first-time obedience – Page 2 – Homeschoolers Anonymous

Sibling v. Sibling — Giving the Child the Rod: Libby Anne’s Story

September 17, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team11 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on March 8, 2012.

*****

Trigger warning for To Break Down a Child series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.

*****

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point early on my mom handed me the rod. She told me I was to spank my younger siblings if they misbehaved or broke any rules and she was not in the room. The rule was that I could spank any sibling at least five years younger than me. This meant that at ten I could spank my five-year-old sibling, and all those younger than him.

This breaks my heart because now, years and years later, my younger siblings tell me they saw me as a bully, that they resented me, that I “lorded it over them.”

I may have been all that, and I definitely was far from perfect. Perhaps having this sort of power over them brought out the worst in me. But I was ten, twelve, or fourteen, and at the core I did what I did because my parents handed me the rod and told me to do so.

As to why my parents did this, the answer is not that difficult. With so very many children, my parents could not watch and discipline each of us individually. So they did what all Quiverfull/Christian Patriarchy parents do: they outsourced.

They outsourced their discipline method to me, and that method was the Pearls.

I was told that loving parents – or, er, siblings – discipline their children, and that the only way to make a child into a happy, healthy adult is to spank him. I was taught that children must have their wills broken and must be forced to submit. I did not generally spank my siblings out of malice (though I’ll admit to my shame that I sometimes did). I spanked them because I had been told to and did not know any better. I did not realize that as I spanked I was building a wall of resentment between me and my younger siblings.

I wish for all the world that I had been allowed to be a normal sister to my younger siblings. Instead I was put up as a second mother, an authority figure, a clone of my parents and their methods. I spent an enormous amount of time watching my younger siblings, both when my mother was in the house but occupied elsewhere and when my parents were away. I was expected to act as parent, not as sister, to my siblings.

*****

Sixteen-month-old Faith reaches for a glass bowl on the coffee table.

Faith, no, don’t touch that.

Faith touches the glass bowl. *pop* I slap her hand. She looks startled.

I said no.

Faith reaches for the glass bowl again. *pop*

No.

Her little hand reaches out once again, her lower lip trembling. *pop*

No.

Faith whimpers and looks like she’s going to cry, and I sigh. I gather her in my arms.

Faith, it’s okay, but I said no, and that means no.

She looks up at the glass bowl with pain and confusion in her face.

*****

This scene repeated over and over and over again.

I learned to never give in to a child’s crying, and that even a baby could rebel. I learned to house proof the baby rather than baby proofing the house. As for slightly older kids, I frequently spanked four, five, or six-year-old siblings for “disobedience” or “insolence.” Obedience was expected to be immediate, completely, and without complaint. Even talking back was to be punished, often with spanking.

*****

Judah, I told you to take this trash bag out.

I don’t want to!

I don’t care. You have to take it out or get a spank and take it out.

But I did it last time!

Alright, that’s it, you’re getting a spanking.

*****

Why was I made to be an authority figure to my siblings instead of a sister?

My heart breaks because I inflicted pain on them. It hurts worse that I never questioned these things, never asked why, never said no. But what did I, at ten, twelve, or fourteen, know? What did I understand? I had never seen anything different from what my parents taught and modeled at home. My parents handed me the rod and told me to spank. And I regret it with all my heart. And now, all I can say is I am so so sorry.

I am today working on repairing my relationships with my siblings, relationships I unwittingly and unintentionally sabotaged all those years ago.

As for the future, I will never, ever put my children in this kind of situation.

My Own Son Cringed At My Touch: Michal’s Story

September 17, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Michal” is a pseudonym.

*****

Trigger warning for To Break Down a Child series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.

*****

I was an abusive mother.

My kids are my whole life. I adore them and would do anything for them. I can’t tell you how hard it is to admit, in writing, that I hurt them. I hurt the people I would do anything to protect and I have to live with that.

With many large families, as the oldest girl, I helped parent my younger siblings. So in my young teens, when these books entered our home, I was reading and discussing them with my mom to help “parent”. I was accustomed to lots of spankings with small branches or belts in my early years and so the book was not surprising to me. Instead of the occasional punishments, though, it laid out a horrific system of beating your children under the guise of breaking wills and spiritual reasoning.

“A child is like a dog” is the first thing I took away from the Pearls book, To Train Up a Child.

