social isolation

Fighting for Hope: Elliott Grace Harvey’s Story – Part Two

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

In this series: Part One | Part Two | Conclusion

*****

Orthodox Presbyterian Church – 18 years
However imposing, formal, and elitist you might imagine “Orthodox Presbyterian” to be, it’s all of that and then some. At first impression however, your experience with church members will likely be warm and welcoming, though distant and non-committal.

I want friends so desperately and I’m not going to have any if I don’t do anything. I think that’s a big part of my problem, I’m very lonely. I’ve been at my church 16 years. No one calls me when a group of kids are getting together. No one picks me to kills time with. No one wants me. I just want want friends, people to love with, laugh with, live with, grow with. – Journal entry

The following is a direct quote taken from The Book of Church Order of the OPC. It contains in alarming detail the measure of control they expect to exact over their members:

“All governing assemblies have the same kinds of rights and powers. These are to be used to maintain truth and righteousness and to oppose erroneous opinions and sinful practices that threaten the purity, peace, or progress of the church. All assemblies have the right to resolve questions of doctrine and discipline reasonably proposed and the power to obtain evidence and inflict censures. …They are to watch diligently over the people committed to their charge to prevent corruption of doctrine or morals. Evils which they cannot correct by private admonition they should bring to the notice of the session.” – The Book of Church Order

My own OPC leadership regularly sent out letters to all parishioners if there was a “sin issue” involving a church member. These so-called sins included eating disorders, mental illness, unmarried pregnancy, marital struggles, and so forth.

This shaming effectively silenced the victims of the sexual, physical, and psychological abusers being harbored in the church.

I’m confused. Completely and utterly. People are so hard to figure out. I want to be real. But who people really are and what they tell you is so different. How do you know who to trust? – Journal entry

My mother asked for help from the leadership regarding her abusive husband. Little was done, arguably nothing legitimately helpful, and she was discouraged from seeking outside help.

The last month has been hard. Finding out that your church family isn’t what it seems is difficult. Lying, secretive, untrustworthy, unchanged. – Journal entry

When I was kicked out by my father, I was expressly instructed by a pastor not to tell anyone.

I was told they would help me find housing, and this kept me from going anywhere else for assistance, waiting for help that never materialized.

What I’m feeling: Scared. Alone. Scared of what I might do. Scared of messing up. Scared of Sundays. Scared of falling apart. Scared of admitting it, admitting anything. Scared of loving and not being loved back. Scared of disappointing people. Feeling trapped by my own walls. Afraid of the solution. Tired. – Journal entry

Much later after leaving the church, I detailed for all the church leadership my parent’s history of abuse, and abuse being currently committed against minors in their home. My appeal was based upon their current membership in good standing with the church, but after formal meetings and pleading for help nothing was done.

After roughly a year at the fabric store, I came home from work to a letter from my father giving me a few weeks to get out:

“The time has come young lady for you to leave our home, and move out on your own. Though I had hoped for better circumstances under which this transition could occur, it can not be helped or avoided at this point. As you will remember, this was my position a year ago. But after talking with several of our elders, I decided to exercise deference towards their counsel and allow you to remain in the home. I have in all sincerity young lady endeavored repeatedly to express my love for you, to show you grace and forgiveness in spite of your repeated rank disrespect, animosity, and bitterness towards me. I have appealed to you for forgiveness for my known past sins against you, but you have refused to forgive me, and have chosen rather to harbor this hatred against me, as well as any effort I have made to repair and restore our relationship, and now as you can see, it is affecting your other relationships, including the ones in this home. Hatred is toxic, and it will destroy your other relationships with sound Christians. I have told you that hating me is not worth this, but you have rejected my counsel in this. I have tolerated this toxic influence in this home long enough, and in light of your continued obstinance in this regard, it’s time for you to move out.
Now if you behave yourself during this transition, you will have till the end of August to be moved out. But if you continue this same nasty pattern, and continue to neglect the few duties you have in this home (it’s your week for dishes, make sure they get done each day), you will be out much sooner. Please do not test me on this, my mind is made up, I will not be moved.
If you have a change of heart and truly desire to seek to repair and restore our relationship that would be great, and I would be up for moving forward under the proper avenues of restoration with competent counsel and mediation. But your residence here is not required for that to happen. In fact, I believe it would be detrimental to the process.
Please don’t blow this off or procrastinate with this move, please seek all available avenues in the church for help in finding a new permanent residence, if you choose not to I will help you in this regard.
I am truly sorry that it has come to this young lady, but this is a choice that you have made repeatedly and finally over the past several years. As I told you before, I am not worth hating. You will and are ruining your life over these unresolved issues. Whether you believe me or not, I do love you, and it grieves me deeply to see you to make the choices you’re making. Now I have to make some choices, please act wisely and accordingly. Sincerely, Dad.”

I had nothing I could do, nowhere to go. My mom asked if I wanted her to say anything, I told her not to, I didn’t want her fighting with dad about it and making things harder for them.
A series of excerpts from my journal at the time:

– I’m so tired. Confused. Lonely. Lost. Down. I feel like the truth I’m looking for is somewhere staring me in the nose and I just can’t see it. I wish… I even just knew what I was looking for.
– So supposedly dad is bringing a complaint against me to the church. This is going to be a big ugly mess.
– I’ve never felt like I really could be myself or belonged anywhere but my family. Now I don’t even have that.
– I didn’t know I wanted someone who would stick with me even if I wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t perfect. Maybe there’s a person out there who could love me for me, but why not a christian? Is there such a person? Someone I could trust that much? I’m just so tired. Tired of this place.

Nearing my deadline to move out, I still had nowhere to go, and I had been abandoned by the people I thought would help.

