Michael and Debi Pearl

Voddie Baucham, Shy Kids, and Spanking 5 Times Before Breakfast

HA Editorial Team48 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Julie Anne Smith’s blog Spiritual Sounding Board. It was originally published on June 17, 2013.

One of the traps that we got ourselves caught in was looking to religious leaders for guidance on how to raise our children. It’s ok to seek guidance, but we didn’t always check what we learned with scripture. We read a lot of books and went to parenting seminars/classes over the years:  Train Up A Child, Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Titus2.com, Ezzo’s Growing Kids God’s Way, etc.

We weren’t the only ones. Some of these books/classes were trendy and many churches across the states would jump on the bandwagon. During the mid 1990s, I spent time visiting homeschool forums online and I’d hear of new parenting books/programs popping up all over the country. Next thing I knew, our own church was now promoting the program I had just read about online.

In general, we tried to adopt ideas that worked for our family and leave the other stuff behind. That seems like a balanced approach, but we still got ourselves in trouble and I have had to apologize to my kids for the way I treated them.

It’s interesting, but the Bible really doesn’t have a large amount of verses on child training, yet some of these Christian leaders were able to write meaty books on the subject or speak for hours on the subject,  showing us how to parent our children the “biblical” way. Yet how much of what they write or speak about really is in the Bible?  It’s really more of their interpretation of the Bible and the application of it. I don’t know about you, but none of my kids were born with an instruction manual and coming from a dysfunctional family, I wanted all the help I could get.

I now get red flags when I see big names being promoted as being the expert on a particular issue. Voddie Baucham is one such pastor whose name is in the celebrity pastor limelight.  I don’t quite understand why people elevate certain pastors to the level of celebrity status.  It’s high time we start removing people from pedestals and acknowledge that God has given us parents the same ability to discern that He has given them.  They were not given a direct line to God any more than we have been given.

From Mr. Baucham’s “about” page at his church website:

Voddie Baucham wears many hats.  He is a husband, father, pastor, author, professor, conference speaker and church planter.  He currently serves as Pastor of Preaching at Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, TX.  He has served as an adjunct professor at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, TX, and Union University in Jackson, TN.  He has also lectured at Southern Seminary.

Baucham is a big proponent of homeschooling and his 8 children are educated at home. He and his church also promote family-integrated church model, meaning families worship together and there is no age segregation for Sunday school classes, youth groups, etc.

In this article, we read about his involvement in the Homeschool Movement.  The Homeschool Movement is a subculture within the homeschooling community which subscribes to specific teachings and ideologies:  Courtship, Patriarchy, Purity/Modesty teachings, Quiverfull, etc.  He believes the Homeschool Movement has the ability to turn the tide in recapturing this current generation for Christ.  Here’s one quote:

”The one hopeful sign I see is that the home-schooling movement is thriving. If there is an answer, I believe that is it.”

Along with his support of the Homeschool Movement, Google searches will show that he is a strong supporter of Courtship and Patriarchy. He also does not think adult daughters should leave the home to go to college.

I’m not going to discuss those specific issues, but only bring them up to give a little background information.

What I do want to focus on is his parenting ideas, namely, spanking. Listen to his words. Line up his words with what the Bible says on parenting and see for yourself if this man is speaking biblically or his own agenda. Does the Bible say anything about shy children? Does the Bible say anything about how many spanks a child needs each day? Where does that come from?

*****

The following was transcribed from the above video:

Voddie Baucham

November 4, 2007

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

SPANK OFTEN

Ephesians Chapter 6 Verses 1-4: I want to take you through three things, I want you to see three things, three phases in the training of our children. Phase number one is the discipline and correction phase. These are the first few years of life incredibly important. This is where we lay the foundation for everything else. The discipline and training phase. In this phase is where we are saying to our children “give me your attention, give me your attention.” “You need to pay more attention to ME than I do to YOU, give me your attention.” “The world doesn’t revolve around YOU, YOUR world revolves around ME.” That’s what we need to teach our children in those first few years of their life. Because they come here and just by nature of things they believe that the world revolves around them. And for the first few weeks that’s okay, but eventually we need to teach them that that’s over, that, “The world no longer revolves around YOU. YOUR world TODDLER, revolves around ME, around me.”

