Lydia Schatz – Homeschoolers Anonymous

Michael Pearl’s Advice is Child Abuse (According to His Own Definition)

February 1, 2016May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team17 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Hypocrisy occurs when someone claims to have moral standards or beliefs to which their own behavior does not conform. If I tell you that treating your child with respect is important, and then instruct you to disrespect your child, I am a hypocrite.

Michael Pearl is a hypocrite.

This matters a whole lot because ever since high-profile cases of child murder like Sean Paddock, Lydia Schatz, and Hana Williams were linked to Pearl’s teachings, he has repeatedly claimed that those children’s parents did not follow his teachings correctly — that what those children’s parents did “is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of No Greater Joy Ministries.” They misinterpreted. They took it to the extreme. They were abusive, whereas he makes clear you should not abuse.

But Michael Pearl says one thing and then instructs parents to do another. Let me give you an example. This is from Pearl’s September 2001 article “In Defense of Biblical Chastisement, Part 2,” under the section, “When is it abuse?”:

If your child is broken in spirit, cowed and subdued, you have a problem.

This seems pretty straightforward — and in line with Pearl’s claim that there is a line between legitimate child training and child abuse. The standards are simple: if your child training results in your child being cowed and subdued, you have a problem. The problem? You are abusing your child. Hence this section being titled, “When is it abuse?” No Greater Joy Ministries itself lifts up this article as proof that the Pearls condemn child abuse.

Here is the catch: Michael Pearl gives the very opposite instructions elsewhere. This is from Pearl’s July 1998 article “Angry Child,” an article that addresses how to spank a so-called “angry child”:

I could break his anger in two days. He would be too scared to get angry. On the third day he would draw into a quiet shell and obey.

This also seems pretty straightforward. Michael Pearl proclaims his own self-mastery of godly child training: in two days, he can take the angriest of children and render them (1) “scared” and (2) “drawn into a quiet shell.”

Let us go back to Pearl’s definition of child abuse:

If your child is broken in spirit, cowed and subdued, you have a problem.

What does “cowed” mean? It means “scared.”

What does “subdued” mean? It means “drawn into a quiet shell.”

The very things that Pearl says are indicators of abuse are the very things Pearl says are the signs that one has mastered his techniques.

Let me give you another example. In the aforementioned “Biblical Chastisement” article, Pearl says:

You are abusing the child when it starts doing harm to the child.

Again, this is straightforward. Child training crosses the line into child abuse when you are causing damage to your child.

Now look at Pearl’s advice in the “Angry Child” article:

A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain. If he should tell you that the spanking makes him madder, spank him again. If he is still mad…. He desperately needs an unswayable authority, a cold rock of justice.

Yet again, this is straightforward. Godly child training, or “a proper spanking” as Pearl says, “leaves children without breath.”

I do not mean to get super scientific, but (1) there are no lungs in the human buttocks and (2) breathing comes naturally to a healthy child. Pain inflicted on the human buttocks will therefore only disrupt a child’s intake of oxygen by spiking the child’s stress hormones to a literally traumatic level. That is to say: to spank your child to the point that they cannot take in oxygen, you have to cause nervous system dysregulation. You must overwhelm the child’s brain with pain to the point that the brain’s ability to perform normal human functions — like breathing — become disintegrated. This is why trauma is accompanied by breathing difficulties.

If you are spanking a child to the point that they cannot breathe, you are literally harming their brain. Furthermore, you are potentially disrupting many other aspect of the child’s development. While humans in general have a need for oxygen, children are particularly in need of it. The World Health Organization notes this:

Children have a dynamic physiology that is not only turned up to “high” because of growth demands, but also vulnerable to damage during differentiation and maturation of organs and systems. Their needs for energy, water and oxygen are higher, because they go through an intense anabolic process… Children breathe more air per kilogram of body weight than adults at rest… An infant has three times the minute ventilation of an adult and a 6-year-old has double.

Let us assume, simply for the sake of argument, that spanking your child with a “cold rock of justice” is not child abuse in itself. Let us assume, simply for the sake of argument, that spanking your child repeatedly — never stopping until your child submits because Michael Pearl says in To Train Up a Child that “If you stop before he is voluntarily submissive, you have confirmed to him the value and effectiveness of a screaming protest” (p. 80) — does not cause rhambdolysis (Lydia Schatz’s cause of death). Even assuming those two points, we are still left with the fact that spanking your child until they cannot breathe does physical harm to your child.

When does Pearl say child training turns to child abuse? “When it starts doing harm to the child.”

What does Pearl say child training must do? “Leaves children without breath.”

The very things that Pearl says are indicators of abuse are the very things Pearl says are the signs that one has mastered his techniques.

Michael Pearl’s advice is child abuse according to his own definition.

Failing to Understand the Dynamics of Abuse: Focus on the Family on Adrian Peterson and Corporal Punishment

September 18, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on September 17, 2014.

Yesterday, Time Magazine’s parenting section featured an article by Focus on the Family’s Jared Pingleton. The article, titled “Spanking Can Be an Appropriate Form of Child Discipline,” addresses the controversy surrounding Adrian Peterson’s suspension from the Minnesota Vikings on pending child abuse charges after leaving open lacerations on his son. In his article, Pingleton makes a case for corporal punishment while clearly calling Peterson’s actions abuse.

Pingleton begins his article with this stand-alone sentence, in bold:

We won’t go wrong if we exercise a firm and consistent hand with a soft and loving heart.

The problem with this statement is that Peterson was exercising a “firm and consistent hand,” and he was disciplining “with a soft and loving heart.” After being taken to court for injury to a child and then suspended from his team, Peterson apologized for causing his son harm, but he was very clear initially that he did not see anything wrong with his actions—and for good reason. After administering corporal punishment to his son, Peterson texted this to the child’s mother:

Never do I go overboard! But all my kids will know, hey daddy has the biggie heart but don’t play no games when it comes to acting right.