In a moment of hopelessness was honest with my coworker when she asked me what was wrong. She shares about that conversation:

“Grace started to withdraw a bit which was concerning. …One day I came in to work and found her cross legged on her car hood eating lunch. She looked upset, so I stopped and chatted her up a bit.
She confessed the most heartbreaking situation- her dad was kicking her out. Her? WTF? Hard working, sweet, talented, that made no sense.
I never hesitated. You can move in with me.
Her big green eyes widened, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
‘Really?’
Well, I have cats and a stressful job, but a spare bedroom and you are welcome to it.” – A

I accepted her offer, and moved in within a week. I was running on adrenaline, doing everything I could to keep it together and just survive. I was starting to deal with the impact of my childhood:

“We settled in, her coming and going when ever she wanted… When I had a minute, I cleaned out the kitchen so she could be comfortable this was *her* house. I came into the living room after work that day to find the girl curled up in a fetal position on the corner of the couch. Apparently, cleaning the kitchen set off ptsd. Her father ‘cleaned’ when mad, and the whole family pussycat stepped around when that was happening. We had a long talk after that admittance about how she lived with me now, she was her own person and could grow and set her own rules. She seemed to relax after that, and settled into her new life.” – A

I spent two wonderful years living with her. She was my angel in disguise, giving me a place to start to heal and move on. My parents were critical, but at this point I couldn’t afford to care.

Isn’t This Why We Don’t Send Them to Public School?

HA Editorial Team7 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Quinn Dombrowski.

Editorial note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog, The Girl Who Once Lived in a Box. It was originally published on December 14, 2015.

I was four years old.

We were visiting my dad’s childhood home in New York, and we went to the house of an elderly lady who used to be his neighbor. She had a caretaker, a single mom homeschooling her son, who was around my age.

My favorite TV show was Barney the Dinosaur, my only 30 minutes of live television once a week. I also played my Barney’s Favorites cassette tape every day and I knew all of the songs by heart.

The little boy and I started chattering and playing on the floor, and I sang “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” for him and his mom, very enthusiastically, with all of the hand motions and marching.

“Do your ears hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie ’em in a knot?
Can you tie ’em in a bow?
Can you throw ’em o’er your shoulder
Like a continental soldier
Do your ears hang low?”

His mother turned to my mom and said, “Isn’t this why we don’t send them to public school, so they won’t be exposed to garbage like this?”

I remember this deep sense of shame and wanting to crawl under the carpet. I felt like I’d humiliated my mom and I wondered what was so terrible about my song. I think the little boy’s mom called him to come sit on the couch next to her, away from me, and we weren’t allowed to play together the rest of the visit.

This was the first time that I was that child, the bad influence.

Usually it was my parents keeping me away from other children that could lead me astray. This time, they hid their children from me. My mom didn’t understand at all why the other mother objected to the song.

The fear would follow me for years.

Later on in my teens, we ended up in a church with mostly other homeschooling families, some of them Quiverfull. All the other churches we’d gone to before were mainline denominations, and their children went to public school. But homeschooling was becoming more common by 2004.

I’d hear stories from the other families, pick up things in snatches of conversation.

My sister got a craft book for her 8th birthday party, the only party she ever invited friends to since we stayed to ourselves. The other children said, “Oh, look there’s a witch on this page! We’ll have to cover that up.” Their mom glanced over and said, “Oh yeah, you can just cut out black construction paper and glue it over those pages like we do at our house.”

I called my Bible Buddies partner during the week, we got into a theological discussion, and I asked, “Well, have you ever read Narnia?” “No,” she answered. “My parents don’t like that they talk about magic, and they think it’s too confusing for children to read about Jesus as a lion.” I explained that magic is like a substitute for divine power both in creation and redemption, and I read her some dialogue between Aslan and the Pevensie children. She said she thinks it’s probably safer not to read it and seemed uncomfortable, and I dropped the subject.

A homeschool mom traded some used A Beka textbooks with our family. The pages of the only Greek myth in the 8th grade literature book were stapled together. “Why should they learn about pagan literature when they could be reading the Bible?”

My dad bought clearance books and films from the Focus on the Family bookstore. He sent the kids Ten Commandments VHS series to a Quiverfull family we knew with 13 kids. My mom explained to their parents that the only time there is music with a beat in the series is the scene where the characters worship false idols.

I was always watchful around the other families, struggling to balance being honest about the books and movies I enjoyed but with the fear of not being allowed to talk to the other teens if I’m considered a “bad influence.”

In this patriarchal world, if one of the parents decided I’m not spiritual enough or too worldly, I might not be given space to defend myself.

I know because it happened to others. Teens and young adults were called into the pastor’s office and questioned about their music preferences, asked to stop hanging out with their children.

Because, you know. This is why we don’t send our kids to public school.

public school pearls

The Battle of Peer Dependency: Part 2

HA Editorial Team27 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Dan Slee.

Continued from Part 1

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

“The first step in overcoming peer dependency is determining whether or not a child is peer dependent. The second is accurately assessing the depth of the problem and then taking the proper steps. One approach a parent might take in order to find out if a son or daughter is peer dependent is to tell your child that all outside activities with peers will be suspended for one week. Will your child willingly and joyfully go along with that plan, or will they whine and cry, manipulate and control, and completely make your life miserable until they can do things with their friends? ….ask them, ‘Who has your heart? Who would you say in in control of your life?’ ”

So lemme get this straight: tell a normal kid that they have to cease and desist all the normal stuff they do outside the home (keep in mind we’re talking about homeschoolers who rely on their parents to have an outside social life), then when they freak out like normal kids, give them a triumphant “AHA! You are peer dependent. We must fix this.” Um, no, actually, they’re just normal human beings who like the company of other human beings. How would this mother handle it if someone told her “You won’t be allowed out of your house or to see anyone else but your kids for a week. And tell me now, who has your heart”? Sounds abusive and manipulative, right? Oh, but not when it’s directed at kids. Kids can be treated as non-humans because they’re on the bottom of the Godly hierarchy. Suddenly “Who has your heart?” sounds uber creepy to me. All this emphasis on who owns whom.