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child and the ROD of correction will drive it far from them. In other words God says your children desperately, desperately need to be spanked.

Amen, Hallelujah, Praise the Lord and spank your kids, okay? (laughter from audience)

And, they desperately need to be spanked and they need to be spanked often, they do. I meet people all the time ya’ know and they say, oh yeah, “There have only been maybe 4 or 5 times I’ve ever had to spank Junior.” “Really?” ‘That’s unfortunate, because unless you raised Jesus II, there were days when Junior needed to be spanked 5 times before breakfast.” If you only spanked your child 5 times, then that means almost every time they disobeyed you, you let it go.

Why do your toddlers throw fits? Because you’ve taught them that’s the way that they can control you. When instead you just need to have an all-day session where you just wear them out and they finally decide “you know what, things get worse when I do that.”

THE SELFISH SIN OF SHYNESS

Let me give you an example, a prime example. The so-called shy kid, who doesn’t shake hands at church, okay? Usually what happens is you come up, ya’ know and here I am, I’m the guest and I walk up and I’m saying hi to somebody and they say to their kid “Hey, ya’ know, say Good-morning to Dr. Baucham,” and the kid hides and runs behind the leg and here’s what’s supposed to happen. This is what we have agreed upon, silently in our culture. What’s supposed to happen is that, I’m supposed to look at their child and say, “Hey, that’s okay.” But I can’t do that. Because if I do that, then what has happened is that number one, the child has sinned by not doing what they were told to do, it’s in direct disobedience. Secondly, the parent is in sin for not correcting it, and thirdly, I am in sin because I have just told a child it’s okay to disobey and dishonor their parent in direct violation of scripture. I can’t do that, I won’t do that.

I’m gonna stand there until you make ‘em do what you said.

*****

I Was An Abusive Homeschooling Mother: Jane Doe’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Lustrous Wooden Cabinet with Regret File Label in Dramatic LIght.

Trigger warning: this story contains a detailed description of physical abuse.

I was an abusive homeschooling mother.

I can’t change that fact by writing about it.

I’m hoping to raise awareness about the higher potential for abuse in a family that homeschooling makes possible and the dangers of the Pearl child raising methods by speaking out about it, as one who has first hand experience. And partly I’m speaking up because I am still trying to recover a sense of myself in the aftermath, which is still unfolding in our lives like a years-long train wreck from which we can’t escape.

My husband and I were fervent Pearl followers, which is strange considering that he was a non-believer.  However he used other arguments to come to the same conclusions.  After a devoutly religious friend sent us some No Greater Joy newsletters we ended up buying and reading, and re-reading, almost all of Michael Pearl’s books concerning child raising.  We also bought his book To Train Up a Child by the box load and gave it away to people at every opportunity.

I was a young and uncertain college student when I met my husband to be. He was 16 years older and had been living alone for many years.  He was set in his ways and could be described, by a generous description, as eccentric. At first it seemed we both wanted the same kind of life: that of being semi-self-sufficient on a small farm.  He had the land and skills to make that life possible.

Most pertinent to this story, he has the soul of a lawyer.  He loves argument more than anything in the world, and spends much of his time devoted to it’s study and practice.  Esoteric disputation, definitions, shades of meaning, debate techniques, and hard-core allegiance to “principles” over relationships is what made it so easy for him to adopt the Pearl techniques, blowing away any objections I, or my mother, might put forth.

I must accept blame however.  I must make clear that I chose, in the face of conflict with my husband, to submit myself to his will in all things.  I made that choice.  No one else made it for me.  I felt that it was a good choice at the time, for I could not stand up to him in argument, and I could not stand conflict.  I wanted to have a real home for the kids, with a real dad, like I never had as a girl.  As time went on I was baptized and accepted that being a submissive wife was my calling from God, as preached by Debi Pearl.  I was determined to make it work and keep my husband happy at whatever the cost.