This is exactly what Focus on the family and other groups that advocate corporal punishment promote—the argue that a parent should act from a heart full of love, but exercise a firm hand when it comes to obedience and doing what is right. Is it any wonder that Peterson felt he had done nothing wrong? Many Americans were outraged by pictures of Peterson’s son—and for good reason!—but it makesabsolutely no sense to respond to this case by stating that corporal punishment should involve “a firm and consistent hand” and “a soft and loving heart.” In Peterson’s case, it did.

A parent can have “a firm and consistent hand” and “a soft and loving heart” and still abuse their children.

Before I go on, a few words of background. My parents used corporal punishment and did everything “right,” but my experience was nevertheless negative. Today I practice positive parenting and gentle discipline with my own children. Based on my experiences and a wide array of research, I would like to see corporal punishment phased out. I consider all forms of corporal punishment ethically wrong, though it’s worth noting that I do understand that not all are equally harmful. Slapping a child on their clothed bottom in an attempt to make a point is not the same thing as striking a child with an object and leaving bruises or welts. I dislike the term “spanking” because it erases these sorts of distinctions and everyone seems to define it differently. Finally, to avoid confusion I tend to adhere to the guidelines generally followed by social services and reserve the label “abuse” for corporal punishment that causes bodily injury (i.e. bruises, welts, and worse). That is the definition I will be using throughout this post.

My concerns with Pingleton’s article are twofold. First, Pingleton others child abusers to the extent that he makes it impossible to consider that seemingly normal, loving people could be child abusers. The reality is that child abusers often get away with their actions because they can fool those around them into seeing them as kind, loving people who would never harm their children and thus can’t be child abusers. Second, Pingleton reinforces the many justifications child abusers use to defend their actions. Child abusers are rarely malicious or sadistic. More often, they believe that they are just trying to do right by their children, and that pain is how children learn. Yes, Pingleton condemns child abuse, but he seems to lack any understanding of the dynamics of abuse. If he actually understood these dynamics, he would see that his words also serve to make abusers invisible and reinforce their justifications.

Here is an example of how Pingleton others child abusers:

There is a giant chasm between a mild spanking properly administered out of love and an out-of-control adult venting their emotions by physically abusing a child.

In creating this dichotomy between abusive and nonabusive parents, Pingleton is clearly putting Adrian Peterson’s actions in the “out of control adult venting their emotions by physically abusing a child” category. But there has been no indication that Peterson was out of control (i.e. that Peterson was not in careful control of his actions the entire time) or that he was venting his emotions (Peterson has been clear that the punishment was administered to teach his child to not shove other children). Pingleton is trying to shove Adrian Peterson into a child abuse box he has fashioned many sizes too small, because he doesn’t understand who child abusers are or how they operate.

The reality is that there is no “chasm” between “mild spanking properly administered out of love” and “an out-of-control adult venting their emotions by physically abusing a child.”

Instead, there is a sliding scale. There is also no clear and obvious line between a “spanking” and a “beating.” This is what corporal punishment advocates like Pingleton miss. Adrian Peterson was not on one side of this scale or the other—he was somewhere in between. Different people put the line between acceptable parental behavior and abuse at different points on that line, as is made obvious by the fact that some Americans have defended Peterson’s actions as not abusive. This idea that there is a “chasm” between reasonable discipline and child abuse is nonsense.

We often have this caricature of a child abuser in our mind—out of control, angry—and while some abusers do fit that profile others do not. But when we believe abusers look like this caricature we have created, we create a situation where Adrian Peterson can still insist that he is not a child abuser—because he does not look like that. But the reality is that child abusers often don’t look like that at all. In fact, sometimes they look like this:

This idea that child abusers are some sort of monsters and that normal, loving people do not abuse their children a serious, serious problem.

It allows us to miss and overlook very real abuse because the perpetrators are nice, and smile, and say the right things. The reality is that abusers are very good at fooling others and looking picture perfect, and if we don’t understand that we will be likely to brush warning signs under the rug when they do appear.

Pingleton goes on:

It is vital, however, that spanking be administered within proper guidelines. The reports about the punishment meted out by Peterson to his son, and the consequent injuries his son suffered, indicate his behavior on that occasion was far outside those boundaries.

If this is what he wants to argue, Pingleton needs to drop his whole “we won’t go wrong if we exercise a firm and consistent hand with a soft and loving heart” schtick, because Peterson followed that short line of advice and did go wrong. Does Pingleton seriously think that parents who abuse their children don’t believe in being firm and consistent and administering discipline out of love? Does he not know that most parents who abuse their children say things like “this is for your own good” and “I’m only doing this because I love you”? Is he unaware that child abusers say things like “children need a firm hand” and “we have to be consistent”?

I’m glad that Pingleton recognizes that Adrian Peterson abused his child, but I’m troubled by his total lack of understanding of why it happened. He seems completely unaware that what he thinks is a caution against abuse—”we won’t go wrong if we exercise a firm and consistent hand with a soft and loving heart”—is in fact the very argument Peterson used to insist that there was nothing wrong with what he did when he left his son with open lacerations. If Pingleton wants to protect children from being abused, he needs to stop making abuse-enabling statements like that.

That Pingleton has no understanding of the dynamics of abuse is bizarre given that he is the director of Focus on the Family’s counseling program.

Pingleton goes on to give some guidelines for appropriate corporal punishment. He says that it should only be used in “cases of willful disobedience or defiance of authority,” and that “a child should always receive a clear warning” first and understand why they are being punished. The punishment should take place in a private area and should be “lovingly administered” and should not involve “the potential to cause physical harm.” Afterwards, the child should be told once again why they were punished, to ensure that they understand and have learned the intended lesson.