“Accurately knowing who has each child’s heart will be to the parent’s advantage….many parents have said that they lost the heart of their child as early as 8 years of age. Whatever the age, it is never too early to win the heart of your child, then purpose and plan to keep it.”

In what other context is this type of control OK?? Place this in the context of a husband toward his wife, and you have the set-up for a textbook emotionally abusive marriage. Nowhere does Sears ever think to ask what the child wants.

What the child wants in this paradigm is completely irrelevant.

“A child having an independent social life is a cultural phenomenon that has become an accepted practice in Christian homes, resulting in the decay and impotency of the modern Christian family. Many young people find their lives shipwrecked because they have placed too much emphasis on friends instead of family.”

Here we go again with the family v. friends false dichotomy.

“The lack of purposeful and meaningful relationship between siblings and parents has come to be accepted as normal. Not only do present day trends of divorce, abandonment, and death add to the breakdown of the family, but the structure and foundation of the family itself is faulty. Families growing up in the same house, but not sharing each other’s lives, have created separation and aloneness, which often times results in suicide, a leading cause of death among teens.”

I don’t even know what to say to that. Well, actually, these days I’d say “citation, please?” But apparently back in the world I grew up in, nobody bothered with such cumbersome things as citations and evidence. People could spout whatever harmful nonsense they wanted to, write a book about it, even! And nobody bothered to say “prove it”. That could’ve saved a lot of people a buttload of trouble. Like the confusing predicament of being a teenager who is told that because you don’t like your siblings and would love to have friends your own age, you’re responsible for the crumbling of the family and the downfall of the world.

Sears talks about how they found other homeschooling friends with the same goals and the same “standards”. How those relationships were “heaven-sent”; how her kids were happy and making friends. But of course, this was just Satan trying to deceive them and bring them down. “My philosophy that my children needed a best friend outside the Lord and our family was the instrument that set them up for failure.” So apparently even other squeaky-clean homeschooling families are a threat. One of her sons become “peer dependent”, and she spent 5 years trying to get his heart back. She even had to battle other Christians who told her that having friends was perfectly healthy. But she knew better. God told her, revealed to her in his Word, how friends are evil.

Here are some more gems that make up this book and its philosophies, all highlighted in orange years ago by my mom. Read and wonder:

“Children have a great capacity to rationalize truth in order to get what they want, when they want it. It is the parent’s responsibility to train their sons and daughters to obey (Eph. 6:1-3) Remember that partial obedience is total disobedience and good motives do not make disobedience right.”

 

“Partial obedience is not obedience” [this is said many times throughout the book]

 

“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and stubbornness is as the iniquity and idolatry….in the Hebrew, rebellion is synonymous with bitterness.”

“Rebellion” was defined as anything we wanted and thought that was against our family’s rules and standards. Having my own opinion on anything often got the label “rebellious” tossed my way. Obedience had to be instant and cheerful, as described in Sears’ book, or it was “rebellion”. Rebellion, we were told, was one of the worse sins of them all, often causing a domino effect of other sins to take hold in our lives.

“The good activities that my children were participating in seemed never to be enough. Once the activity was over, and the pleasure had worn off, they were off to the next thing. The pleasures of this world, no matter how innocent, are never satisfying…..This is why peers and their activities become all consuming.”

Keep in mind that activities for homeschoolers usually meant church, AWANA, Bible studies, homeschool co-ops and field trips to museums, and possibly (if we were lucky) going to play as a family at a friends’ house.

“Serving others is one way to fulfill our need for activity; another is sharing the gospel message”.

You don’t need friends, you just need to volunteer more.

“By not understanding the text of 1 Sam. 15:23, I didn’t see that when my children would peck at the direction or rules of the home, they were being stubborn….Parents need to understand that the root cause of peer dependency is ‘…stubbornness is as iniquity as idolatry’ “.

Sears describes here how God revealed to her that the word for “stubbornness” actually meant “pecking away at”. She goes on to describe how a child being stubborn was the same as that child pecking away at the standards of their family. Just like chickens peck at the ground.

“Were their own brothers and sister important to them, and did they desire to be with them, regardless of the activity, circumstances, or what age group was there? I realized in that instance what a tragic mistake I had been making. I had actually trained our encouraged my children to prefer people outside of our family to be their best friends. My heart was broken as I thought about the state of my family, and what I was going to do.”

“If you can’t treat your siblings well and get along with them, you don’t deserve to have friends. You must love family more than friends.” That’s what I was told many times as a child and teen. I was often “grounded” from spending time with the very few friends I had because of arguing with my sister. To this day, my closest friends are most definitely not my family members so I’m not sure how well that philosophy worked out.

“Understanding that God has given each individual in the family a life purpose, these life purposes will complement the purpose of your family….individual life purposes will work together, in the life of the family, through trials, struggles, and suffering, for God to be glorified to a lost and dying world.”

But goddess forbid that anyone has any life purpose that does not fit the cult, I mean, family, and that kids grow up to have their own lives that have nothing to do with the plans of The Family.

“Knowing that peer dependency is a problem for all age groups and understanding its definition is the first key to having a godly family. As parent realize the potential life-long consequences and danger of peer dependency that will be upon the lives of their children, restructuring the family will occur. Only when the family is what God has ordained it to be will we see nations coming to Christ.”