It turned out that the cost was very, very high.  Accepting his will in everything meant living without electricity or running water while living in a small decrepit single wide trailer, having a baby every two years, not going to the dentist ever or doctor regularly, wearing dresses, not wearing make up, not cutting my hair, doing all the cooking,gardening, food preservation, never buying anything, not celebrating any holidays or birthdays, not leaving the house without permission, and forbidding my mother to come visit on any occasion whatsoever.  I essentially lost contact with the outside world and became completely consumed with the vast number of everyday chores that were my duty.

For the children it meant that they had no birth certificates, no social security number, no vaccinations, and no friends.  It meant being spanked regularly, without mercy, until their “wills were broken”, as the Pearls’ say.  To do anything less would have been to allow “evil” to flourish in their very souls, and what a bad parent one would be then.  When the children got older, it meant they were “homeschooled”, which also became my job.

I loved my children.  Being a housewife with kids on a farm had been my ambition since I was a little girl.  I was never spanked as a child.  I never thought that was a good idea.  Our family’s exposure to the Pearls’ child raising ideas came along when our first child was two years old.  I was appalled.  But my husband, devouring the Pearl’s books, found many arguments to use on me.  Eventually I simply came to the point I always came to with him.  I gave up and let him have his way.

According to the Pearl philosophy however, I could not choose to be an innocent bystander.  No, it would not do to let dad do all the spanking.  The children would notice.  Mom must also do her part so that the children would know there was in essence, no escape.  I too must hit my children with sticks for the slightest disobedience or even tardiness of obedience.

And hit them I did.  The change in parenting hit my poor two year old daughter like a brick wall.  The first spanking was at least an hour long.  She, of course, did not ‘submit’ at all, never having experienced anything like it.

I believe the first command I gave her was over something relatively minor.  The second was to stop crying after her first spanking.  Of course she wasn’t going to stop.  According to the Pearls’, to stop crying was a command I was supposed to be able to give and get obedience.  I am here to tell you, it takes a long time to spank a child until they stop crying.  Their bottom gets red, welts start appearing.  You take breaks and waste your breath on endless explanations between the hitting about how you are not going to stop until they obey.  Eventually, they start trying to hold their breath while they sob, making a sort of hiccuping gasp with moans and gurgling in between, while the demanding parent tried to decide what point really constitutes “stopped crying”.

It is a horrendous thing to witness, to perpetrate.  It makes my blood boil to think of it now.  It was completely mentally and physically and emotionally exhausting at the time.  Both myself and my now ex-husband deserve jail time for what we did.  We really do.  But that really would not take the past back.

The beatings (can I now call them what they really were?) continued almost everyday.  The Pearls’ say that you should be able to spank less and less.  That the children will come to joy and peace and trust through this method, over time.  But this much awaited magic never happened.  Our oldest two children as time went on, became angrier and angrier.  According to the books, this was because I was not being diligent enough in my applying of discipline.  So, we spanked more and more as time went on.

More and more beatings.

More and more screaming.

The oldest girl got spanked over school lessons too, the few we had time to fit in.  It was especially bad in areas of math and Spanish.  Dad would butt into our lessons, and ask her if she understood what he was telling her.  If she said yes she did, but then she could not demonstrate understanding, she was spanked for “lying”, for saying she understood when in fact she had not.  Of course, she wanted to stay out of trouble and was trying to say what she thought he wanted to hear but became trapped in a no-win situation. She was also spanked for not being able to correctly pronounce Spanish words, he said she was simply “not trying”.

To this day, our girl cannot learn math or Spanish due to her emotional block to those subjects which were the setting for some of her worst tortures.

Our second child, a boy, was not so much under my attention where school was concerned.  His dad toted him around with him all the time.  This meant that instead of learning to read and write, he was standing around most of the time with nothing to do, no one to talk to, with frequently not enough warm clothes on and nothing to eat or drink.  His only task was to stay quiet and out of the way.  He had night time sleep walking episodes which involved peeing on the floor, for which he was severely whipped with the belt.