From what I have read, it appears that the only point where Peterson did not follow Pingleton’s advice was in causing physical harm—the open lacerations. But once again, the line here is less obvious that Peterson thinks. My own mother carefully followed the guidelines Pingleton laid out, but she did on very rare occasions leave bruises or welts, and on one occasion she drew blood with a switch. She nevermeant to leave bruises or welts, and certainly never intended to draw blood that one time. But when you’re hitting your child’s soft, bare bottom with a wooden paddle or a switch cut from a tree (my mother used both), it’s harder to make sure you don’t leave bruises, welts, or cuts than one might think. And as Peterson has said many times, he never intended to leave open lacerations—he did not realize that the switch he used would do that much damage to his son’s skin.

What I’m trying to point out is that while Pingleton thinks he is drawing an obvious and simple line between abuse and appropriate discipline, the line he is drawing is not nearly as obvious or clear as he thinks. A parent following Pingleton’s guidelines for administering corporal punishment can leave marks on a child completely unintentionally. After all, striking a child naturally involves some risk of harm. Lydia Schatz’s parents used a plastic switch to administer corporal punishment. This switch broke down the girl’s muscle tissue, and when fragments of muscle tissue entered her bloodstream it caused liver failure.

Lydia’s parents never intended for this to happen and in fact had no idea it could happen, but Lydia still died.

Later on in his article, Pingleton makes it very clear that corporal punishment should hurt. After explaining that parents have a responsibility to discipline their children, Pingleton quotes from the Bible:

No discipline seems enjoyable at the time, but painful. Later on however, it yields the fruit of peace and righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:11)

Pingleton argues that teaching children right from wrong should hurt—even that it must hurt—but that it’s for the child’s own good and will yield longterm fruits. This idea that discipline has to hurt, but will pay off in the long run—this was also part of Adrian Peterson’s justification for his actions. Whether Pingleton realizes this or not (and given his understanding of the dynamics of abuse it is likely that he does not), this is yet another argument commonly used by abusers—what they’re doing should hurt, they say, because that’s the only way the child will learn their lesson.

In his texts to his son’s mother, Peterson explained that the reason he went on for so long was that the child did not cry. He took that as an indication that he wasn’t hitting hard enough to get the message across—because getting the message across had to involve pain. Because of his belief that correcting his child’s actions must involve pain, Peterson denied that he had done anything wrong.

Pingleton ends his article with this paragraph:

Parenting is a hard job. None of us do it perfectly. And to make it even more challenging, none of our kids come with an instruction manual attached. But our children need us to do it to the best of our ability, with all the wisdom, love, gentleness and strength we can muster. We won’t go wrong if we exercise a firm and consistent hand with a soft and loving heart.

Pingleton finishes with the same sentence with which he began. He clearly wants to emphasize it. Pingleton says over and over again that abuse is a tragedy and is wrong, wrong, wrong, but he does not seem to recognize that his own words are inadvertently reinforcing child abusers’ justifications for their actions. Does he not realize that child abusers say things like “I’m only trying to make them a better person“? How is he unaware that child abusers say things like “pain is how children learn“?

Ultimately, this is one of my biggest problem with the arguments made by advocates of corporal punishment. Most of their arguments in favor of corporal punishments are the same arguments used by child abusers to justify their abuse. Their only caution against abuse appears to be clarifying that corporal punishment should be administered out of love rather than anger, but this plays into incorrect stereotypes about what child abuse looks like and is less helpful than they seem to think. Suggesting that parents use their own judgement to make sure they don’t go to far is equally unhelpful.

Most child abusers tell their children they are doing this because they love them, and most would deny that they’ve gone too far, or that they ever intend to harm their children.

How can Pingleton not see how his own words can be used to justify not only corporal punishment he considers appropriate but also actual child abuse? How can he not see that child abusers are not all evil monsters venting their anger on their children, and that suggesting that there is a huge “chasm” between child abusers and other parents serves to keep parents from self reflection and prevent people from seeing child abuse right in front of their eyes? How can he be Focus on the Family’s head of counselingand not see this?

This Present Darkness: A Review of M Dolon Hickmon’s “13:24”

April 14, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

* Read our exclusive interview with M Dolon Hickmon and enter our 13:24 Giveaway. *

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

The highest praise I can give M Dolon Hickmon’s debut novel is a trigger warning: While I believe that everyone everywhere needs to read this book, I must urge those with a history of physical or sexual abuse to approach this title with care. I personally had a nervous breakdown after I finished it; I couldn’t breathe because it felt like someone had punched me in the gut. And I could not console myself by saying, “This is fiction.” It isn’t, as anyone who has experienced child abuse will recognize.

In his prologue, the author explains his intentional use of real-life parallels, based on his childhood experiences and research into religiously-motivated child abuse. Also examined are the intersections between child trafficking rings, physical and sexual abuse, and fundamentalist cults. Woven with fictional elements, these create the book’s complex, dark, and brutal narrative.

13:24 is the story of two young men: Josh, a rising rock star, and Chris, the neglected teenaged son of a drug addict. Their stories begin distinct and distant, but as the novel develops, their pasts—and futures—are revealed to be connected in ways that both shock and disturb.

The story opens on a gruesome murder. While the body count rises, questions multiply as a small-town detective chases Chris as a murder suspect. Along the way, readers encounter events and characters with uncanny real-life parallels: Josh has flashbacks of being abused by his minister father, who resembles Michael Pearl and advocates harsh physical punishment; in another thread, a controversial parenting manual is linked to a spate of discipline-related deaths, bringing to mind real-life cases, like those of Hana Williams and Lydia Schatz. Elsewhere, an imprisoned child abuser is freed through the efforts of a “homeschool legal defense fund”, reminiscent of the Home School Legal Defense Association. At the same time, an oily “Christian psychologist” heads a James Dobson-esque media empire, with tendrils in state and national politics.

13:24 may be fiction, but it describes the lives of any number of people I have known. In its imagery, I recognize moments that friends and colleagues have breathed and suffered through. That is what made this novel so hard for me to read.