 

“One of the dangers with church youth groups is that the youth minister must have the hearts of the children in order to accomplish his goals. The youth group in itself becomes a family unit with the youth minister and his wife acting as surrogate parents.”

This just screams “isolate and control” to me.

“Young people have been so segregated in our society that few can adequately converse outside their own peer group.”

 

“Family friends add depth to the family structure; however, many times friends draw individual family members away from the family rather than the friend associating with the family, strengthening the whole unit.”

 

“Children don’t always know what they want, nor do they always know what is best for them. That is why God gave them parents, and why He gave parents Himself.”

It’s very convenient for the parents that they are not only accountable only to God, but they are the ones that get to decide what God wants, what God is saying, and what God wants the children to do with their lives. What the children think or want does not matter and is always trumped by what the parents think God is telling them. In this system, children have absolutely no recourse. And the family becomes a little cult.

Then there’s about seven pages on how your family will go to hell and won’t get free unless you, the mother, confess all your sins and your own peer dependency and get yourself right with god, and how if your kids are failing, it’s probably your fault for unconfessed sin.

Then she explains how to “give your children to god” by building an alter in your mind and sacrificing them on it.

That’s right, folks. You must symbolically sacrifice your children to God, or none of this will work. I wish I were making this up.

One of my favorite puke-worthy parts was when she described how her older teenage son wanted to listen to “ungodly music” (which, for a Gothardite, means anything with a “rock beat” or syncopation). She explains how she told him that “God has shown us a better way to live and to experience his presence in our lives. This music will hinder you and our family’s life goals. Therefore, you may choose to listen to it, but if you do, you will also be choosing to move out of our home.” She goes on to say how she stuck to her guns to kick him out over his music choice, even helped him pack. At the last minute, he changed his mind and she praised the Lord for rewarding her for being faithful. Mother of the Year right there.

I could go on and on. But I’m emotionally burning out over here. Because this isn’t just some crazy shit I randomly found and decided to put on the blog so others could gawk at it. It’s personal. It defines much of my teenage years. But I do want to highlight one more quote before I quit:

“One aspect of winning the heart of my child was trying to discern which activities were acceptable and which ones were not…..I tried to think through each activity and discern whether it was right or wrong….this approach caused great offense among fellow Christians because if there wasn’t anything wrong with the activity, the focus changed to the character or spiritual maturity of the other individuals involved. It wasn’t until our family purpose was defined and clarity was given for the direction that God was taking our family that the struggles lessened. I could take each activity or thing in question to the Lord and see if it would accomplish the goals that the Lord had for our family. For example: our family purpose was for each member to delight in each other and in the Lord. Activities that arose which would not accomplish our family purpose would not be attended.”

This explains so much. Why my mom could just say “no, you aren’t going to go do that thing because it doesn’t fit our family values.” When there was nothing wrong with The Thing and it would be fun and everyone else was going. In reality, this gives parents absolute authority to do whatever the hell they want and arbitrarily forbid whatever the hell they want and say it is because God told them to.

And if we questioned them, we were questioning God.

We had no say in the matter. There was no way out for us. We were trapped in this hell. We were powerless children, and to this day I experience panic attacks whenever I see or hear that kind of bondage in parent/child relationships. Anything that makes me feel like a powerless, trapped child at the mercy of unreasonable adults will set off my stress response, even watching a movie with those kinds of themes.

There was a time I wasn’t allowed to have my own friends. They had to be “family friends” and I had to drag my younger siblings along when I wanted to do stuff. My mom was a social person though so thankfully she didn’t do very well at the whole isolate yourself from friends thing. She would’ve withered and died too. But that didn’t stop the blame and manipulation from being thrown around. If I didn’t get along with my sister, our family was at stake. If I questioned the “family standards” I was making everyone miserable and my heart was not right with God. I was told I didn’t need friends, that my siblings were my friends, and if I couldn’t get along with them then I didn’t deserve friends outside the family.

Family was worshipped above all.

Family had to look, sound, feel, and appear a certain way or we were failing to be a testimony. Peers were evil, friends that didn’t share our standards were threats. As I got older, peers who were boys were definitely evil. Things like “emotional fornication” and “purity” and “defrauding” and “giving away your heart” entered into the already convoluted and ridiculously complicated rules for having friends. It was impossible to navigate and it was hell on earth.

People can stop saying we’re exaggerating now.

They can stop telling us “it wasn’t that bad” and “well, that’s crazy, it didn’t happen to me, I can’t imagine that actually happened” and “not all homeschoolers”. Not only did it actually happen, it was taught and promoted by various leaders in our world. Most of my friends report similar experiences. We used to jokingly ask “did our parents have a manual for this crap they taught?” Well, maybe they did. I’m holding this book in my hands right now. A book that my mom highlighted the shit out of. Full of teachings that so many of us heard and had thrown at us and were used to control and manipulate for years. Read these quotes then tell us “it wasn’t that bad”.

The Battle of Peer Dependency

HA Editorial Team15 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Dan Slee.

Sometimes when homeschool alumni tell stories about the way things were — the things we were taught, stuff our parents said, and the teachings we practiced — we are not really believed. Our recollections are met with incredulity, doubt, and outright disbelief. Sometimes, our own parents are the ones telling us “that didn’t happen like that, you aren’t remembering correctly, I never said/did/taught/believed those things”. Those presently homeschooling deny that homeschoolers were like that and tell us “well, you were just part of a small group of extremists”.

It’s hard to be the focus of both gaslighting from the inside and mainstream disbelief from the outside.

We start to think maybe we really aren’t remembering correctly.