If your children do something you dislike, you beat them calmly until they won’t do it again. The other concept I took away from that book was that if I wanted to save my child’s soul from hell, I had to make them obey at all costs. If your children can’t obey you, they won’t obey God. I learned that parents who did not spank their children, hated their children’s souls. Once I was a mom. I was “encouraged” by multiple peers and mom, mother-in-law, wives of elders, etc following this book to have times set aside every day for “training”.

“Training” of my poor 6 month old included finding something he wanted to do and spanking him every time he did it instead of heeding my command of “come here”.

I remember so many times of bawling because I was so miserable and my son was in so much pain and it just wasn’t working. I would tell these women that it wasn’t working and they would just say “spank harder” or I would be condemning their soul. Every time. Spank harder. And I did. Even with the glue sticks (the long flexible “bruise-less” instrument used by many) I would leave welts on my baby’s thighs because he would crawl away from me, not towards me on command. I was afraid to take him to the doctor. I started being afraid of asking for people’s help because it wasn’t working. I would make him eat the food I had deemed necessary for the day or he didn’t get other food. Sermons, from our church selling the book, reinforced the discipline and obedience of children. And that damn book said I didn’t love my child’s soul. And then it happened.

I came close to give my 18 month old son a hug and he cringed.

My own son cringed at my touch.

Over time we gladly threw spanking out the window. I tore up the book and threw it away. I stood up to women who told me I needed to just be spanking my children more. I didn’t know that physical abuse was defined as intentional contact to cause feelings of physical pain. I didn’t know that it was illegal to hit your child with an object regardless of whether it was called “spanking” or not. I started reading books on child development and psychology and realized how harmful it was to start my children’s lives out so aggressively. Most of those beatings had to do with my want for control or punishing my children because they embarrassed me, not with caring for my child. And I know that’s true for all the women and men that I watched “train up” their children.

I’m not joking when I tell people that I plan to pay for my children’s counseling sessions even after they reach adulthood. Even though I changed my views on parenting while they were still young, my children were hurt by me and I can never go back and change that.

Lacking empathy and nurturing attachment in the parent/child relationship, To Train Up a Child is destructive to the well being of any person, especially children.

Eggshells: Ava’s Story

September 16, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team10 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Ava” is a pseudonym.

*****

Trigger warning for To Break Down a Child series: posts in this series may include detailed descriptions of corporal punishment and physical abuse and violence towards children.

*****

Splat!

Oh no.

I dropped an egg on the floor.

Here we were, my mom and me baking together, and in my imperfection (would it be the sin of carelessness today?) I had made a mess and ruined the idyllic moment.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

I was shaking and nearly in tears. My mom, today, didn’t think it was a big deal, but I was too frightened to notice.

“Stop it,” she said, irritated at my fearful apology.

“I’m sorry,” I said — Oh no, I was irritating her now when she wasn’t irritated before.

“Stop, you are not an abused child!” Her voice was harsher now.

“Sorry!” I sobbed.

“Stop crying, you are not an abused child!”

I couldn’t. I tried.

“Stop or I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT.”

…Because I didn’t obey and stop crying immediately, I got a spanking. I needed to learn to control myself better. To stop crying when Mom said so, to only apologize fearfully when she was already irritated, lest I irritate her. I must learn to be obedient, to be holy, to be self-controlled. Until I did, Mom would never be happy with me. Jesus would never be happy with me.

I must be broken, humbled, so that I would be able to be good.

So I would obey immediately every time; so I would never question my parents and therefore know to never question God. To “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

…When I got yelled at because Dad thought I refused to share my bubblegum with my brother, I sat silent. To interrupt would probably change the lecture to a longer lecture and a spanking. Finally when he stopped, I explained softly that I had already shared with my brother.

Then, instead of apologizing for the false accusation, he praised me for taking his rebuke silently. He was pleased that I was contrite and broken, like Jesus, who was led like a lamb to the slaughter. Jesus, my ultimate example. Jesus, who didn’t defend himself.

My dad told the story of me, being Christ-like, any time he had the chance…

My brother once was forced to sit on a stool in the woodshop, watching while Dad cut out a paddle and sanded in finger grips on the handle, to spank him with when he was done. Dad was too angry to spank him right away, so he had to cool down by making a thick paddle first. We all remember the punishment, but the infraction that merited such a violent reaction was quickly forgotten.

