. Trust me, I heard this growing up, too! Hearing this didn’t make me any less afraid of public schooled children, and it didn’t magic me more friends.
Look, if you are a homeschooling parent, your children’s socialization is up to you. If you do your job right, your children will have a large pool to draw their friends from, have close friends they see regularly, and be comfortable around a wide range of different people. But this is not guaranteed. It’s something you have to work for.
As a final note, I am aware that not all children who attend school simply fall into friendships, and that there are children who attend public school and are still profoundly lonely. I don’t think parents of children who attend school should assume they don’t need to pay attention to their children’s social needs. All I’m saying is that when parents homeschool, they take their children’s social needs solely into their hands, and that’s not a responsibility they should take lightly.
For our next open series, Homeschoolers Anonymous invites homeschool alumni to share about their experiences with their siblings – whether positive, negative, or outright abusive.
For some of us, the bonds we made with our siblings were relationships we’ll cherish for life. For others, our siblings were our lifelines — the people that helped us stay sane while our parents rained down the fire and brimstone of “biblical discipline.” And yet for others, a sibling might have been our first abuser, someone who violated our body and mind and forced us into the shadows of secrecy and shame.
Regardless of where on this spectrum your relationship with your sibling(s) fall, we welcome you to share your stories. Since we’re approaching the busy holiday season, we are making the submission deadline for this series a ways out:
* Deadline for “Re:Siblings” submissions: Friday, January 2, 2015. *
This post deals with parents isolating and controlling their children’s social interactions; of course my parents and many other homeschooling parents have engaged in many other forms of control, but this is one that people don’t seem to realize is a problem. Below, I give some examples of social isolation and control in my own life, and then reference work from Roberta Hibbard, Jane Barlow, and Harriet MacMillan to show how social isolation can be a serious problem for children who are subjected to it.
As I have said in previous posts, many of the people who were involved with my family over the years still don’t really get what the problem was. They will admit that my parents were a bit overprotective. Depending on the day they might even admit that my parents were controlling. But they always cycle back to trying to convince me that my parents were just doing their best, just trying to keep us safe. Then sometimes the same people concede that not everything was perfect but assure me that my father has changed.
I don’t spend much time around people who think they are in a position to re-write my history for me.
Once when I was about 15, I was something like friends with the neighbour girl. She was about 2 years older than me, and very conservative (more so than we were, in some ways – they attended a very conservative Mennonite church). Her parents and my parents ran in the same circles and spent time together talking about fundamentalism (not their word). Her dad had a home business, and one day she called and asked if I wanted to go with her to a little hamlet about 15 minutes away to pick up a part with her for her dad. My dad turned this invitation into a really big deal. He told me I had to ask her if I could call back in a few minutes so we could discuss it. I hadn’t been out of the house for days, and I really wanted to go on this 30 minute adventure with her.
I sat down with my parents, and they went over how they felt I had behaved over the past while, pointing out instances of rebellion and ways I could have tried harder in helping out around the house. In reality, I was a full time mini-mom, I cooked and cleaned and homeschooled my siblings and gardened and changed diapers. I wasn’t being taught anything anymore, although I was still being “homeschooled” I didn’t say any of that to them. I displayed appropriate contriteness and promised to mend my behaviour, and I was allowed to go. They selected several chores I would need to complete before going, and said she could pick me up in an hour. I called her back, very excited, and she reacted with confusion. It was just a short trip to grab something and she just wondered if I wanted to come. Furthermore, it was an errand she needed to run quickly for her father, and she had not planned to wait even the fifteen minutes it had taken for me to call her back, much less another hour. She went and checked with her dad, and he agreed he could wait an hour if that meant I was able to go.
This is the problem: when a teenager is “homeschooled” like that, not really doing school work anymore, and spending most of their time being the assistant mother, it actually costs the parents for the child to do something that doesn’t serve the family. And I want to be clear, although my parents were notably controlling, it wasn’t just them, there are quite a number of girls that I knew at that age that experienced a similar level of control. Every chance I had to get out of the house was treated with exaggerated importance. And then my parents have that added power to exhort even more compliant behavior.