I could go on about the abuses that myself and their dad handed out to them, but it becomes tedious.

Occasionally we would go out as a family.  When in public we were always praised for the good behavior of our children. They were very quiet. They did not make scenes. What good children we had. It makes me sick!  My ex-husband points to these praises as evidence of how righteous our treatment of the kids was back then.  Our friends and neighbors never saw the terror our children were experiencing.

Five years ago I left that whole situation.  I moved into a modern house in a town.  I put the kids in school.  I got them birth certificates, social security numbers and vaccinations.  I stopped hitting them.

He fought me on all these things.  However, he too was forced to stop hitting his children.  He was also forced to put in running water and a septic tank.  After significant and extremely drawn out legal machinations, the oldest two children were given the choice to visit him or not.  They never want to see him, or talk to him, and now live with me full time.  He insists that I am the one who alienated them from him by telling them lies about him.  He cannot forgive me for “taking away his authority”.  He makes no effort whatsoever to contact the older two and seems to have completely given up an them.

When they first went to school, the oldest girl was put in seventh grade, according to her age, the boy in fifth.  Our youngest was two at the time, so she did not go to school.  However our other three children also entered school according to their ages: kindergarten, first grade, and third.  It was a stressful time for all concerned.

The oldest girl spent her first year in school crying because she did not know what to do.  She also got pneumonia and had to be hospitalized.  She repeated seventh grade the next year.  She will probably never be able to do math.  She displays PTSD like symptoms, with constant anxiety, rage, and feelings of low self-worth.  She threatens to commit suicide and goes to therapy regularly.

Despite not being able to read, write or do math when our oldest son first arrived in fifth grade, he was barely promoted to sixth the next year.  Now he has almost caught up to his grade level in his academic subjects, though his hand writing is still horrible and his reading is still slow.  He has anger issues on occasion and can be a bit of a bully.  He is aware of this and really wants to do better.  He spurns his father, yet suffers from a lack of a father.  He is in boy scouts.

In contrast, the younger four kids are making straight ‘A’s and winning writing, art and science awards.  They excel in everything they try.  They do not suffer from low self esteem.  They have friends.

Yet their father still wants to homeschool them, and has told them that homeschooling is better than public schooling, based on the results of studies.  He has got some of the kids convinced that they want to be homeschooled by him by using his powerful arguments.  He and I are going to go to court soon regarding this issue.

He is a member of HSLDA.  I was interested to read from the site of Homeschoolers Anonymous the transcripts of speeches given by [former HSLDA attorney] Doug Phillips at the 2009 Men’s Leadership Summit.  His vision of having CPS abolished, and homeschooling girls to be housewives instead of considering having a career is truly terrifying, and made me realize that this whole thing is of a scope that goes far beyond my family.  I had previously thought we were strange exceptions.

What happened to me and my children could happen to anyone who becomes isolated and vulnerable, and if homeschooling is allowed to occur with such little oversight.  Unfortunately abusive parents will exploit that opportunity for everything it is worth.

Abusive parents, like me.

What I Should Have Said 13 Years Ago: Sharon Autenrieth’s Thoughts

HA Editorial Team17 Comments

HA note: The following piece was originally published by Sharon Autenrieth on her blog Strange Figures. It is reprinted with her permission. Sharon describes herself as a “wife, mom to 5, homeschooler, Christian Education Director, idealist, malcontent, [and] follower of Jesus.”

It was one of my first homeschool meetings, an evening devoted to people like myself:  the rookies. Three veteran couples were there to encourage us, answer our questions, and give us the benefit of their experience.

I don’t recall much from that evening, but I remember one of the veteran dads counseling us, raw recruits that we were, on the importance of discipline in the home. And by “discipline” he meant something very specific. He went on at great length on the virtues of “beating” (his word, not mine) children regularly, abundantly, at the first sign of rebellion. His weapon of choice was the yardstick and he told us that he’d broken many over the years in an effort to drive wickedness and rebellion from the hearts of his children. Teenagers taken in as foster children had also received frequent beatings, something I suspect their caseworkers did not know.