Dad later put nails into the large wooden paddle to help lay carpet, and soon afterward, my brother needed another spanking, this time again bad enough to merit Dad using a paddle instead of a bare hand.

My younger brother panicked, screaming, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!”

We both thought the paddle still had nails in it and Dad was going to use it as it was.

An irrational fear in my dad’s eyes, but not to us. Our parents believed they were obligated to break sin out of us at any cost, and there wasn’t too big a difference in our eyes from our naked skin being hit by thick wood, and being hit by thick wood with nails in it. It was all pain, pain to punish us for misbehaving, pain to break our spirits until we were good little children, and people would comment on our wonderful behavior when our nice little family went out.

They didn’t know the chewing out we would get on the way home for any misbehavior.

“Where did we go wrong with you? We have failed as parents. You simply won’t be good. Jesus is so upset with you. You always… you never… you spoiled brats. I don’t like you at all right now. I should make you walk home.”

“You know they used to stone rebellious sons, in the Old Testament times.”

So yeah, we were pretty damn good children.

When I was junior-high aged, I was timid. All the self-confidence spanked and shouted out of me. But now my parents said my timidity was sinful.

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind.”

My parents threatened to break my glasses and cut off my hair because I was hiding behind them, they said, instead of reflecting the power of Christ.

But…

How could a broken child have power?

How could a child raised harshly have a spirit of love?

How could a child never taught to think through her feelings or listen to them have a sound mind?

Jesus was supposed to take the child they dutifully broke and fill her up with his power, only he never did.

I have instead set about the hard work of healing myself. I find my strength to parent my own children with love, but every once in a while I get stuck back in those memories of walking on eggshells. I go into my room by myself and I wonder in tears:

Why wasn’t I loved with a sweet, gentle love?

Why was I loved with a crushing, spirit-breaking love?

Why didn’t my parents really love me?

All my life I walked on eggshells, so eager to please my parents, so afraid to upset them.

Now I stomp on the eggshells. I refuse to try to please my parents anymore.

Our relationship is broken, like me, like the eggshells I tiptoed on for so long.

But I am free.

Growing Kids the Abusive Way: Auriel’s Story, Part One

August 12, 2013May 12, 2020HA Editorial Team13 Comments

*****

Trigger warnings: references (sometimes graphic) to emotional, physical, religious, and sexual abuse.

*****

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Auriel” is a pseudonym. Auriel blogs at Drying My Wings.

*****

Also in this series: Part One: Growing Kids the Abusive Way | Part Two: Isolation and Ideology | Part Three: Mini-Parents | Part Four: The Sound of a Sewing Machine | Part Five: The Aftermath of Childhood Abuse

*****

Part One: Growing Kids the Abusive Way

“Turn around, put your hands on the bed.” You scream, “No mommy, please!” She’ll grab you by your arm, wrist, shoulder, lapel, jaw or hair, shake, twist, or drag you, scratch, pull, shove, slap or kick you if you don’t move your butt to her room. “You selfish, spoiled rotten brat! You’re just a little ingrate, you little jerk. Let’s have a spanking!” she yells. Escape is futile.

“You’re abusing me! How could you be so cruel?” your mom asks in tears over her rage. You clench your fists and teeth at the injustice, but can do nothing. After all, you’re an “idiot” and a “stupid a-hole.”

She has told you that this hurts her more than it hurts you.

*****

My parents were abused as kids.

They perpetuated the cycle with us.

With their first child, my parents discovered Growing Kids God’s Way by the Ezzos. True to the teachings, my parents controlled our hearts with fear, and later taught Growing Kids classes to dozens of families over the years, and taught me the classes to use on my younger siblings. I grew up in a Catholic, upper middle class family, and was homeschooled K-12, starting out under an umbrella charter school, moving to become our own private homeschool when I entered high school.

As far as didactics go, I learned a great deal. While my friends used Mother of Divine Grace (MODG) or Seton, we used an eclectic mix of those and other curriculums like Abeka since the Catholic curriculums usually require an overload of coursework. My education was classical and informative until middle school when my chronically and mentally ill mom gave up on teaching us. From there, I had a tutor, online classes, or taught myself through my textbooks. Lucky for me, I had a passion for learning and was pretty studious. I ended up graduating early!

Unfortunately, the damage was done.

I was physically, sexually, emotionally, and spiritually abused and neglected as a child.