The book exposes what many religious and homeschooled children experience every day. Readers witness their pain and hear their cries. We see their misery multiplied when it is justified in the name of God; we see their tragedies covered up to save face and preserve religious “freedom”. And unlike a Frank Peretti novel, there are no angels rushing in to the save the day. We must pick up the pieces and fight this present darkness.

Despite the darkness, 13:24 has a poetic beauty. That beauty is in the narrative symmetry: a murder begins it and a murder concludes it. While death marks where the story begins and ends, there is a profound shift in what those deaths mean. This is the power of Hickmon’s prose: he delves deep into pain, into what he has described in his subtitle as “faith and obsession,” and shows us the human faces behind news headlines’ “monsters.”

13:24 is not easy reading. It is neither uplifting nor redemptive. It will crack your heart open, set your blood on fire, and turn your screams into music. Most significantly, the characters’ actions are neither justified nor condemned by the author. He simply allows them to exist. In doing so, Hickmon gives readers an uncommon gift: a brief look behind the curtain of tragedy, a fleeting chance to understand a little more than we did.

“Biblical” Parenting: A Review of Reb Bradley’s “Child Training Tips”

October 7, 2013May 13, 2020HA Editorial Team16 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Latebloomer’s blog Past Tense Present Progressive. It was originally published on August 22, 2012.

*****

Also in this series: Part One: Introduction | Part Two: A Parent Who Assumes The Worst | Part Three: An Extremely Controlling Parent | Part Four: A Parent Who Tries to Change Minds and Hearts through Spanking | Part Five: A Parent Who Isolates In Order to Control | Part Six: Concluding Thoughts

*****

Part One: Introduction

Every once in a while, I realize something shockingly obvious, something that confronts yet another false assumption that has managed to cling to my mind even as I’ve moved further and further away from my fundamentalist Christian roots.

In the whole Bible, there is not a single verse that credits parents for having raised a good child.

Nothing from God, nothing from any adult sons or daughters in the Bible. Not one word of thanks, not one word of credit.

It would be easy to insert a few parental credit verses into the Bible. Maybe we could add a little phrase here or there in the Old Testament, such as “King David, because of his godly parents,” or “Moses, thanks to his childhood training;” or maybe we could stick something in the New Testament epistles: “The fruit of the Spirit and of spanking is self-control.” No? Perhaps the Gospels then? Maybe Jesus on the cross could say something like, “I couldn’t have gotten where I am today without the support of my godly mother Mary. There she is, people. Let’s give her a round of applause!“

But those verses are not there.

So why do fundamentalist Christian parents today feel they have so much control over their children’s destinies?

Why do they think that they can help their child get closer to God by getting in the middle? Why do they put so much pressure on themselves, considering themselves failures if their children grow up to take a different path?

In the homeschooling circles that I was raised in, many of these unhealthy ideas about parenting came from several books that claimed to be about true “Biblical” parenting. First on the market was a 1979 book by Richard Fugate, called “What the Bible Says About Child Training.” Fugate’s book appears to have inspired two other books that surpassed his own book in popularity: Michael Pearl’s 1994 “To Train Up A Child” and Reb Bradley’s 1995 “Child Training Tips.”

Based on these books, the small collection of homeschooling families who attended Reb Bradley’s church Hope Chapel along with my family had high hopes for their children. Yet in the dozen years since, many sincere and dedicated parents have seen all their work fall apart before their very eyes as their children reached adulthood, or even earlier.

I am one of many who didn’t “turn out right,” yet another disappointment to the former parents and leadership of Hope Chapel.

Everyone responds a little differently to poor results. Some, like Michael Pearl, laugh at the critics and refuse to self-reflect at all. Others, like Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who were just young parents when we attended Hope Chapel together in the late 1990s, apparently felt that they could avoid poor results by doubling down in intensity on poor little Lydia Schatz, who was disciplined to death in 2010 at age 7.

Of all these responses, I find Reb Bradley’s 2006 blind spots article, “Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling”, to be the most promising because it represents a very small step in the right direction. Here is a quote from the introduction to the article, in which Reb Bradley acknowledges the unexpectedly poor results:

“In the last couple of years, I have heard from multitudes of troubled homeschool parents around the country, a good many of whom were leaders. These parents have graduated their first batch of kids, only to discover that their children didn’t turn out the way they thought they would. Many of these children were model homeschoolers while growing up, but sometime after their 18th birthday they began to reveal that they didn’t hold to their parents’ values.

Some of these young people grew up and left home in defiance of their parents. Others got married against their parents’ wishes, and still others got involved with drugs, alcohol, and immorality. I have even heard of several exemplary young men who no longer even believe in God. My own adult children have gone through struggles I never guessed they would have faced.

Most of these parents remain stunned by their children’s choices, because they were fully confident their approach to parenting was going to prevent any such rebellion. Some were especially confident, because as teens these kids were only obedient. Needless to say, the dreams of these homeschool parents have crashed, and many other parents want to know what they can do to prevent their own children from following the same course.”

When I first scanned over many of his points in that article, I was encouraged by the things I saw; acknowledgement that parents don’t have total control over their children’s destinies, a de-emphasis on authority, and a much-needed emphasis on relationship and acceptance.

If only there weren’t this little paragraph at the end of the introduction [emphasis mine]:

“After several years of examining what went wrong in our own home and in the homes of so many conscientious parents, God has opened our eyes to a number of critical blind spots common to homeschoolers and other family-minded people. Bev and I still stand behind what we have taught on parenting in the past. However, we urgently add to it the following insights.”

It is because of that sentence, and because of my own desire as a new mother to deliberately throw out the unhealthy ideas of parenting that I was raised with and around, that I have decided to write a critical review of Reb Bradley’s book “Child Training Tips: What I Wish I Knew When My Children Were Young.”

My critique will be posted in several installments online for the purposes of discussion, and I welcome any comments or feedback from the authors, from parents who have used this parenting approach, from now-grown children who experienced these techniques, from parents who are considering using it, or from horrified online bystanders.