But then something happens that helps solidify the fact that we aren’t crazy, we aren’t making shit up, and we can trust our memories. That happened to me this week, and in sharing it with my friends, I think I helped them gain that clarity too.

In cleaning my basement this week, I found an old book that belonged to my parents. A book that we bought at an IBLP Basic Seminar in Seattle, WA, around the time I was 13-14. It is called The Battle of Peer Dependency, by Marina Sears. And when I opened that book and started to read the parts my mom highlighted 16 years ago, it was like stepping into a time machine. I was 14-18 again and all the memories, feelings, situations, even smells from that time hit me full force and in color and clarity.

I’m going to share excerpts from this book, along with some very personal and vulnerable memories of how they were used during my teen years.

My reasons are simple: so that those on the “outside” of the Christian homeschool movement can see the type of emotional and spiritual abuse that we thought was normal. And so those on the inside, both past and present, can see that they were and are not alone.

That we really do remember these things correctly. That they were taught and believed. That they were toxic and abusive.

The book opens with a story of the author’s husband dying in a car accident, and the many sufferings that their family went through, all God’s purpose to show them how to be a family. She alludes to how she would need the lessons learned through suffering for the future of trying to hold their family together, a family threatened by the ominous-sounding “peer dependency”. There is a lot in this first chapter about suffering being God’s will to teach needed lessons.

The entire second chapter is the story of Sears’ fear and her desire to please God and trust him, mostly with her children and their hearts. She sets the stage for a “battle of peer dependency” as something big, bad, ugly, and antithesis to a solid family unit.

Peers are the enemy of children’s hearts; children’s attachment to having friends is the enemy of the family.

This she state quite clearly:

“A child having an independent social life is a cultural phenomenon that has become an accepted practice in Christian homes, resulting in the decay and impotency of the modern Christian family.”

The family v. friends battle is the framework for the entire book.

“Once I entered the battle with peer dependency, a new and different kind of fear gripped my heart. Seeing my children being drawn to the things of this world, I feared that they might never let Christ be the Lord of their lives.”

Peers and independent social lives are the enemy of the family. They are even the enemies of your children’s salvation.

“Even more devastating was the idea that they might never trust Christ as Lord of their lives.”

 

“For five years I struggled with peer dependency, not understanding what it was. I thought if Dave [her son] would just have more character or love God and his family more, the struggle would disappear…..suffering works to motivate one to trust the Lord…This is an essential principle for the family who will enter the battle to win back the heart of a son or daughter from his or her peers. The reason this is vital is so parents won’t become weary in the midst of the battle.”

Suffering for Jesus, learning lessons, parental sacrifice, creating “character”, setting life up as a battle between family allegiance and having friends are the themes of this book. The next part goes into “The Fight”. She talks about her “battle” with her kids wanting friends. It is framed as a battle for the hearts of your children.

You can either be a strong family and have your children’s hearts, or you can have friends.

The false dichotomy here is pretty obvious, but let’s look at more of her advice and her story.

“As the years have passed, I know why many parents are broken-hearted after giving their lives to see their children follow the Lord. These young people have grown into adults grieving in spirit for their failures and living with the consequences of poor choices they made as teenagers. Sadly, they grow up, marry, and have children of their own, still locked in peer dependency. Many are not understanding that they have a greater desire to please others or be like others, rather than the individual God has created them to be….This is not the only reason for broken young people and broken homes, but it is something that every family will face in varying degree. Understanding the battle of peer dependency and fighting it according to God’s word will decide the outcome and success in children’s lives….

 

How then, with God as the head of our home, did I lose the heart of one of my children to peer dependency? At first I didn’t even realize what peer dependency meant. In fact, it took me five years to understand the struggle and realize that I was in for the fight of my life….I soon realized the battle of peer dependency was going to cost me my son’s life, and that I needed to understand that it was a life and death battle.”

She goes on (and on and on) dramatically about this “battle” and how peer dependency will cause children to fall away from God, will destroy the family unit, and ultimately the entire nation. The whole chapter reads like a letter of self-inflicted martyrdom by a mother who is whining about how hard she had to fight and what sacrifices she made to keep her family free from the diabolical threat of friends. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why this is utterly ridiculous. I wish I had the words to explain why this sounded so good to many of our parents. I mean, did the homeschooling cult attract control freaks or what?! It would be funny if it didn’t hit such a personal, raw place in my heart. If I didn’t have to explain what these teachings did to so many of us, how they broke us, how we still struggle with healthy peer relationships decades later. If we didn’t have to constantly fight to get people to believe that it really was that bad.

So, what is “peer dependency”? The author explains:

“Webster’s Dictionary defines peer as ‘an equal or member of the nobility’. Dependence is ‘to rely as for support, to place trust, or to be determined’. Therefore, on can define peer dependence as an equal or member of nobility that one can rely upon, places trust in, and will be determined to do so.”

That’s one of the most epic splicing together of definitions that I’ve ever seen. But it’s also a popular method of finding meanings in scripture that Gothard himself uses. Given that this was written by an ATI mom and sold at a Basic Seminar, it’s reasonable to assume she used the same twisted methods of discovering what God has to say as Gothard does. Actually, Gothard’s teachings, catch-phrases, and strange word definitions are prolific throughout this book.

Then we get into the weird hierarchy, “emotions are evil”, and “agreements/strongholds in your heart” teachings that are straight from Gothard:

“When a young person is in a position that they have taken an equal, or someone they think highly of and are determined to trust and rely upon, a parent is in trouble. To place trust in a peer, one must make a choice with their will to believe in that peer. They come to an agreement within their heart that the one whom they trust is worthy of that trust….Throughout the decision process made by the young person, he has involved his mind, will, and emotions. He has processed the peer through his intellect, enjoyed and desired what he as seen, and has made a decision with his will to follow in order to become like his peer. As we continue to define the struggle, there is one more word that must be considered. Through Scripture, one can find the heart defined as the mind, will, and emotions of a person.”