I listened, trying to hide my shock and disgust. I was new to homeschooling, but I’d been parenting for almost a decade and there was no way I would be taking this father’s advice. I pitied his children; wondered about his quiet wife who nodded and smiled as he shared his “wisdom”; marveled that he could seem so jolly while describing the physical abuse of children entrusted to his care.

But here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t speak. I didn’t say, ”Excuse me, but what you are describing doesn’t sound like discipline. It sounds like abuse.” I didn’t say, “I’ve been licensed for foster care myself and what you’ve done to your foster children is illegal. I’m going to report you.” I didn’t even meekly suggest that perhaps “biblical” parenting needn’t be so violent. I was silent because he was a veteran and I was a newbie. I was silent because he was a man and I was a woman. I was silent because I didn’t want to make a scene or alienate others in the group. I was silent because I was a coward.

Now, many years later, I know that I sinned that night. I had an opportunity to speak up on behalf of mistreated children and I didn’t take it. Perhaps no one would have listened to me or taken me seriously, but I still should have spoken. I knew that what I was hearing was not just wrong but evil, and I let it go unchecked, unquestioned. I listened as evil was called good – and I did nothing.

This week I fell down the internet rabbit hole into a world of what might be called “homeschool survivor” blogs. The stories are awful, angry, painful to read. I love homeschooling and my immediate response to criticism of the homeschool movement is defensive. I want to shout, “We’re not like that! We’re not like that! We’re not like that!”

But the truth is, some of us are like that. And it’s time that we confessed it, and started holding each other accountable.

The problem is rarely motive. Homeschoolers, as a category, take parenting very seriously. We don’t set out to damage our children, but to do the very best for them that we possibly can. That very seriousness can be a trap, I think. We are prone to particular temptations, many of which are expressed in this article by a homeschool veteran, Reb Bradley. You’d think that doing something so nonconformist (homeschooling) would mean that homeschoolers would be nonconformists generally, but that hasn’t really been the case. There is tremendous pressure to get it right – to turn out ideal children, raised in ideal families – and we are easy targets for experts who promise to deliver results. So we listen to the loudest voices and quiet our consciences and treat our children like objects to be manipulated and molded into polished, shiny finished products rather than as the complicated, untidy, beautiful persons they were born to be.

The problem is not homeschooling as an educational option. And further muddying the waters, the problem is that there’s more than one problem. Here are a few of them:

We confuse external control with internal transformation.

We crave the approval of other homeschoolers so much that we ignore the warning bells going off in our own homes.

We emphasize parental rights and parental authority to such a degree that we dehumanize our children.

We swallow poison as long as it’s coated in Bible verses.

I don’t want to be party to that anymore. It’s not enough to say, “Well, I don’t do that to my children, and other people’s children aren’t my responsibility.” Homeschool friends: do we accept that argument when we’re talking about abortion, or child pornography, or child sexual abuse? Do we feel off-the-hook as long as it’s only other people’s children who suffer, and not our own? I’m as stubborn about parental rights as the next homeschooler. I do not want someone from the government telling me how to raise my children. But perhaps that means we take responsibility for speaking truth to each other, for being honest even about our failures, and for listening to the children our community has raised.

I repeat: the problem is not homeschooling. There is so much potential for good in homeschooling, and every year that potential is realized in thousands of lives. But I’m convinced we can do even better, and it begins with recognizing where we’ve gone wrong. As I read through some of the stories at Homeschoolers Anonymous my heart ached to see how many included abusive doses of “biblical chastisement” or parenting by the “rod”.

So even if I’m 13 years late, I’ll say this now:

That father was wrong. The “biblical model” he was presenting was dangerous and destructive. What he was describing was abusive parenting.  Brutalizing foster children who have already been traumatized and almost certainly have difficulty trusting adults is a special kind of heinous.