*****

To be continued.

Being Told “The Child Will Not Die”: Heather Doney’s Story

September 18, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team10 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Heather Doney’s blog Becoming Worldly. It was originally published on November 19, 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.

*****

Recently my Mom told me something that shook me to my core. She said, “Your father said if you disciplined a child according to the bible, they would not die.” Then she told me she recognized the Pearls’ book “To Train Up A Child.”

It all got brought up because my 10 year old brother likes to give lots of hugs of his own accord, and my Mom and I were talking about how nice that is, how sweet of a boy he is, and she said she wished her older sons, now 25 and 22, were as loving and kind to her as her youngest. This started one heck of a conversation.

I reminded my Mom that her youngest had never been told to pull down his pants and bend over the bed, knowing he’d end up with welts on the behind. He had never known what it was like to get hit with a belt or a wooden stick by his own mother. Also, today she instructs him that if our father says or does anything mean during visitation, he is to tell her right away because that is not allowed.

But she used to tell us kids the opposite.

It was “wait until your father gets home,” then when he arrived, she’d run to the door with a verbal list of our transgressions, expecting him to beat us. I said the older boys likely felt differently about her not because they weren’t as nice, but because they were still responding to the environment and experiences she had helped create, the memories they had. It was the same case with me too, and that’s one reason us older kids have a rocky relationship with our mother.

We didn’t ever have as much trust or respect because of the abuse.

My Mom does not take as much responsibility for what took place as I would like, but she said she was glad that violence wasn’t going on in her home anymore. She regretted it had ever happened. She wished the older boys and I could move on past it now, “be more respectful,” and that I could work to overcome my bitterness.

I said that I thought she shouldn’t be so cavalier about us just getting over it, that she didn’t know what it was like to have to move on past such a thing. She’d only got one spanking in her life as a kid. She said I was right about that part, that she had not been familiar with corporal punishment until she married my father. Dad had told her that spankings were the right kind of discipline required by the bible. At the time she didn’t know anything about them. Then she told me the thing about Dad saying children would not die if they were disciplined by parents following the bible in their use of corporal punishment.

I understood what she meant as I stood there, numbly recalling the effects this perspective had had on my own childhood and on others I knew of in similar situations. The idea was you could beat a child until their will was broken, until they submitted, until they were bruised, bloody, and mentally and physically injured —

— and you could do so feeling confident that the child would not be at risk of dying from this because they were being beaten in a Christian way.

It was a spiritual thing, almost like a belief in miracles. The normal rules of the physical world were suspended. The kind of beating that might kill a child if it was administered by say, an atheist or a Muslim, would simply not have the same effect if done by a bible-believing Christian.

Yeah, unfathomable, right?

I could honestly have just gone and curled up in bed the rest of the afternoon after hearing this, but I said, “Mom, I want to show you something — an interview about a little girl that did die from this.” She said, “Really?” — like she still half-believed my father, or at least wanted to. We sat down together and I pulled up the Anderson Cooper interview with Michael Pearl about little Lydia Schatz’s beating and murder. Even though watching this stuff with my Mom was so weird and so many more mixed emotions than I’d even expected, I was calm about it until the audio interview with one of the other Schatz daughters, Zariah, came up.

Zariah answered questions about where and how she was beaten in the clear, crisp, enunciated, submissive, and painstakingly polite way Quiverfull girls are generally taught to speak. After all, the beating that resulted in Lydia’s death had supposedly been for mispronouncing a word. The policeman seemed very kind and gentle with Lydia’s sister on each question he asked. The he requested her permission to bring her to the hospital.

She responded by apologetically asking if she could take a pot with her because she might need to throw up.

Her sister had just been beaten to death in her home, in front of her. She herself was covered in welts and marks from regular beatings, and she politely asked for one simple logical thing we all might need in such a situation – a bucket to puke in.

Right then I just started crying. I couldn’t help it, and my Mom started crying too when she saw me cry. She touched my hand and said how terrible it was for those poor girls. Then when the video switched to a close up of Mr. and Mrs. Schatz being found guilty of murder, my Mom caught her breath, kinda stopped short, and said “Oh, she looks like me.” She was talking about Mrs. Schatz, and there was a definite resemblance. Not particularly in the shape of their faces or anything, but the results of the lifestyle. Both are brunettes with kinda lackluster home-cut hair. No makeup. A tired, exhausted, almost empty look from years of stresses, disappointments, fears, frustrations, frugally going without necessities, and the visible emotional weight of internally and externally perceived failure.

Mrs. Schatz sat there, resigned at sentencing, showing no emotions but shame and resignation, possibly dissociation.

I said “Yeah, Mom. She lived like you.” My Mom seemed shocked, not really sure what to do with this, and then said something else that didn’t surprise me as much as I might have expected it would.

She said, “You know, when you asked me before if I’d read that book ‘To Train Up A Child,’ I said I didn’t remember it. Well I think I did read it actually. I remember seeing that picture on the front, the book cover with the carriage. I’d borrowed it from someone, I think.” Then she said that she didn’t really remember the contents of the book, or recall anything that bad in it, so the Schatz family must have just taken it too far. When I told her that there were other accounts of this book being the catalyst for children being abused and even killed, reminded her that the “spankings” in our home were also very bad, she responded that the book itself wasn’t the bible, so “maybe it wasn’t properly based off of the bible and was a misinterpretation or mistake, a perversion of God’s word. That happens more often than it should.”

I said, “Yeah, Mom. I think it was.”