"With their first child, my parents discovered Growing Kids God’s Way by the Ezzos. True to the teachings, my parents controlled our hearts with fear." — “With their first child, my parents discovered Growing Kids God’s Way by the Ezzos. True to the teachings, my parents controlled our hearts with fear.”

From the time I was 6 months old, up until I was a teenager, my parents beat me with a leather strap. This was based on the Ezzo’s teaching of chastisement. My parents would force me to pull up my dress, and if I were especially stubborn, they’d have me pull down my panties. Just the humiliation was enough to fuel my ire. The pain only compounded the injury. Flinching, screaming, or crying meant longer beatings. So, you learn to shut up, have “first time obedience,” “right away all the way with a happy heart.” Don’t show even a flicker of anger, sadness, discontent, or any negative emotion. Those are signs of rebellion.

I often had scratches and bruises, in various stages of healing. They’d start out as the new red or white fingerprint marks or welts, moving to purplish blues, healing to ugly greens and sickly yellows.

Some days, the punishment was only receiving smacks from a wooden ruler, running scores of laps around the yard or being flicked in the face. Other times, punishment was no supper.

My stomach would suffer, painfully contorting, gnawing at the emptiness, and I would cry myself to sleep.

Sometimes we would only be fed plain oatmeal or bread and water for the week as punishment. My brothers were locked outside or forced to sleep naked on the cold floor as punishments. And it’s hard to imagine the amount of screaming we bore.

Back then, tears were weak. They could be used against you. I couldn’t let anyone see them, or they’d be powerful. I’d curl in a ball on the floor in a corner, and just sit, and rock, and cry, soothing myself in the dark. I reverted to thumb sucking when I was 8. Even today, I still rub my arm and hug myself to self-soothe.

I tried to protect my siblings by covering for them on chores and standing up to my parents for them. My littlest sibling even called me Mommy, and would call to me for help and protection. We’d take beatings for each other too. But if no one confessed to a failure on a chore (read: perfectly swept floor), everyone would suffer. If we brought a sibling into our mistakes, we would be held outside the room, while our parents reminded us that the screams of our siblings were our own fault. Overtime, you become jaded to pain. It no longer hurts you, and the screams of others become mundane and almost comical.

To be honest, I was so sheltered, I didn’t even know I was being beaten or abused. I thought this was legal spanking.

Nightly, we’d fall asleep to domestic violence, fights, slamming doors, broken glass. After a nice tuck in and a whispered, “Jesus loves you,” we’d hear Mom attacking Dad. She’d claw, scratch, knee, hit and punch him, pounding her fists into his chest and back, smacking him with objects.

A few snapshots of my home life:

Mom threatening Dad with a knife in our kitchen right in front of me
Dad leaving me in my Mom’s room to talk her out of suicide
Dad throwing my brother into a bedpost
Mom driving recklessly nearly driving into oncoming traffic or a telephone pole
Mom yelling at us and publically humiliating us in restaurants

In the end, I learned to lie to save my skin.

I learned to take my siblings away from domestic violence. I learned that violence was acceptable.

This is not to say that my parents didn’t love me.

I firmly believe they did, and see it in countless examples. They hugged me, cared for me, kissed away my childhood scrapes, bought me gifts just because, and told me that they loved me. Birthdays and holidays were special, and they taught me fervently, took me on outings, gave me my faith, drove me to events, encouraged me to learn musical instruments, play sports, and compete in speech and debate.

It’s not like they are monsters.

But they are hurt people who probably should never have had kids. The abusive techniques propagated by the Ezzos jived with my parents’ abusive upbringings. It was their normal, supported by “experts.”

I don’t hate my parents.

I don’t know how to hate human beings. All I feel for them is love, pity, and a need to be far away from them out of self-preservation.

*****

To be continued.

How I Learned To Stop Being Afraid and Love Other Religions: Part Two, When Buddhism Saved My Life

August 1, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from R.L. Stollar’s personal blog. It was originally published on July 30, 2013.

< Part One: If Satan Made Xanax, And Other Worldview Myths

*****

“It’s not difficult to see why Eastern religion is such an attractive form of salvation for a post-Christian culture. It assuages the ego by pronouncing the individual divine, and it gives a gratifying sense of ‘spirituality’ without making any demands in terms of doctrinal commitment or ethical living.”

~Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live?, 2004

*****

Part Two: When Buddhism Saved My Life

There were two particularly eye-opening moments I had during my 12 months studying Eastern Classics at St. John’s College, and both revolved around Buddhism.