You cannot beat sin out of your child; that’s not how spiritual transformation works. What you can do, perhaps, is silence your child out of fear. They may learn to hide their anger, resentment, bitterness, rage, depression and hopelessness from you.

Or perhaps you will discipline your child to death.

“Breaking the will” of a child is a terrible goal, and does not correspond to the way that our kind and merciful Father God deals with us. “A bruised reed He will not break.” Homeschoolers have unwittingly broken many bruised reeds and it’s time to stop.

(Note:  For more stories from former homeschoolers, I suggest Recovering Grace (specifically addresses ATI/Gothardism), Becoming Worldly, Defeating the Dragons, Elizabeth Esther – and of course, Homeschoolers Anonymous. When it comes to “chastisement,” Elizabeth Esther has done a great job over the years of covering Michael and Debi Pearl, whose To Train Up a Child has been especially influential – and deadly.)

Why I Blame Homeschooling, Not Just My Parents: Reflections by Nicholas Ducote

HA Editorial Team50 Comments

By Nicholas Ducote, HA Community Coordinator

Author edit to clarify my call for more oversight: I recommended intra-community policing in my post. State action should be a last resort. Those that care to preserve their parental rights to homeschool need to hold other parents accountable. Unfortunately, fundamentalist homeschooling communities are often isolated from anyone who would question the parents. I don’t have a solution, but I know we can’t just assume the status quo will fix things. Hopefully, projects like this will scare other parents enough to make them confront other parents. But let’s be honest, do you see that happening in these sort of communities? Most of these people laugh at the idea of children having rights and would never support anything that encroaches on their ability to teach their children whatever they want. If you suspect child abuse or neglect in a family you know, please report them to Child Protective Services. 

Homeschooling, as a method of instruction, is not intrinsically bad, dangerous, or damaging. I saw many children raised in homeschooling who were not abused by religious fundamentalism – even if they were Christians. However, as a society, we have to realize that the current state of homeschooling gives parents unique power over their children. Yes, many homeschooled children are a part of co-ops, interact with neighbors, and have relatively normal social interactions. But other homeschoolers are isolated in rural areas, with no contact with neighbors, or the outside world. Abuse develops in these environments because there is no oversight from outside the parents and, if criticism if lodged, the parents are defensive. To many homeschooling parents, homeschooling (the method) is part of a larger worldview that involves rejections of secularism, science, and academic institutions.

I developed claustrophobia, a generalized anxiety disorder, and panic attacks in high school. At the time, I assumed my panic attacks were the result of the Holy Spirit convicting me of my sins. The most common trigger for my panic was sexuality. As a teenager, I would often shake uncontrollably after masturbating. Homeschooling can make children feel trapped because they are literally never away from their parents. When I was quasi-dating girls in high school, behind my parents’ back because they wanted me to court, I would have a mini-panic attack when the phone rang – scared that my parents would find out. When I got in trouble it meant a few hours with mom and dad, crying and arguing about what God told them to do, ending in me feeling completely trapped. When I woke up the next day, I had no choice but to bottle up my anger, shame, and humiliation and go “do” homeschooling. In ATI, many leaders preached about how listening to rock music would literally result in demonic possession. This is abusive to teach to children. To this day, I struggle with anxiety before I fall asleep.  I was taught, by my parents and by ATI’s leaders, that demons were very real and they could possess rebellious Christians. Many in the homeschooling movement conceptualized the “culture war” as spiritual warfare — the secular humanists were literally portrayed as the minions of Satan.

Spiritual abuse is a difficult term for many people to wrap their heads around. It may seem like we are trying to say that raising children in a religious tradition is abusive, which we are not. However, I can say that when homeschooling is mixed with religious fundamentalism, abuse almost always occurs.

There is a distinction between religious fundamentalism and mainstream religions. I once told my mom, “I would have been fine if you stayed Baptist. It’s when you drifted into fundamentalism that hurt me.”  What many people fail to realize is that most parents don’t wake up one day and decide they need to start controlling their childrens’ lives and prepare them for the culture wars. Yes, my parents are to blame for subscribing to fundamentalism, but the homeschooling community and movement are also to blame.