So now my Mom has a scientific experiment in front of her, even though mainstream science has already determined hitting kids is bad for them, and that such so-called “Christian discipline” is unhealthy stuff. She can see from the differences among her own offspring that beating children generally results in fierce anger and mistrust and makes children more prone to lashing out, being sneaky, or making impulsive decisions that hurt other people and themselves. Hitting kids exacerbates “behavioral problems” rather than correcting them. She has seen from personal experience that explaining things and redirecting misbehaving children gently, never threatening violence, will result in a child not only being more likely to happily agree to do what you have asked of them, but a child that likes to hug you, spend time with you, and is comfortable with openly feeling and expressing love for you and closeness with you.

Sometimes I find myself surprised at how much love my younger siblings show my Mom because that simply wasn’t my world at that age.

I loathed her much of the time, even hated her sometimes. Once I hit my teens and got bigger and taller than her, I regularly called her all kinds of names and openly let her know just how much she disgusted me. The younger kids, most now young adults or teens, don’t do that and it doesn’t seem to even cross their minds that often. My relationship with my Mom now is the best it’s ever been and it still isn’t great. She still does a lot of things that I thoroughly disagree with, and it is very easy to find myself impatient or angry with her. But I do notice that she feels grateful to have a chance to be a mother without things being like how they were with us oldest ones.

I am glad that she has had this second chance and that my younger siblings have had a much different upbringing.

My Mom has experienced the pain of what it’s like to have her firstborn children fearing, hating, and despising her at a visible level, and the joy of having her lastborn children write her notes and cards with hearts on them, of their own accord. No wonder she’d dream of sharing that same bond with her older children and no wonder it has not happened to her liking.

Shame on Michael Pearl for calling his collection of books “No Greater Joy Ministries.”

If it was named accurately it would be “No Greater Pain and Fear Ministries.” I’m glad my mother finally saw the error of characterizing these abusive behaviors as “good Christian discipline” methods. I wish my father would too, for my half-brother’s sake. My Dad has supposedly “toned it down” but obviously this doesn’t leave me feeling comfortable or like my brother is safe. He deserves better than to be threatened with a belt or a stick, even if the “spankings” themselves are milder than what I got or perhaps never materialize at all.

I have a hard time believing my Dad really thought children couldn’t die from these things, but perhaps he did, and either way he bought into it on some level and told a horrible lie.

I do not have proof of this, but I am betting it was not his own lie, but a lie commonly passed around in Quiverfull/patriarchal/Christian fundamentalist circles. It just seems to fit in this puzzle too well. So I hope more people will become aware that some parents actually believe or profess to believe such nonsense, and that as the Schatz family case and Lydia’s death can starkly attest, children can and do die from sustained beatings by bible-believing Christian parents, and there are way too many stories eerily similar to hers.

Although my experiences seem like small potatoes compared to the treatment Lydia and the other Schatz siblings endured, I can say from personal experience that being hit and regularly threatened with beatings can and often does seriously injure you. I am fairly healthy overall, but I have a pinched nerve in my back and a knee that painfully pops out of place sometimes. Although this hasn’t been more than a minor inconvenience in my life, both issues have bothered me off and on since my teens. I never played sports as a kid or fell out of trees or got in a bad car accident, and I have trouble remembering the details of what happened during beatings, apparently due to dissociation. It took a friend recently putting two and two together to make me realize that the likely source of these injuries was the violence in my childhood home. I can say with certainty that being hit, and being ordered to submit or chased down and grabbed before the beating, generally leaves you with more emotional injuries than physical ones, forcing you to deal with certain types of self-esteem struggles and anger and aggression problems even if you go on to what looks like a normal or even better-than-average life.

My siblings and I are so lucky though.

Thankfully, even though us older kids lived through the experiences we did and still deal with the after-effects of being subject to this type of abusive and neglectful parenting during our formative years, we have all survived and are doing our best to overcome this. We are doing our best to enjoy our lives and function better as individual people and as a family.

Poor little Lydia Schatz and her family will never have that same chance.

She lost her life in an absolutely horrible and senseless way; her siblings were brutalized and her family torn apart. Her parents learned a little too late that children definitely can die from this stuff no matter how much you pray in between the beatings.

Hopefully the popular outcry against the Pearls’ books and perspective can educate Christian parents and stop this stuff from happening to other children.

To Break Down a Child: A Call for Stories about Pearl-Style Discipline

September 10, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team18 Comments

To Break Down a Child: A Call for Stories about Pearl-Style Discipline

By Shaney Lee, HARO Board Member

*****

Hana Williams.

Sean Paddock.

Lydia Schatz.

What do these three children have in common? All of their deaths were linked to the abusive teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl in their book To Train Up A Child.

If you weren’t homeschooled growing up, it’s possible, even probable, that you’ve never heard the names Michael and Debi Pearl before. Their success with their publishing efforts are largely due to word-of-mouth through fundamentalist Christian churches and homeschooling communities.

It is estimated that over 670,000 copies of To Train Up A Child are in circulation. That’s at least 670,000 too many. Much of that word of mouth has largely been enabled through homeschooling communities. Their books have been prominently featured in the homeschool editions of Christian Book Distributor’s catalogues, been recommended on homeschooling forums, and handed from parent to parent at homeschooling conventions (not to mention sold in some of the booths).

The Pearls don’t just advocate spanking as a method of child discipline. They advocate a method of discipline that puts the child’s will in direct defiance of God’s will and of the parents’ will, that makes the breaking of a child’s will the ultimate goal of child discipline, and that puts parents in a position to believe that if they are not 100% successful in their discipline, they risk their child’s very soul.

And yet, when these teachings are linked to the death of multiple children, there are thousands who speak up in defense of the Pearls’ teachings.

Enough is enough.

It is time for those of us familiar with the teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl to speak up and speak against these abusive methods. It’s time to show that the damage of the Pearls’ method goes beyond just a few parents who got out of control. It’s time to show that it’s justifiable for the Pearls’ teachings to be linked to these horrible outcomes.

If you were raised with the Pearls’ methods, it’s your time to speak. If you’ve read the Pearls’ books and are against what they teach, it’s your time to speak. If you are a parent who previously used the Pearls’ methods, it’s your time to speak.