The first was when my discussion group read a Buddhist text. Going into the discussion, I expected that there would be a lively debate. After all, my class consisted of people with diverse religious beliefs — atheists, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and more. I assumed that disagreement would be plentiful. What I did not expect, however, was that the lively debate occurred primarily between the Buddhist students.

It gave me flashbacks to highschool when Christian homeschool debaters spent hours arguing with each other over free will versus predestination.

Oh… there is more than one type of Buddhist, I realized. Which was a simple reality. But it was a reality that Summit Ministries, for example, omitted when they taught me about Buddhism. And it is a reality that makes a really big difference.

The second moment was when I became friends with a Buddhist for the first time in my life. I’ll call him C. here. C. was my best guy friend during my time at St. John’s. He practiced Diamond Way Buddhism. And he was nothing like the Christian stereotypes I had heard about Buddhists. In fact, he was the most emotional male I had ever known — and I mean that in a thoroughly positive way. He embraced emotions. He taught me that not all Buddhists believe that “enlightenment” is reached by avoiding emotions. Some Buddhists believe that you need to face emotions head-on, acknowledge their existence, let them be what they are, feel them fully, and then let them pass. Learning to master one’s emotions, he said, wasn’t a matter of ignoring them.

You look your emotions in the eyes and say, “Oh. Hey. You exist. I am going to feel you. Maybe even for a long while. But then you will pass. Because you are not me.”

What C. taught me about emotions is one of the most important lessons I have ever learned in my life. Growing in the conservative Christian homeschool world, where first-time obedience and purity culture were rampant, I was taught to distance myself from my emotions, to be afraid of them:

Don’t be angry at adults. Anger is rebellion.

Don’t look at attractive women. You will lust.

Don’t be sad. You must set an example for others.

Buddhism made me realize that emotions are. They exist. This is just a fact of life. It is ok to feel them.

When I feel attraction towards a woman, that is ok. The woman is attractive, and therefore I experience attraction.

It is ok to feel attraction.

When someone does something that is mean or unfair, I experience hurt.

It is ok to feel hurt.

While this might seem like common sense, it wasn’t common to my experience growing up. And it made me realize that this stereotype I had of Buddhists — emotional asceticism — was actually more descriptive of Christianity than Buddhism — at least the Christianity I was raised in.

It was my American Christianity, not Buddhism, that needed to be told Jesus wept and that was ok.

I owe something else to Buddhism as well, something really big. I owe Buddhism my life. While I never converted to Buddhism, I did practice meditation for that year at St. John’s. To be honest, I pretty much hated the process. I do not like sitting cross-legged, and I do not like keeping my back straight and closing my eyes for an hour. But I did it just to say I tried. And in the years since then, when my depression flares up and my suicidal tendencies become overwhelming, I always find myself going back to my Buddhist meditations.

There is nothing religious about this fact. It is, for me, purely psychological. When all else fails, when my body is shaking and all I can think about is ending my life, it is the repetition of karmapa chenno and the visualizing of running mandala beads through my hands that can get my mind re-grounded. These things — though distant memories from almost a decade ago — are lifelines back to reality when my mental health distintegrates.

Buddhism, not my American Christianity, taught me how to mentally ground myself.

On more occasions than I’d like to admit, Buddhism has saved my life.

People who have difficulty with understanding how complex the human mind is, and how complex religions actually are, would find this a terrifying prospect. You can’t be a real Christian and at the same time appreciate Buddhism, the line might go. But I am not terrified by this idea. Because I do not see Buddhism, or Christianity, as set of propositions that are either true or false. I see them as so much more than that.

I see that I cannot step foot into a Christian church (and have not been able to for years) without experiencing a panic attack. And I know that this honestly has nothing to do with the truth-propositions of Christianity. It has to do with just about everything about Christianity other than the truth-propositions. In the same way, my positive experience of Buddhism — that it has saved my life — also has little to do with truth-propositions.

This is a key part of what I mean, then, when I said in Part One that, “Religion is a complex totality of human and other elements, only one element of which is the sort of truth-claim that one can package into propositions.”

This is also a key reason why I am not ashamed in any way to say that I love more than one religion.

*****

Part Three: I Celebrate My Childlike Wonder >

Authoritarian Parenting Is Poison: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

July 18, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Authoritarian Parenting Is Poison: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

The following piece was originally published by Faith Beauchemin on her blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It is reprinted with her permission. Also by Faith Beauchemin on HA: “The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story” and “Starship Captains and Dinosaurs.”