I could give so many more detailed examples of this, like the time I “lost all privileges” (of which there were few) for being a few minutes late getting back when I went with another neighbor Mennonite girl into town to – wait for it – drop off her mother’s homemade quilts to customers. My father decided what a reasonable time was for this errand that had nothing to do with him at all, and I had the girl rush me home in a cold sweat when I realized I would be late. This errand was one that was planned in advance, and I had to earn the privilege to go with days of displaying a perfect attitude, and days of hard work. And being a few minutes late meant I lost the ability to go anywhere for months. My father allotted two hours for the trip, and we were about 20 minutes out of town. That gave us 1 hour and ten minutes to do all her errands for the quilt business.
I know a number of Mennonite teenagers from a certain church when I was 14-15 and my brother and I were invited to their youth groups. We also wanted to attend church with them on Sunday evenings. My parents treated each weekly occurrence of these activities as special privileges that they arbitrarily allowed us to earn sometimes but not others. I often wanted to go to someone’s house after church, or have someone over, but my father would not give advance permission, or even answer me if I asked him after church. He would sometimes turn to me in the van as we were leaving the parking lot and tell me that I could have someone over, or that if someone wanted me over I could go. By then, everyone would already have plans so I sometimes went back to the group and pretended to ask, and that no one was interested. I was too embarrassed to try to make plans at that point. If I refused to go over, he would be upset with me and say that I didn’t really want that privilege and shouldn’t be wasting his time asking.
My parents were able to pass this behaviour off as protective. And technically that is true, I suppose. So what is the problem?
First of all, the way they restricted my social activity, including Sunday night church, really skewed my concept of social interactions.
Social activities were something that I coveted and dreamed about, but experienced so rarely that I didn’t know how to handle myself. I tried to be funny and make people enjoy being my friend, which of course just made me seem odd. I felt envious of others my age that were allowed to have regular social interactions. Those with a more normal social life seemed more well-adjusted then me, and I felt this when I was with them, which increased my feelings of inadequacy. I felt like those with normal privileges were more important than me, because I was sometimes put in the position to try and solicit their attention and invitations. This skewed my sense of value of myself and others.
Because I had to behave so carefully in order to get a chance to take part in a social activity, there was a sense of fear attached to other people, especially other teenagers. It also increased the sense of control that my parents had over me; before I was interested in spending time with other youth, there wasn’t much that I wanted, that my parents could actually provide, that I was motivated to work for, and our family was reaching a point of chaos that meant that there wasn’t much parental approval to work towards. So I was motivated to perform my duties at home purely to get out and see other youth. My parents kept me fearful and off balance by sometimes allowing this and sometimes taking away the privilege with no explanation. My father said that if I didn’t know the privilege was being taken away, maybe I needed to lose more privileges in order to learn to respect him.
The biggest problem I have with this control over social interactions is that it stifles the learning of social lessons.
It is a form of child maltreatment to teach a child to act in an abnormal way, and therefore a form of neglect to not teach them lessons that they will need to function in adult life. I simply didn’t get enough exposure to other people as a child and teenager, and the skewed value of other people and of social interactions meant that I didn’t learn how to be a friend. I didn’t know how long a visit with a friend should last, and I didn’t know how to see that a visit was reaching an end. In fact, it was so hard for me to get out that when I was out, I often overstayed my welcome. It also impacted my ability to build planning and decision making skills.
In their report titled “Psychological Maltreatment” in “Pediatrics”, Hibbard, Barlow, and MacMillan provide a table outlining six different categories of child maltreatment (find it here). According to this table, the simple act of confining a child and restricting their community social interactions is a form of maltreatment likely to result in social maladjustment. Under the heading of exploiting/corrupting, there are two descriptions that my parents fulfilled: “Modeling, permitting, or encouraging antisocial or developmentally inappropriate behavior” by not allowing me to develop appropriate social behavior, and “restricting/undermining psychological autonomy” by not providing opportunities for me to learn to plan and make decisions in social interactions with enough information.
