blanket training – Homeschoolers Anonymous

Socialization isn’t a freaking joke

February 19, 2016May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team11 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Michael Scott.

Editorial note: The following is reprinted with permission from Samantha Field’s blog. It was originally published on February 11, 2016.

If you’ve been around homeschooling culture for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with how they tend to make fun of “socialization.” When I was growing up as a homeschooled kid, I had “20 Snappy Comebacks” prepared in case I overheard someone asking “b-but but what about socialization?!” I’d been taught– and was firmly convinced– that when people asked about socialization it sprang from a place of ignorance about homeschooling. When you homeschool, I believed, you’re not just limited to interact with people from your grade level, but with children and adults of all ages. Through church (and, theoretically, co-ops, although I only attended one in 2nd grade), we got all the social interaction we could possibly want.

It’s ironic to me now that while I thought that other people were ignorant if they asked me about socialization (which, honest moment, they never did, probably because of how incredibly isolated I was), the fact of the matter is that most homeschoolers who dismiss socialization as a legitimate question are also being ignorant.

Socialization isn’t just “learning to talk to people like a regular human.” It’s not “having friends.” It’s not “engage in social activities.” Socialization is “the process whereby an individual learns to adjust to a group (or society) and behave in a manner approved by the group (or society).” I’ve talked about my own experience with socialization before, and one thing I can confidently say is that if we’re talking about fundamentalism, then I am socialized extremely well. I know how to walk the walk and talk the talk. I know what the acceptable behaviors and language are. I was taught to be extremely well-suited to that environment.

However, now that I’m not in fundamentalism anymore, I am not well socialized. I struggle understanding what the group parameters are, and one of the biggest struggles I face is that I have no metric whatsoever for analyzing my behavior. Was I polite? No idea. Did I hurt someones’ feelings? Not a clue. Did I do or say something weird or awkward? Can’t say. I’m slowly learning how to operate in casual social settings, but there is always a sliver of me that’s panicking the entire time that I’m going to blow it and expose myself as the weird homeschool kid.

But there’s another aspect to this “socialization” question that I’ve yet to see addressed.

Above I noted that I am extremely well socialized to operate in fundamentalist spaces, so I am intimately familiar with what’s required to achieve that and it bothers me.

Every once in a while, I’ll bump into someone commenting on how “well-behaved your children are!” Sometimes it’s people talking about how polite and happy and well-mannered all the Duggar children appear to be. A few years ago I overheard it at a not-fundamentalist church, and it was directed at a mom in a denim jumper with six kids and– no joke– No Greater Joy sticking out of her diaper bag for some reason. “Well-mannered children” is part and parcel of fundamentalist socialization, and there’s a fairly uniform code for what that means:

instant obedience
obedience with a “good attitude”
joyfulness
respectful of elders
lack of rebellion (individuation)
are faithful, diligent members of the religion

The main problem I have with the above is all those people complimenting fundamentalist parents on “well-mannered” children have no freaking idea what it takes to achieve children who behave like that. Children are supposed to be imaginative and express their identity and be unruly and rambunctious and explore and be curious and filled with wonder and sometimes be grumpy and unhappy and annoying.

The methods used to create children who are always smiling, who always obey instantly, who never go through individuation, who never talk back– they should horrify us because they are nightmarish. In order to achieve this, you have to beat infants. You have to strike your children multiple times a day with a switch or a board or a belt. Age-appropriate exploration must be prevented at all costs– either through things like blanket training or slapping a baby every time they reach for a necklace or your hair. You must subject your infant or toddler to brutal physical punishment every single time they show a disavowed form of curiosity about their environment.

For older children and teenagers, you have to completely disallow any form of individuality. They must agree with everything you teach them. Doubts and questions are forbidden. If they attempt to express their own identity, they must be bullied by other members of the fundamentalist community to immediately stamp it out.