Even if you’re not normally a fan of what Homeschoolers Anonymous does, I ask you to join us for this series.

Because this issue is bigger than any disagreements we might have about homeschooling. It’s about preventing another Lydia, or Hana, or Sean.

This is not about whether spanking is a legitimate form of discipline (that’s a whole ‘nother discussion in and of itself!). This is about taking a public stand against a method of teaching that is extremely harmful towards children. Any system of childrearing that views children as rebellious little souls whose wills needs to be broken — rather than as small humans who are learning to live and thrive in the world — dehumanizes children and will always be harmful in the end.

Hana, Sean, and Lydia can’t speak up for themselves. It’s up to us to do it for them, to stand up for children who still have a chance. While it is the homeschooling community that has largely enabled the Pearls, I strongly believe it is the homeschooling community that is most equipped to fight against their abusive teaching.

So let’s stand up for our children. They deserve better.

*****

To contribute your story or thoughts:

As always, you can contribute anonymously or publicly.

If you interested in participating in this, please email us at homeschoolersanonymous@gmail.com.

The deadline for submission is September 15, 2013.

The Breaking of a Child, A Story of Near Disaster

May 30, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team15 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on April 25, 2013.

*****

The next day was Tuesday. Hope did not say please and so did not have breakfast, lunch, or her bottle. By late afternoon Hope had gone for forty-eight hours—two straight days—with nothing to eat or drink but a single six ounce bottle of milk. By that time she was beginning to act strangely. Her usual vivaciousness had disappeared, replaced with a sort of melancholy. She lay on the couch listlessly, uninterested in playing or even reading books.

*****

I’ve hesitated from sharing this story because of how personal it is, but I think it needs to be told because it illustrates perfectly the danger of the Pearls’ teachings. See, when I first read about the death of Lydia Schatz, my immediate thought was that I understood how something like that could have happened. The Schatzes followed the discipline methods of Michael and Debi Pearl, who teach parents to view their relationship with their children as a battle for dominance that they must win. Once a contest is started, the Pearls say, you can’t back down. You can’t blink. My parents are also Pearl followers, and there was one time when a situation got similarly out of hand, but in their case, mercifully, they blinked. Their basic humanity got to them and overrode the Pearls’ advice; they got scared by what was happening, by what they were doing to their child, and they backed down.

My parents didn’t follow the Pearls’ discipline methods because they wanted to do us harm—they followed them because they wanted what was best for us. When the Pearls’ discipline manual came to them highly recommended by their Christian homeschooling friends, they read it and found its reliance on Bible verses and (simplistic) theological arguments convincing. The Christian homeschooling movement puts parents under intense pressure to turn out perfect children, and in that environment books like this seem to make sense. But even the best of intentions can have disastrous results—and that is what the Pearls’ book does, it takes parents’ best intentions and spins them into something twisted.

In general, my parents’ adherence to the Pearls’ discipline methods meant that we children were not allowed to show a spark of defiance toward them and were expected to be 110% obedient 110% of the time. Bad attitudes were not allowed, and obedience was expected to be immediate, complete, cheerful, and without complaint—anything short of that was disobedience. When we were disobedient or defiant—or were seen as being disobedient or defiant—we were spanked with a wooden paddle until we were sorry, repentant, and compliant. We learned quickly that things were easiest for us if we just rolled over quickly, so we generally did.

But the story I want to tell here is the time my parents ended up in a battle of the wills with one of my sisters, Hope, who was only eighteen months old at time—a contest of the wills that quickly spun out of control. Now I say that there was a contest of the wills, but I actually think it was a one-sided contest—I think my sister was confused and bewildered, not defiant or rebellious. But it didn’t matter. Her actions were interpreted as rebellion and that was all that mattered. This story is illustrative of the danger of the Pearls’ child rearing methods.

It all started one Sunday at supper time. Hope had recently gained the ability to lisp a little “peez,” so my parents held her plate of food out to her as she sat in her high chair and asked her to say please before they would give it to her. They weren’t trying to make any special sort of point or anything, just to teach her to be polite and ask nicely for things. But for some reason, she wouldn’t do it, and my parents interpreted that as a sign of willfulness on her part. They told her she couldn’t have her supper unless she said please—so she sat and went without, watching us eat our warm spaghetti, steaming garlic bread, and fresh spinach salad as the delicious smells wafted over her high chair.

Hope no longer breastfed, but my parents still gave her bottles of milk. That evening my mother bathed Hope along with the two or three siblings closest in age to her, and then dressed her in her warm footie pajamas. Then, as usual, she prepared a bottle, this time asking her to say please. But Hope would not say please. After some cajoling, my mother reluctantly snuggled her into bed in her crib, empty stomach and all.

In order to explain the mindset my parents were operating on here, I’m going to quote directly from Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child (p. 11):

Be Assured of Two Things

First, almost every small child will have at least one time in his life when he will rebel against authority and attempt to take hold of the reins…. This act of stubbornness is profound—amazing—a wonder that one so young could be so dedicated and persevering in rebellion. It is the kind of determination you would expect to find in a hardened revolutionary facing enemy indoctrination classes. Parents who are trained to expect it, and are prepared to persevere, will still be awed at the strength of the small child’s will.

Second, if you are consistent in training, this attempt at total dominance will come only once in a child’s life, usually around two years old. If you win the confrontation, the child wins the game of character development. If you weaken and allow the child to dominate, the child loses everything but his will to dominate. You must persevere for the sake of the child. His will to dominate must be dominated by the rule of law (that’s you.)

Based on the Pearls’ teachings, my parents believed that they were now engaged in a contest of wills with Hope, a contest of wills that revolved around her refusal to say “please.” If they gave in and let her get away with that refusal, they believed, all would be lost, and much damage done. On the other hand, if they won the contest, they would put Hope on the path to a happy, healthy, and productive life. They could not lose. They could not back down. They had to conquer Hope’s will and refuse to let her dominate them.