In many states in the 1990s and 2000s, homeschooling parents received most of the curriculum, instruction, and indoctrination at state, regional, or national conferences. There are a myriad of institutions and groups that formed the movement, so it is impossible to point to a single root cause of the abuse in homeschooling. But I know abuse doesn’t just happen because of bad parenting. The bad parenting that people indict was being advocated on stage before thousands of people. There is a reason why so many homeschooling alumni share stories and experiences. Tens of thousands of homeschoolers attended state Christian Home Educator Fellowship (CHEF) conferences, where they were exposed to

  • The Harris family and their beliefs about Biblical courtship
  • David Barton and Little Bear Wheeler’s revisionist history
  • Evangelical leaders that scared everyone about the evils of secular humanism
  • Michael and Debi Pearl’s harsh ideas on corporal punishment and misogynistic ideas of gender roles
  • Huge book sales populated mostly by Christian fundamentalist textbooks — advocating creationism, teaching math based around the Gospel message, or other “educational tools.”

All of these ideas circulated around the homeschooling communities and trickled down to local CHEF chapters.

Parents’ responses have been mixed, but many of them see our blog as a tool to take control of their children away from them. Parents emphasize their rights to raise their children however they want. But, as a society, we have already decided that parental rights end where abuse begins. Thus, one of the main issue in this debate becomes whether or not a homeschooling environment is emotionally or spiritually abusive.

You might think this is only a problem of the past decades — that now, in this new zenith of modernity, fundamentalist homeschoolers that spiritually abuse their children are dying out. You would be wrong. Yes, there is growing momentum behind secular homeschooling, but there is no hard social science about homeschooling.  At this point, observational data is almost all that exists about homeschooling and its demographics. We know very generally how many people homeschool and for what reasons. But ten states do not even require the parents to inform them of their childrens’ “enrollment” in homeschooling.

This is the start of an important conversation about homeschooling. I am opposed to religious fundamentalism in all forms and I believe that the abuse that occurs when fundamentalism is allowed to dominate homeschooling has no place in the modern world. I’ve heard so many Evangelicals and homeschooling parents mock the Islamic madrasas for their religious instruction, but fundamentalist homeschooling isn’t different by much.

To those homeschoolers who are afraid of this exposure, it’s time to own up. These abuses happened, the community’s leaders encouraged it, and the community does not regulate itself. If the homeschooling community is not willing to regulate itself – lest a parent tell another parent their methods and ideologies are abusive! – then someone else will.

I am tired of sitting around hoping that the abusive fundamentalist culture within homeschooling will die out.  I don’t want it to die out, I want to trample it out so that no other children face the sort of abuse I, and many other, went through. Part of the means telling the honest, visceral truth about what happens in many homeschooling homes. Yes, abuse is ultimately the fault of the perpetrators, but why does everyone leave the homeschooling community blameless for how it brainwashed my parents?

The issue of abuse in homeschooling is an issue of the distortion of parental rights and the reality of systemic indoctrination.

You cannot stop the abuse without exposing the advocates.

We Had To Be So Much More Amazing: Samantha Field’s Story

HA Editorial Team23 Comments

Samantha Field blogs at Defeating the Dragons, and she was recently featured in a Christianity Today story entitled, “Finding Faith After Spiritual Indoctrination.”

I’ve been reading the stories Homeschoolers Anonymous has published since it launched, and at first didn’t feel comfortable sharing my own experience with homeschooling, since it was unlike most of what I was reading. But, through reading these stories, it’s helped me come to grips with some of what I went through.

I’d like to start out by clarifying that my experience was fundamentally different– and yet, somehow, eerily the same. I spent most of my childhood in an Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) Church, and for that reason we were never part of the larger homeschooling movements — at least not organizationally. We didn’t use PACES, I’d never even heard of ATI until I went to Pensacola Christian College, we never went to any conferences, I didn’t travel in debate. In fact, reading about these stories made me slightly jealous; because of the cult-like environment of the church I was raised in, I never had the opportunity to interact with anyone outside of my church. I had one friend — one — from the time I was 9 until I left for college at 17.