Being socialized as a fundamentalist child means being horribly abused. It means being denied any natural part of growing up. So, yes, fundamentalist homeschool families are socializing their children– socialization, really, is inevitable– it’s just what they’re socializing them to. Fundamentalist homeschoolers are largely incapable of socializing their children to be capable, competent, contributing members of society because socializing them in fundamentalism precludes that.

Remember that next time you hear someone comment how cute and quaint and charming the Duggar family is.

Blanket Training is About Adults, Not Children

May 20, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team51 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Blanket training is a child training method advocated by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo and popularized by the Duggar family through their TLC show. It has its own Wikipedia page and has its own featured page on the Duggar Family Blog. Parents have adopted this child training method specifically because of the Duggars.

In its simplest form, blanket training consists of 3 actions: (1) place a young child (usually an infant or toddler) on a small blanket, (2) tell that child not to move off the blanket, and (3) strike that child if they move off the blanket. Rinse, repeat.

The training can be more elaborate than this. Some advocates may describe it more gently, poetically, or less fearsome-sounding. Others prefer corporal punishment to be a last resort if a child moves off the blanket. But despite linguistic dress-up, at its core it remains the same: you punish a young, still-developing child for wanting to indulge its natural curiosity and crawl off a blanket.

Blanket training is essentially a specific manifestation of “first-time obedience” training, also popularized by the Ezzos as well as Michael and Debi Pearl. The Pearls use this same technique but instead of a blanket they use an object the infant or toddler will find attractive:

Place an appealing object where they can reach it …. when they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, ‘No, don’t touch that.’ Since they are already familiar with the word ‘No,’ they will likely pause, look at you in wonder, and then turn around grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, No.

While the forms differ, the technique and message is the same: Set up boundaries for the child that impinge of the child’s natural curiosity and development and then punish them for acting on that nature. Ultimately, this technique (and its message) rest upon an idea that children’s nature is hell-bent rather than innocently curious. Voddie Baucham would express this idea by saying children are “vipers in diapers” and thus require significant restraint.

Families that grew up in Bill Gothard’s IBLP or ATI programs are likely familiar with blanket training. Gothard and his cohorts advocated it. A former IBLP attendee remembers Lori Voeller, wife of former ATI President Jim Voeller, teaching blanket training in the following way:

I remember Lori Voeller in her message on blanket training telling us that her child was so “trained” to stay on a blanket that she had been calling the child and she would not dare get off the blanket. The child knew this was a baiting technique. Lori thought this was admirable. I was horrified. I was thinking, “Yeah Lori, what if the house is burning down and your child can’t think for him or herself about getting off of a stupid blanket because they are so fearful of doing the wrong thing.”

Here is another example of what blanket training consists of, from Sarah Rose at Make Something Beautiful, a self-proclaimed advocate of the training:

The first thing you need to do is put the blanket on the floor. You can use a heavier “fleecy” blanket or fold a big blanket to a reasonable size. Both of our girls have been trained to sit on a 2’x3′ blanket. You just want to make sure that the blanket doesn’t move around too much because trust me, your child is going to test the limits anyway and you don’t need the added frustration a thin blanket will cause. Place your child on the blanket with their toy and book, and tell them to stay there. Set your timer (I suggest starting very small…five minutes is a long time, especially for younger babies) and get busy with your busy work.

But watch that baby with at least one eye, because I guarantee that baby is going to find out if you mean what you say. When your baby ventures off the blanket (be it a finger or their entire body), gently remind them that Mommy said to stay on the blanket. Follow up with your preferred method of discipline…I think you know what I mean here…let’s just say that “time out” won’t work in this situation. Your baby will probably cry, and you might want to as well. Just stay the course. Repeat this process until time is up.

Note what Sarah Rose says about the “fruits” of this method:

The boundaries of the blanket have brought us tremendous freedom. We can take her to meetings and expect her to sit quietly.