My parents wanted to be the best parents they could be. It’s a pity that I barely even speak to them. It’s not really their fault, and I would forgive them immediately if they ever admitted their parenting had been wrong. But they defend themselves and make excuses and believe that they were doing it all to the glory of God. And if something is to God’s glory, of course it’s going to be good for every person involved.

But that’s not true at all. I suffer significant psychological and emotional distress to the point of being developmentally stunted in several ways because of my parents’ “god-centered” parenting techniques.

All the books and sermons available to my parents convinced them that their parenting techniques were correct. Multiple authors and preachers basically bullied my parents and many others like them to completely dominate and break their childrens’ wills, because total obedience was God’s plan for children and if children could not obey their parents, how would they ever know how to obey God? My parents were convinced that my eternal salvation rested on their success as parents. If they did everything right, I would follow the Lord and be happy all my days. Too bad I only started being truly happy after I left home and left the church.

In the interests of doing everything right, my parents chose to homeschool me and my siblings. This, along with the very tiny church which was our only social interaction, meant my dad’s ideas and will completely dominated every aspect of my life growing up. He passed it all off as God’s ideas and God’s will, but there was of course only one correct way to think of everything and that was my dad’s interpretation of Christianity.

As a young child, I was happy, imaginative, precocious, friendly, outgoing, intelligent, excited to explore new ideas, devouring books about dinosaurs, about history, and every story I could lay my hands on. By the time I went to college, I was quiet, depressed, frightened of everything, unable to speak in public, socially awkward to a painful degree, and self-censoring as to what ideas I was willing to even entertain or think about. I channeled my intelligence into proving the few points that I believed were true, and disproving everything else. My mind wasn’t just closed, it was completely locked down. It took four long years at college to return me partially to the outgoing, intellectually curious, adventurous personality I had lost.

My parents broke my will. They wanted to make me follow a prescribed course of life. They had a particular bundle of beliefs that they wanted me to adopt and take with me forever. Any flicker of self-interest, self-will, was seen as rebellion and immediately crushed. Any personal desire contrary to their wishes was deemed sinful, and spanked out of me. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, I never got away from my parents. I was always in their home, always dominated by their influence, their thoughts and desires. I had one channel of freedom, the books I checked out of the library. But when every other part of my life was controlled so totally, I tended to closely self-censor on what books I would read or how I would interpret them.

The adversarial form of parenting, the one which sees the child’s self as automatically opposed to the parent’s authority, is unbelievably harmful to the parent/child relationship. It took me a very long time to relate to my mom as a person rather than just an authority figure. I still can’t relate to my dad as a person, his whole being is consumed with his religion, and with trying to prioritize God in his life. He has obsessed for a long time over the fact that he’s the authority figure in the family and everyone needs to honor him, which come to think of it makes me a little worried about his mental health. He hasn’t realized that it’s wrong to put your ideology before your children. He doesn’t understand why we barely ever speak to him.

Even hearing about homeschooling families or reading materials written by people in the homeschooling or fundamentalist Christian movement can trigger flashbacks. I am still working, every day, on reclaiming my self. I wonder, sometimes, what life might have been like if I had been allowed to develop my own path instead of being forced to follow so closely my parents plan for my ideas and my life. What might I have accomplished if I hadn’t wasted the first 19 years of my life focusing all my time and energy on matching up to this ideal Christian model held up by my parents. Perfection was the goal and therefore it took all of my time and energy to try to reach that goal.

I have only just now, at age 23, begun with any kind of seriousness to figure out my place in the world. Once I realized I had spent the vast majority of my life in a tiny insular principality, ruled by my father, which had very little to do with the rest of the world, I felt completely lost. And who am I supposed to turn to to figure it out? My parents? They’re the ones who screwed up my life this badly.

I have to rely on myself, the self that was squashed and harangued and abused almost out of existence. I’ve survived, and I’ll go on to do something important and real and lasting in this world, but I will never know what could have happened in those years that are lost.

Homeschool Movement and Abuse, An Introduction

April 1, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team11 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Julie Anne Smith’s blog Spiritual Sounding Board. It was originally published on October 4, 2012.