So let’s create a problem, then see the entire world through this problem, write some stuff that sounds a little like legit psychology to those who know nothing about psychology, and then write a book on how you overcame this salvation-threatening problem and saved the souls of your children. Mother as the martyr-savior. This is starting to sound all-too familiar.

“Some may think that being peer dependent is not such a bad thing….however, Scripture is clear that it is a very big deal to God. In fact, if is God’s desire for the father to have his children’s hearts, because in the last days, if they don’t, He will smite the earth with a curse.”

The above quote is really important if you want to understand the undercurrent of the homeschool movement.

Gothard and other homeschool leaders loved the scripture in Malachi 4:6 that said “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” And upon this verse they built their cults. This verse was used to promote everything from Vision Forum’s “Biblical Patriarchy” and Family Integrated Churches to the pet doctrines of homeschooling and was very likely part of the foundation for the entire homeschooling movement in the 80’s and 90’s. Homeschooling was supposed to turn the father’s hearts toward their children and vice versa. We were told that this was the only way to promote God’s Kingdom on earth, that this was God’s will for families, that it would be the only way to have a strong nation. This verse was used to justify all kind of cult-like family practices, including not allowing peer friendships and individual social lives, as you see throughout Sears’ book.

In reality, it was about control.

“Another factor involved when a father does not have his child’s heart is the principle that whoever has the heart of your child controls him.”

That’s about the most honest statement I’ve seen in any of these books on “keeping your child’s heart”.

“Peer dependency is the loss of your child’s heart. Dressing, talking, and having the same morals is just the beginning. When a father has lost the heart of his child, the child is torn between the direction and wishes of his parents and that of his friends. In the beginning, he may still desire to please his parents. As time goes on, however, the family will experience great turmoil as the peer dependent young persona grows deeper into dependency and rebellion. People who are peer dependent will find themselves beginning to lower the standards that their parents have tried to instill in them. Even young people who have grown up in very godly homes will suffer the consequences and bondage of peer dependency.”

Please tell me that others can see what is happening here, what is actually being said. “Peer dependency is the loss of your child’s heart” and your control over him, per this author. This reads like a manual of how to isolate your kids and ensure that they will never be exposed to anything other than your own teachings; that they will never learn to think for themselves; that they will never question you and your rules.

These are instructions on how to control your children and to rid them of free will and ensure they turn out to be the people you decide they will be.

This is the goal, very clearly stated, of the homechooling movement that I and my friends grew up in. We were raised in cults, even those of us who weren’t part of ATI or Vision Forum or other organized groups. Our families became cults and operated at such. Complete with ultimate authoritarian control, emotional abuse, religious manipulation, isolation from outside influences, censorship, physical abuse, and absolutely no accountability to anyone else. Our parents were taught that this was how to have a strong family and this was how to ensure their kids turned into the robots we were meant to be.

The author goes on to use all the right catch-phrases: “they want to be like the world instead of like Christ; a quest for pleasure, materialism, and self-gratification; comfortable with the things of the world; children and young people act differently when they are with their peers than they do with adults; some Christian groups have outward evidence of the Christian life, but they are inwardly peer dependent.” On and on and on she goes, setting up this danger, this battle, this threat to families and children. THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

“The particular child who was deeply involved in peer dependency was in complete turmoil in his soul. He would argue and fight against the direction of our family but be repentant at night over his bad attitude and hurtful actions. [He] was in such turmoil that he made the whole family miserable.” [emphasis mine]

Raise your hand if, like me, you were told that your stubbornness and rebellion was making your entire family miserable. If you were told that “if you would just submit to God’s will for our family and stop questioning and being ornery and rebellious, then we wouldn’t be having so many problems.”

Raise your hand if your parents followed teachings that made you, in all practicality, the scapegoat.

Dysfunctional doesn’t even begin to describe the consequences of being raised with such toxic teachings. Try for a minute to imagine being a 14-yr-old, struggling with suicidal imaginations, thinking everyone hates you, even God, that you are worthless because that’s what your parents and their religion taught you, stuck in the turmoil that is puberty, and being told that your family’s problems are because you are making everyone miserable by not submitting. Because that was my life at 14.

“For 5 years I didn’t understand that the reason he didn’t want to go in the direction that God was pointing our family was because he had decided in his heart that he wanted to go in the direction of his friends. So I approached my child and asked him, ‘Do I have your heart?’ “

A bit of advice: don’t ask your child that. There is no way to ask that without manipulation and heaping guilt on a child’s head. I knew I supposed to say yes, that that was what God wanted for me. I also knew that my heart was not at all safe with my mother, that I needed to protect myself. But when an influential adult comes to you, the child, crying that she doesn’t have your heart, that you don’t trust her, that all she ever wanted was to have your heart and a relationship with you, that this is what God wants and don’t you want what God wants….what the hell are you supposed to say?! I said what I thought I was supposed to. “Yes, of course, Mom.” It was a lie, and I knew it was a lie, but a 14-yr-old doesn’t have the tools to combat religious and emotional manipulation. A 14-yr-old just wants to make it stop.

Next in Part 2, with the problem clearly defined and laid out, we will get to the good part: what to do about it. Spoiler Alert: It’s all terrible advice.

Gifts and Wound: ElenaLee’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

ElenaLee blogs at Our Place.