Rose minces no words here. The best part of this training method is not what it teaches the child but rather that “we can take her to meetings and expect her to sit quietly.” In other words, it trains children to be seen not heard, that old adage which expresses nothing but contempt for children and the beautiful chaos they bring into our lives.

Reb Bradley, another popular child training “expert” in Christian homeschooling circles, advocates a similar method (and with a similar goal, that of children’s silent stillness) in his 1996 book Child Training Tips:

Rather than waiting until Sunday morning and using a church worship service to teach a child to sit still, it is helpful to have them practice at home…Pull up a chair, and have them sit quietly for increasing increments of time. Try 5 minutes the first day, 10 the second, 15 the third, and so on. Chastise them each time they get down without permission. Start when they are toddlers and you will be amazed at what they are capable. This is a very simple means of teaching them first-time obedience (p. 141-2, emphasis added).

Stillness. Silence. Control. Broken will. These are the fruits of such “discipline.” Yet Theologian Janet Pais provides an excellent reminder concerning these fruits in her 1991 book Suffer the Children: A Theology of Liberation by a Victim of Child Abuse:

Adults, often unconsciously, act toward children out of an attitude that the child is a possession properly subject to their control. Because adults have power over children, too often they use it, not for the true good of the child, but just to ‘show who is the boss.’… ‘Christian discipline,’ calmly and calculatedly administered, may abuse the child both physically, in the use of the rod (or ‘spanking’), and emotionally, in humiliating the child, in breaking the child’s will, in forcing submission to the adult’s greater power, and in refusing to accept the child’s natural reactive feelings (rage, anger), while requiring the expression of other supposedly repentant feelings. Such ‘discipline’ manifests adult contempt for the child and resulting overt forms of abuse. A slave too will be submissive after physical and emotional abuse and humiliation…

God creates the child who brings chaos into our lives and into our worship. And Jesus says if we receive the child in his name, we receive him, we receive God the Child incarnate. In fact, doesn’t Jesus himself, God the Child, bring chaos into our lives? We would like for conversion to be nice and neat and under control—our control, that is. But often conversion, faith in Christ, turns our lives upside down… Receiving children in Christ’s name, accepting the chaos, even embracing it, can be a sort of spiritual discipline. It means yielding one’s life to greater necessities than keeping things tidy and rational. It means letting life itself, new life in the child, come first. It means having faith in the child, and in God, the child’s Creator. The child truly does bring God’s truth to us. (p. 10, 43, 146-7)

Welcoming children into our midst should bring the opposite of blanket training’s fruits. Welcoming children means embracing the loud, wild, reveling child. It means understanding, as Joyce Mercer says in her 2005 book Welcoming Children: A Practical Theology of Childhood, that, “The very idea of associating Christ with the silencing of children appears preposterous to anyone even vaguely familiar with New Testament stories about Jesus’ interactions with children” (p. 2). And we do indeed see, in Matthew 21:14-16, Jesus embracing the reveling children:

The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”

At its core, blanket training is not for children. It is for parents who desire their children’s spirits broken and their voices silenced. It is for parents who have contempt for the essence of what childhood is: noisy, raucous, and a handful. It is for parents who want to quiet the children crying out in the temple.

In Their World, But Not Of It — My Years on the Periphery of ATI: Giselle’s Story

January 9, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team17 Comments

We were never really one of “those families.”

I felt out of place at the annual conferences because we only had two kids. We might even put on shorts and watch TV when we got back to the hotel room. We had a car, not a 15-passenger van, and we only drove two hours to get there, unlike many families who spent days traveling, their windows painted with pithy slogans like, “Knoxville or Bust.” We evaluated the people we met at those conferences carefully. Were they “real” ATI people, or were they renegades like us, who wouldn’t shun us when they learned we were blue jean-wearing, movie-watching, pizza-eating radicals?

We were definitely misfits.