The lawsuit from my former abusive church has come and gone and I have been doing some deep thinking — trying to figure out what brought us to that particular church — what made that church appealing to us? I had to acknowledge that this church, like other prior churches, was strongly pro-homeschooling. In fact, if you didn’t homeschool, you may not feel very comfortable there. So, it made me go back further, all the way back to the very beginning — before we started homeschooling and were investigating. What I have discovered is alarming: patriarchal teachings that are often times abusive, parenting styles that are often abusive, and ideas completely outside of mainstream Christianity are going on in the homeschool movement.

My husband and I have been married 27 years and have 7 children from 25 yrs down to our 6-yr old “caboose”. We have always homeschooled. We have always believed that this was the best choice for our family. We have been to many churches due to my husband’s military service and job changes. Many people have influenced us in our homeschooling, parenting, marriage, and our Christian life journey and right now, I am angry. I am angry about what I have discovered looking over our marriage, looking at our parenting styles over the years, looking at decisions we have made, looking at people who influenced us — people we trusted to be godly, like-minded and who wanted the best for their children and families.

If you have not been connected with the homeschool movement and click on some of these links, you might say: ”Um, yea, you drank the Kool-Aid long ago.” If you’ve been in the homeschool movement, you will probably be nodding along and can reminisce with me. I will take you on a wild journey going back through what I have experienced or seen in the past couple decades as a homeschooling mom. Here is a sampling, and not in any order, of the kinds of influences, beliefs, philosophies, practices we dealt with or were familiar with among the homeschooling movement over the years:

Why did we have so many children? How do you know when your quiver is full? Would we have had this many children if we hadn’t listened to specific teachings? Who invented the jumper dress? Why did I sometimes feel guilty if I didn’t wear my denim jumper? I no longer own a denim jumper. Who decided Gregg Harris or Michael Farris were the spokesmen for homeschoolers? Why did so many homeschoolers flock to the articles and books of Mary Pride?

Is it okay to refrain from sex to not get pregnant or is that saying “no” to God’s blessings of children? Did it really mean one isn’t trusting God if taking measures to prevent pregnancy after cycles returned 6 weeks postpartum (and round-the-clock nursing)? How many blessings of babies did I prevent by taking matters in my own hands? Is God mad at me for my “interference” of “His plan”?

What about all of those families who stop having babies after only 4 children or 2 children — are they disobeying God? Why don’t they want God’s blessings? Who is targeting the homeschooling community to convince them to pop out babies to overpopulate the world with Christians babies? Why does this same dude bombard our mailboxes right before Christmas to encourage us to buy Christmas toys (gender specific boy toys for boy and girly girl toys for girls) when their family does not celebrate this “pagan” holiday?

How did I get to the point where I believed that I may be treading dangerously if I was not a member of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association? Who would protect me if someone from school district came to my door and wanted to find out why my children weren’t attending the evil government school down the block? How many homeschool families printed out instructions on what to say to government officials if “they” came unannounced to our door to interrogate? How many of us had HSLDA phone numbers in a prominent place — just in case? Where did all of this fear come from?

Why was I corrected when I said “public” school instead of their preferred “government” school? Is there an agenda going on? Who is feeding all of this? Who decided that boys should be owning their own home businesses to support their families? Who decided that all colleges were bad until Patrick Henry College was founded by popular homeschool leaders in the “movement” and then all of a sudden it became “okay” and even “good” to send our kids away to college?

How did the homeschool movement influence my views as far as who I voted for or how involved I was in politics? How did they convince me that I was eating improperly and I needed to grind my own wheat and make my own bread? How did the homeschool community have the inside scoop before my traditional-schooled friends from church when it was going to become the end-of-life-as-we knew-it during the Y2K scare? Who brought that hype to the homeschool community? Would you like to ask me how many homeschoolers I personally know who are still going through their stockpiles of grains? Seriously!

When did I get to the point where I looked down at my friends who were Christians and either sent their children to public or private schools when “they should” be teaching their own? How did all of this happen? Why do so many homeschoolers balk at immunizations? Why are some homeschoolers so proud? Homeschooled kids were the smartest because they always won the National Spelling Bees, right? Who decided that homeschoolers should be involved with speech and debate? Why are so many families going to their state capitals and involving themselves in politics — because they were going to be the movers and shakers of world in the political arenas? And why is my husband responsible for my faith and the faith of our children? And why do we have to go through him on spiritual matters? Does God not speak directly to homeschool kids and wives?