A blogger I very much respect once spoke of events in her life bringing both a gift and a wound. A gift and a wound—I carry this imagery with me like a familiar piece of jewelry or some small memento, some reminder of where I have been and of where I hope to go. The simple acknowledgement that both exist, at the same time, is healing. After growing up in a subculture often trapped by a black and white view of itself and the world, I relish the freedom to carry both truths in my hands. For me, being homeschooled was a gift. And it was also a wound. Both strands revealed themselves as I moved from a very home-centered existence to the larger experience of college and adulthood.

College unfolded a new world for me, one filled with the stimulation of interacting with more people more frequently than I had before, a chance to know and be known in new ways. After a high school education taught largely by textbooks (but with careful oversight by my mother, who assigned each day’s lessons and made sure I did the work), I found flesh-and-blood teachers exciting. I liked when they knew and respected me—when an art professor noticed I had a question during lecture just by the look on my face, when my history professor shook my hand after I finished his final test. Looking back, part of me hates that I knew how, and was eager, to excel in relationships with authorities. There is, perhaps, an element of “working the system” involved in it. And yet, I am grateful for the richness that interacting personally with these good men and women added to my life.

I have never excelled socially with peers. I suppose excelling isn’t even the point of peer relationships—but certain elusive social skills are helpful in bringing people together. I made only one lasting friend in community college, and she wasn’t a fellow student but an older employee in the library. Though on cordial terms with classmates, I commuted into town and never “hung out” with others, a skill I still feel uncomfortable exercising. In college, I continued to be dogged by a perception of myself which began with the (to me, unaccountable) distancing of one of my few close friends as a tween and solidified during my lonely high school years as a relative newcomer in a rural area: I wasn’t good at friendship. “I don’t expect to make friends,” I declared to my mother as I contemplated my transfer to a college in another state. “If I do, that’s fine, but I’m not counting on it. And that’s fine, because I’m really just going there to learn.” Viewing college as a job instead of an opportunity to develop friendships was my defense against the humiliation of social failure.

Thankfully, my predictions didn’t come true. I made a few real friends and a number of lovely acquaintances during the two years I spent earning my bachelors. The comfort of companionship which I had primarily experienced in family situations, I now enjoyed in spontaneous games of Dutch Blitz with the girls across the hall, in watching a movie with friends the first night back from break (soothing the jar of transition with back rubs and “mindless entertainment”), in having someone to sit by in chapel and (sometimes) the safety of a group in the dining hall. But, at least in my own mind, I didn’t exactly fit. I seldom felt secure in relationships with others, never fully relaxed.

During that time, I did experience a whole new joy in the realization that my written words could resonate with others and forge a connection. My professors challenged and encouraged me, creating an environment where things stored inside of me could come to life on paper. Interactions with fellow students in small peer-review groups delighted me—I could hear the warmth in their voices, enjoy the sense of discovery when something one of us had written became something that somehow belonged to all of us. Shared imagery wove into each of our lives. This joy, this gift of shared words, flowered in college—but it began long before that.

My parents, my mother in particular, raised me in a home rich with words. Mom read to my siblings and me nearly every night, even into our preteen years, and we each read eagerly on our own, as well. She placed a wonderful writing curriculum in my hands, thrilling me with the realization that words provided another outlet for my artistic passion. She even helped me like the physical appearance of my handwriting, teaching me a whole new kind of cursive when the first method wobbled and globbed from my left hand. Writing, especially poetry, has become a key way that I navigate life—a solace for myself, and sometimes even for others. When I trace the path that ushered me into that world, following it from my keyboard, today, through professors and fellow student writers–it begins with one woman, my teacher throughout my whole childhood, my mother.

I carry the gifts Mom gave me—the many benefits from her conscientious, extensive, and loving efforts on my behalf. In some ways, exposing some negative results from my upbringing feels disloyal and ungrateful. But it is not my job to be the justification of a lifestyle. I am no one’s lifework. I am a person. And along with a love for the sharing of life through the sharing of words, who I am includes the wound of a social limp which I carry today. I still tend to default to isolation or interacting with others through meeting their perceived expectations of me, but it is my hope that I will continually grow more honest with others and with myself.

 

More Guest than Citizen: Jaelyn Bos’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

“Be in the world, but not of it.”

This statement summarizes how good Christians are to relate to non-evangelicals, or so I have been told. It also describes my relationship to my peers prior to college.

As a homeschooler (K-12), I was something of an anomaly. My parents are moderately left-leaning in both their politics and their theology, which in Homeschool World makes them flaming liberals.

I had friends prior to college (primarily from a homeschool co-op), but I was also far lonelier than I understood. I worked hard in school, stayed quiet though conversations about Ken Ham and Sarah Palin, and kept my interests to myself. Though in their world, I was definitely not of it. I actually had a great variety of experiences in high school, from volunteering regularly in inner city DC to visiting a development organization in Honduras. Yet, in all these places, I was more guest than citizen, in but not of.

Thankfully, my family expected me to go to college. They supported me completely when I chose to live on-campus at a diverse public university.

My first few weeks at college felt like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia.

I was a little dazed, sure, but mostly I was dazzled but the discovery of a huge new world of ideas and activities and people. I made a friend from Albania, and a friend who was Jewish, and a friend who was bisexual. I discovered terms, like intersectionality, and causes, like transgender rights, that I barely knew existed. I played cards with mixed-gender groups of friends past midnight and nobody cared.

My academic transition was easy thanks to community college classes in high school and parents who made sure I received rigorous, well-rounded education. Socially, I was friendly, but struggled to see myself as part of a group. I still remember my bizarre feeling of surprise when I realized that I was just as capable of gathering my friends for dinner as was anyone else.