However, I, too, donned conservative white blouses and flowing navy skirts each summer of my high school years (and several years after) for a week of training and choir rehearsals. I will not lie, there was something invigorating and powerful about it all—particularly when we sang—thousands of voices raised together…. It was easy to get swept up in the moment, for sure.

But deep down, I think I knew that something wasn’t right.

Perhaps the full effects of those years on my psyche are still unknown, but for the most part, I emerged fairly unscathed. My father was not controlling. We were never abused. We always had a voice and were allowed, even encouraged, to share our opinions. My parents wanted me, as well as my brother, to graduate prepared for college, if we chose to go. My teen years were mainly self-directed, with my parents supporting and encouraging me in my own interests and pursuits.

Strangely enough, in reflecting back on those years, I have come to the realization that it may have been me, not either of my parents, who was most indoctrinated by the ATI mindset.

I remember reading countless books on courtship and buying into the “facts” that dating was stupid and rock music was somehow evil. I dressed “modestly” at all times and memorized most of Matthew 5, along with countless other Scriptures that I self-selected during my own devotional times. I chose to work on (but never completed) the faith, wisdom, and virtue journals, teach in Children’s Institutes, and even attend a short training in Indianapolis and a two-month training at EXCEL. But even through all of this, my discernment told me that something was wrong.

I went to the Indianapolis training center when I was about 16. I remember very little except enjoying spending time with a couple friends, but I do very clearly recall a session when a fairly prominent ATI mother spoke to us about her children. She shared about her older son with disabilities and two adopted daughters of another race. I think she was teaching about demonic influences and spiritual sensitivity in children. I remember that the woman seemed tired, perhaps even defeated. She said, “If I had it to do over again, I don’t think we should have adopted the girls. It wasn’t God’s first choice for our family.” After adopting them, they had conceived several children naturally, and their family was somewhat disjointed. I was horrified. What in the world was this woman thinking?! Her teenage daughters were somewhere at the training center, and she had just admitted to dozens of girls that she wished she hadn’t adopted them! What if they found out?

It was unbelievable to me.

Another talk that stunned me was during one of the Knoxville sessions for women and “apprenticeship ladies”—basically age 12 or above. My mother was not with me (it may have been the year she was sick & didn’t go…) but there was a panel of mothers teaching us about child training.

I remember being fairly shocked as they described something called “blanket training” for infants.

Basically the goal was to train your baby to stay on a blanket, so that no matter where you went, you could pull out the blanket and put your kid down and not have to worry about baby-proofing the area or your child crawling off into harm’s way. In order to do this, you had to spend some time rather intensively “training” your child by administering spankings every time they touched the floor off of the blanket. A great way to do this, they said, was to “spank” all around the edges of the blanket—perhaps even pulling a child’s hand off the blanket and administering a swat or two to get the point across before they even had a chance to “disobey.” They told us that mothers who were “mercies” often had trouble doing this. (Women with the spiritual gift of mercy were always looked down on as weaker and more vulnerable, it seemed to me.)

Keep in mind that these children were infants! They were not even toddling around yet! (Although they said older babies could be left on blankets, too, once they were “trained.”)

I remember thinking (and even saying to some people that week), “I’d like to know if these children are less curious or more fearful of exploring the world around them—isn’t that the reason babies crawl around and touch things? They’re supposed to!”

During that same session, during a discussion on discipline, we were taught that biblical chastisement involved swatting your child at least six times—if it wasn’t that many, it was only a reproof, not true chastisement. (Personally, I had never been swatted that many times, and I thought these requirements were pretty creepy!) I remember a mother on stage sharing about how sweet their naptimes were now with her little child since she had taught her to lie down as soon as she was placed in the crib by giving her “six switchies” every time she put her head up. I was sickened. I was only a teenager, but I knew something was terribly wrong.

My 8-week trip to EXCEL when I was 21 was…well…strange.