Who told me about modesty and how I should be dressing and how my daughters should be dressing? What does modesty have to do with homeschooling? Why do all homeschool boys look alike with similar short haircuts? Who convinced me that my children could never “date”, but must only “court” and that my husband gets to choose our children’s future spouses? How did, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” become such a popular book? Who named the government as “evil” for wanting to know how our children are educated? Why do homeschoolers assume the worst when they file their “notice to intent” with their local school district?

Why do they assume that the school district secretary doesn’t want to deal with homeschoolers and will instigate more trouble by wanting more information than required by law? Who made up this purity ring ceremony — and that our teen daughters should wear their purity rings symbolizing their virginity until they replace it with their wedding ring? Who started this thing where daughters shave their fathers’ beards? Below you will see an invitation to a Father Daughter Tea from Vision Forum. Fast forward to 1:37 to see daughters shaving their fathers. Um, really?

Who decided that boys should have their homes paid for before they get married? And why are organized sports so wrong? When did Young Earth creation become a primary issue to be a Christian and that if you didn’t believe it, you might not be Christian? Why are scientists looked at as if suspect? Psychology is of the devil. What’s with all of those pictures of large families with matching clothes on the covers of homeschooling magazines? Are my children supposed to be wearing matching clothes? Who decided that was the right way to dress kids? Who decided that women should only wear dresses?

And what about those who show up at conventions with head coverings — are we bad women if we don’t have them? Who decided that family-integrated churches were better than traditional churches for our family? Why is it that homeschoolers brag about their children being able to interact and socialize well, yet you can “pick them out” a mile away because they look and act so “different”? Who has been instigating the us-vs-them mentality regarding so many of these topics? Who decided that the only job that we should be teaching our daughters is to be “keepers of the home” and serving their fathers and then serving their future husbands?

Who decided a 1/4-inch plumber’s line was an appropriate tool for spanking? Who taught us that if we had to repeat a command twice to our children, our children were being disobedient: First-Time Obedience. How did we let this group convince us that all infants should be able to go 4 hours between feedings. What single man decided that fathers were an umbrella of authority over the family below God? What same man also encouraged men and women to get vasectomies and tubal ligations reversed to allow God to control the size of their families and then paraded post-reversal children in front of the auditorium at conventions?

This is quite a diversion from spiritual abuse in the church, but I need to go there. I now believe the homeschooling movement made our spiritually abusive church seem appealing to us. Some of the above is just plain quirky, but other issues go much deeper affecting core spiritual beliefs and agendas.

My daughter, Hannah, is 25 yrs old and she was only homeschooled. The first traditional school she attended was community college and last spring she became a college graduate. Her peers were from an early generation of the growing homeschool movement. More and more blogs are being published by young adults like my daughter who are “coming out” and sharing their homeschool experiences. The stories are not pretty. My daughter has shared some of her story. And you can read the story I wrote about Hannah’s experience here. In that story, you can get an idea of the controlling environment in which she lived and how she had to escape – it remains one of the most popular blog posts.

What she experienced at home has probably gone on in many homes. I bear much responsibility for it. I went along with it. I have apologized to my daughter many times for it. The abusive church we found also aligned with these philosophies of heavy-handed control of children, even adult children. Hannah was 21 when she moved out. She was not a child, yet we thought we owned her.

I assumed (yeah, I know about that word), that when we got into homeschooling that it was a safe community — a community where children’s best interest was at heart. We wanted to have the primary influence in the education of our children. That’s good, right?

But I have discovered that there is an underlying agenda in the homeschooling community that has been there all along — even years before I started — and it continues to this day. I believe that some of this underlying current — taken to an extreme — could be responsible for breaking up families, causing abuse, wreaking havoc on people’s spiritual life.

I firmly believe that God used the lawsuit in a powerful way to highlight the issue of spiritual abuse in the church. He was there during the entire time providing amazing support for me. My life is rich having gone through it. But now I’m wondering if God is using another experience of my life to share here.

While I have spent countless hours writing blog posts about spiritual abuse in the church, I think there is a setup for spiritual abuse that originates in the homeschool movement. In our abusive church, we felt a “kindred spirit” (and all the homeschool moms just laughed at me with that phrase) in the church because of with like-minded teachings and beliefs. Some of these ideas need to be explored further.

I think it’s important to hear from these young adults who have lived it and are now trying to put the pieces together of their childhood together as they begin their families.