But, until recently, I would have said that my experience with homeschooling was a favorable one. I started studying logic in third grade, I started studying Latin and Greek in fourth grade, I started reading the classics of the literary canon at nine. I skipped fifth grade entirely — fifth and sixth grade in math. I always tested extraordinarily well — I started testing on the graduate level in seventh grade, and I got a nearly-perfect score on the verbal portion of the SAT (I deliberately answered one of the questions “wrong” because I felt that the question was asking for a “liberal” political opinion). When I went to college, I maintained a 4.0 GPA my freshman year, and made the Dean’s List for every semester thereafter. I never needed to study — in fact, attending classes always felt like I was being “spoon fed” my education, when I had grown used to learning everything I needed to know simply from the reading. I went to graduate school and got a Master’s degree in English — and, again, did very well academically.

It took me a long time to realize that the academic excess I experienced had its good and ugly moments. The good was that I was an excellent reader, and I became a fairly decent writer and editor. It also gave me a lot of time to study music, and that paid for my first year in college.

There are a few ugly sides, and the first was the extraordinary amount of pressure I felt academically. I imagine many, if not most, homeschoolers can attest to the unbelievable amount of expectations we had to live up to. We had to be so much more amazing than any other kind of education. My parents were immeasurably proud of my achievements, and they lovingly wanted to “show me off,” but the constant pressure to perform resulted in a sense that the pressure followed me everywhere– even into college. I felt like I was constantly and unceasingly being evaluated by everyone I knew. I became an overachiever — to the point where several of my professors repeatedly had to tell me to calm down, relax, and do less work or I was going to kill myself.

Another facet of how homeschooling failed me was in mathematics, and I think my experience is fairly standard. Both of my parents are incredibly intelligent — my father works in a STEM field, and my mother did very well in math. However, while I was in high school, neither of them had a college education (a sacrifice my mother made, ironically, in order to stay at home and homeschool us) — and I was surrounded by an attitude that women didn’t belong in STEM fields because we’re just not suited for it. Our brains aren’t wired that way. So, I grew up believing that part of my identity of being a “good, godly, Christian woman” was being terrible at math. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, even though I excelled in geometry and musical theory (which somehow were “artsy” so I was “allowed” to be good at them). When I met my husband, some of our conversations centered on his insistence that I would be good at math if I ever tried — and my insistence that no, I wasn’t. Until, one day, he explained algebra to me on a road trip. And it made perfect sense– so much sense, in fact, that I wondered why it had seemed like complete gibberish before.

And some of the things that get so heavily praised in the homeschooling movement ended up being unhealthy for me in the long run. We were isolated– we called it “being called out” and “separate,” and we laughed at people who asked us about “socialization.” We went to Wal-Mart in the middle of the day, and someone would inevitably ask what I was doing there. I would say that I was homeschooled, and without exception they would ask if I was “special needs.” And then, inevitably, I’d have to mount a defense for homeschooling.

As I’ve moved into my adult life, I’m beginning to see how deep the influences go. While we weren’t involved in any type of official organization, I grew up familiar with the Pearls, the Wilsons, and the Vision Forum. I read Beautiful Girlhood and believed that daughters should stay at home until they’re married. Now, I find it incredibly difficult to interact with people in a group setting, and it has nothing to do with not being familiar with “pop culture” (although that is occasionally a factor). I am completely hopeless at reading people, I don’t understand basic social interactions, I can’t navigate basic things like class discussions — even though I am articulate and outgoing. I’m frequently disabled by self-consciousness and nerves, and find it difficult to find a balance between silence or speaking too much. I don’t know how to do simple things like create boundaries with people.

I’m moving toward healthiness, slowly. It’s difficult, and hard going, but it’s happening. And part of my recovery is recognizing that even though I pretty much had the “ideal” homeschooling experience, it was still unhealthy.