In a lot of ways. I was still living at home but was largely autonomous in most of my daily activities. I was working 30 hours a week and involved in church and ministry activities which I had to leave completely for two months. For me, EXCEL was a step into an ultra-controlling environment, the likes of which I had never experienced before, but I tried to adapt and make the best of it because I was a pleaser and never wanted to be in trouble. Although I absolutely loved to learn and looked forward to gleaning a lot from the sessions, the dozens of rules and regulations were tough. I remember the look on a close guy friend’s face when I told him, “No, you can’t write to me. It’s against the rules.”

Our relationship was never the same again after that.

At EXCEL, we were only allowed to call home once or twice a week, unless we had “something to confess.” We had a strict “lights out” time, and my stickler roommate turned me in for using a flashlight to journal after 9:00 p.m. Living with her was a bit of a challenge because she was often depressed and terribly homesick. I never knew how to help her when she would lie on her bed during free time and refuse to engage in conversation or anything remotely fun.

I was frustrated because this made me feel even more lonely and strange about being there.

At home, I spent most of my time with adults or with the children I worked with in my job and volunteer work. There were no kids at EXCEL, and that was very difficult for me. There were also very few adults—just a whole bunch of teenage girls. My “team leader” was the age of my younger brother, and it was difficult to submit to her as an authority.

Sundays were also very difficult. We attended various churches in the mornings and then had “free time” in the afternoons, but we weren’t allowed to work on our academic projects since it was the “Sabbath.” We couldn’t really read (books weren’t allowed at EXCEL except for Bibles and a few approved books for our assignments.) We also weren’t allowed to eat anything until dinner—every Sabbath was a 24-hour fast. Those were realllllllly long afternoons. I learned that you can feel pretty unloved and uncared-for when your blood sugar drops and you are away from the people who care about you.

I think I’ve taken that with me because I am pretty conscientious now about making sure anyone in my care is well-fed and comfortable. Although I learned many things at EXCEL, some of which come back to me at the strangest times, reflecting back on those weeks fills me with an eeriness that seems from another lifetime.

When I returned from EXCEL, I was grateful to be home, but somewhat more indoctrinated. I don’t think I wore pants for almost a month, even though my parents had never in my life suggested that I shouldn’t wear them. I was even more dead-set against “rock music” than I had been before leaving.

In fact, I remember visiting a church with my family and ending up in tears because they added a backbeat to a hymn.

My poor parents didn’t know what to do with me, but they were very patient, and after several weeks, I came around. That was the beginning of the end of ATI’s influence in our family, because the following year my brother and I both started college, so we weren’t really eligible for the program anymore.

When I began preparing this article, I thought it would be easy. I planned to write about my experiences and impressions throughout my years in the ATI program. However, as I delved into my old notebooks, I found pages and pages from sessions with titles like these: “How to Conquer Food Addictions and Avoid Degenerate Diseases,” “7 Reasons Why This Is the Most Important Conference,” “A Way of Life the World Will Want to Copy,” “Why Not to Marry a Divorced Man,” “How to Prove God’s Existence Without Faith in 2 Minutes!”

It has been more difficult to process through all this than I had thought it would be.

I even called my dad to ask him if he had felt pressured in his men’s group meetings to follow certain commitments or act a certain way, since he never seemed to fit the ATI mold for controlling fathers. He said no, it wasn’t like that in his group. He even told me that he viewed ATI as just another program to help us reach our goals, and he basically selected the parts that he felt would help us while leaving the rest alone.

We were taught at the ATI conferences that there are three types of smiles: a joyful smile, a ministry smile, and an obedient smile. You should always be able to pull out one of the three, they said. This concept makes me wonder now: how many of those bright, cheerful faces were never joyful at all…? Although I am a bit shaken by all the memories I’ve sifted through over the past few weeks and by the adult realization of what was going on during those impressionable years of my life, I think I’ve emerged fairly healthy with an ability to coexist in the world I once believed to be evil.

After all, I am now a public school teacher.