Isolating children and not allowing them to interact with other children and youth is a form of psychological maltreatment. Not allowing children enough opportunities to learn how to behave in social situations and not providing them with opportunities to plan and make decisions in social situations is psychological maltreatment in the exploiting/corrupting category.
“Socialization” was a joke to my parents, as it was and is for many homeschooling apologists, but the different aspects of isolation are easily categorized as psychological maltreatment.
Hibbard, et al, state that psychological maltreatment may result in a child feeling that they are unloved or only valued for what they provide to the parent, even if the parent did not intend to cause harm. They state that the effects of this maltreatment can include problems with adult attachment, including attachment to their own children, and trouble with conflict resolution in adulthood.
If a woman is to have a career and friends of her own, she will need these skills. Even if one ascribes to the school of thought that the purpose of women is to get married and stay at home with children, it should be clear that this type of isolation will not result in girls growing into well-adjusted stay at home mothers. To succeed in such a role, women will need to have social skills, planning and decision making skills, conflict resolution skills, and good attachment in order to have good relationship with their husbands and children. If a woman is to engage in some type of out of home employment before getting married, these skills will vital in that setting as well.
Socialization is not a joke; it provides several essential skills for adult life in various settings. Isolating children and youth is not a joke, it is psychological abuse, and can have serious consequences for those who experience it.
Many people find the beginning of parenthood marks the sudden decline of their friendships.
Babies are constantly needy and deprive you of sleep, energy, and coherence. Toddlers, when awake, need constant monitoring; and even their sleep must be prioritized in your schedule. Preschoolers are fast and fearless and can disappear in an instant because of a whim. And for all of them, their constant stream of needs and your constant stream of worries, day and night, can completely shut down your ability to think of any other topic.
But somehow, although all of those things are true about my two kids, that does not describe my experience. And I’m forever grateful for that, because increasing my already unbearable feelings of isolation just might have killed me.
Somehow, in the haze of new parenthood, I actually connected to a group of other new moms. Maybe it was because they were in a similar haze, and we were all in the trenches together. Crying, worrying, laughing, celebrating together. Just what I had always wanted, for my whole life, but never experienced even once.
And it didn’t stop there. I also began to feel closer to a few other friends that I had always wanted to connect with more. And I began to meet even more people, around the neighborhood, in kid classes, through friends, through preschool. Was it my newly increasing confidence and happiness? Was it the oxytocin boost of motherhood that made me better able to connect?
Whatever it was, I wish that myself as a child could have known that a good future was coming, so that the dark nights didn’t seem quite as cold. However, the coldness of the past makes me value even more the warmth of friendship now. The empty silence of the past, the years of absolutely no conversations with anyone, make me value so much even the broken snippets of conversations that moms have while also monitoring active young children. The lack of attention and lack of empathy from my parents means that I don’t take the attention and empathy of my friends for granted today.
Thank you friends, if you are reading this, for being you and letting me be me.
I wish it weren’t true, but unfortunately my past does still sometimes reach all the way here to my good life today. Sometimes I still struggle with depression. Sometimes another person’s choices or mistakes hit me in an area where I am vulnerable, leaving me shaken and crippled with emotion. Sometimes, when my mind is stretched between sleep deprivation and two active kids, I find I have no bandwidth left to function socially, and then I resent the deficit I have to work with, and the fact that basic social skills and conversational skills that come naturally to many others require so much extra attention for me.
But now I can better fight my way out of those dark moments. Instead of trying to “be better” so I’m not a disappointment to God, now I have the positive motivation of wanting to connect with my husband, connect with my kids, and connect with my friends. Because, now that I know what it feels like to connect with others in a healthy and non-codependent way, there is no way I’m ever letting go of that.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 