The next morning at breakfast, Hope was put in her high chair, dressed in fresh clothes and hair tied up in a bow, and offered food—a warm bowl of oatmeal topped with brown sugar—if she would say please. But for whatever reason, Hope would not say please. So once again, she watched us eat while getting nothing for herself. And later that morning she was once again offered a bottle on the condition that she must say please, and once again she did not say it, so once again she went without. Lunch came and passed—peanut butter jelly sandwiches with pretzels and carrots—still without a please.

We children began to see it as a challenge—a challenge to do whatever we could to get Hope to comply and say please. We kept her bottle handy and again and again over the course of the day we offered it to her, urging her to comply and say please. In between our attempts we got out her toys and played with her, enjoying her babyish smiles. Finally, sometime that afternoon, Hope lisped out something that sounded vaguely like a little “peez” and was therefore given the bottle. She drank it down—all six ounces of milk—as though she was famished, which of course she was. By that time she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in twenty-four hours.

But then supper came and Hope once again would not say please for her food. Once again she sat in her high chair and watched us eat, unable to avoid the aroma—and my mom is a very good cook. Once snuggled into her pajamas, Hope was again offered a night time bottle—and again she would not say please. My parents concluded that while they may have won one battle—she had surrendered her will and had said please for a bottle that afternoon—the war was still on, and they must win it. And so Hope went to bed hungry, having only had a single six ounce bottle of milk that entire day. As she read a bedtime book to my small siblings, Hope among them, I could tell that my mom was concerned—but determined.

My parents did not feel that they were starving Hope, because they were quick to offer her food—and tasty, tempting food—if she would only say please. Their interpretation of what was happening was that Hope had gone on a hunger strike, a hunger strike she could end at any time by simply obeying and saying please. The problem wasn’t with them or their actions, it was an internal battle within Hope. All Hope had to do was to stop being rebellious and submit her will to theirs, and it would be over.

The next day was Tuesday. Hope did not say please and so did not have breakfast, lunch, or her bottle. By late afternoon Hope had gone for forty-eight hours—two straight days—with nothing to eat or drink but a single six ounce bottle of milk. By that time she was beginning to act strangely. Her usual vivaciousness had disappeared, replaced with a sort of melancholy. She lay on the couch listlessly, uninterested in playing or even reading books. I sat and held her in my arms, worried. My siblings were worried too, but Hope seemed barely aware of our attempts to coax her to say please, offering a bottle as a reward.

I knew nothing other than the Pearls’ discipline methods, and had been taught since I was small that if parents didn’t break their children’s wills while small, those children would grow up to be miserable and unhappy. I believed all of this. This entire situation, then, was confusing for me, because I saw the pain my sister was in but I still believed in the system, still believed that her pain was justified and necessary. If only she would just say please, I thought. But another voice nagged me: Is she even able to anymore? What happens if she doesn’t? When will this end? And yet, I didn’t do anything. I wish now that I had—that I had secreted her some food and water, or attempted to intercede with my parents. I wish that my sense of compassion had overridden my brainwashing and belief in the system. But it didn’t.

That evening Hope didn’t say please for either supper or a bottle. She acted tired and didn’t make eye contact, so mom put her to bed early. By this time, my parents were becoming extremely concerned about the situation. In some sense, they were stuck. They believed, based on the Pearls, that if they gave in and gave Hope food or a bottle they would be allowing her to conquer them—they would be submitting their will to hers rather than the other way around. The Pearls teach that even giving in once—just once—will set back everything that had been gained and even threaten to ruin the child forever. And yet, here was their eighteen-month-old daughter, still toddling and barely starting to lisp words, wasting away before their eyes. The atmosphere was tense, and I think in retrospect that they were frightened.

The next morning, everything was different.

See, that night my mother had a dream. She dreamed that Hope died, and that Child Protective Services was called to investigate, and that they took the rest of us children away. They say that dreams are our subconscious processing and regurgitating, and I think this was an obvious case of that. But my mother’s interpretation was different. She told us that the dream was sent by God, sent to tell her to give in and feed Hope, give her her bottle, and end the contest. Thankfully, Hope was still strong enough to eat and take a bottle, and her recovery didn’t take long.

My mother’s dream gave my parents an out—an opportunity to give in and cede what they saw as a contest of wills even though the Pearls strongly advised parents against ever doing this. Yet my parents did not reject the Pearls wholesale. Believing they couldn’t end the contest entirely, they instead changed the requirement—they now asked that Hope say please only for snacks or dessert, withholding them if she did not. About three days after they ended the main contest, Hope lisped “peez” for a Popsicle, and regularly did so for snacks and desserts after that. Part of me wonders if it was a developmental thing, and if my parents assumed she was able to say please on command a week or so before she was actually able to.

This story illustrates the way the Pearls’ teachings can lead parents to become caught up in real or perceived contests of the will with their children, and result in those contests spiraling out of control. When parents believe that they can’t back down ever, no matter what, without threatening their children’s temporal and eternal well-being, we shouldn’t be surprised when some parents, like the Schatzes, refuse to back down and instead persist in continuing the battle until the contest escalates to a disastrous end. It doesn’t even take bad parents for this to happen, it simply takes well-meaning parents following toxic advice. And this, perhaps, is the most dangerous thing of all about the Pearls’ teachings.

My own parents continued to endorse the Pearls’ discipline methods even after this incident, but nothing like it ever happened again. I think maybe this incident frightened my parents, and shook a little bit of common sense into them. Perhaps it took a small edge off of the infallibility they imputed on the Pearls, or perhaps it simply awoke a little nagging doubt in the back of their mind, doubt that served as a check on things getting out of control. Either way, when I recall this incident and look at my sister Hope, now in her teens, I am reminded of the danger the Pearls’ teachings pose to both parent and child. And even after all these years, telling this story hasn’t been easy.