As the semester wore on, I carefully practiced being honest about myself. I admitted to my ignorance of pre-2012 pop culture, doubts about my sexuality, and fascination with evolutionary biology, and learned that no quirks are unique to one person. I realized that in being truthful, I could actually affect the opinions of others, and my opinions could evolve as well. I felt heard.

I learned that I could not only be genuine in my community, but also change it.

Joining a service learning program exposed me to concept of civic engagement, and amazing administrators and professors showed me how to take my ideas and run with them. On a more personal level, I sought other students in need of community and tried to be there for them.

I am now beginning my third year of college, double majoring in two sciences and mostly still loving it. My community is not perfect, but it is mine. To all of the homeschoolers facing a transition to college, I would like to give the same advice I gave the freshmen for whom I TA: Try new things, find help when you need it, be kind.

For you in particular, I will add that it is not your job to defend homeschooling. It is your job to find people you trust, and then be honest. Tell the truth about where you’ve been, what you care about, and what you don’t understand. Then listen to the others’ truths and allow them to change you.

Homeschooling taught me adaptability, and critical thinking, though perhaps I would have gained those same traits elsewhere. I do not know what my life would be had I not been homeschooled. I do know this. I am woven tight into the fabric of my community here, and I am not just in it. I am making it.

Crooked Arrow: Smith Lingo’s Story

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

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

My dad found Jesus towards the end of his college education and immediately wanted to quit his music studies and run off to seminary. Or so he tells me. He only had a year left, so he decided to stick it through to graduate. But that initial determination to sacrifice the reality of his own needs and wants for a far-off ideal, some abstract standard, is something he’s never abandoned, and something he’s done his damndest to pass on to the kids.

Soon after graduating and getting married to my Mom he became seized with another defining idea: that they were destined to be parents, and they would parent not just the amount of children that was healthy, sustainable, or economically viable, but that they would conceive, deliver, and raise as many children they physically could.

This was driven by a rhetorical idea of children not defined as individuals, but a collective force.

Children as “arrows in the hands of a warrior”, “blessings from the Lord”, things to be multiplied instead of cherished, raised for gain as political clout or a future care-taking staff instead of for love.

It was in service to this idea then that my father went back to school for Computer Science, working at a gas station in the morning, going to class in the day, and poring over his Calculus textbook at night. He wanted a new career path, one that paid better than music education. He worked the long days in service to his abstract idea of children — the arrows, the blessings — while the same work separated him from his concrete children. It was for all his future children too, the children of the mind, that he labored and studied while the children of his present were fatherless.

I realized from a very early age that my dad cared more about me as an idea than about me as a person, a discrete, tangible being.

The very first thing I was taught in our homeschool of hard mental knocks was to tell him what he wanted to hear, to tell him what the child of his mind would say. If I didn’t, I knew he would try to pry it out of me, convinced he was simply refining an imperfect vessel, burning the dross away from my crude soul with paddles and palms. I can’t remember ever not knowing that my father was disinterested in my truth.

But, abstract as they were, my dad’s ideas had consequences, and one of those consequences was me. As difficult as it is to reconcile, without my parents’ reckless pursuit of their ideological army of children I would not exist. I am the physical manifestation of my parents’ ideas, even if I could never measure up to the mind-mold in their eyes. As I come to disagree with those fundamental ideas, it becomes more of a struggle. I am opposed to the very reason I exist. I must take the position that if what was best had been, I would never have been born. This is the poison of ideology.

A few years ago, my homeschool education came to an end. I graduated in a ceremony with other homeschoolers from the local area, kids I was lucky to have seen a handful of times in the previous years. I remember before the ceremony the parents of the graduating seniors tried to plan social events for the class. Looking back now through the lens of disillusionment it seems like a desperate attempt to make up for decades of conscious desocialization in a few short months. It certainly worked about as well as you’d expect from that viewpoint.

The first event I attended may have been the first time I had faced the prospect of a purely social gathering by myself. I was terrified, and anxious, and awkward, feelings I would come to be intimate with in the following years.

I was facing for the first time a seemingly impassable gulf of experience and knowledge that my parents never taught me in the syllabus of my home education, and I hadn’t been allowed to gather outside. They had prepared me to take tests in Algebra and English, to converse with adults about the Will of God, to make change, and to tell time.

But they had always, actively kept me from independently forming relationships with anyone my own age.

My parents adequately prepared me to score well on academic tests. I received a scholarship to go to college, and since I was born male and had scored well in Math they decided to allow me to attend the local university, my father’s alma mater, in Computer Science. I had become an expert in telling them what their abstract child would say, so I told them I would study Computer Science.

It was, I told them, a good career to support a family with, and I may not have said the words, we both meant a family with as many future, abstract children as my future, abstract wife could possibly deliver. Their abstract child would never tell them he wanted to study film, so they never heard that in my gentle hints and information requests to other schools. The dross of my dreams was burned away.

I was becoming a pure ideological vessel, a well-fletched arrow they could shoot into the world.

The Gulf has returned to haunt me again and again. I’d recognize it anywhere. In every realm except the academic and physical, I am a child, with a child’s experience and knowledge. I am now old enough to legally drink, but we are born knowing how to drink. I am more than old enough now to connect with my peers, but I do not know how to do it; I never learned. And I am slowly learning now, but the Gulf between me and my generation grows larger as I try to build my flimsy bridges over it.

The Gulf paralyzes me, turns every phrase into mumbled gibberish in my mouth. Every situation contains an unknown, a reminder.

Every experience understood as universal that I can’t possibly relate to, every turn of phrase everyone else understands but is foreign to me, every reference that exposes my naivety transforms me from hulking twenty-something to socially floundering toddler.

College has corrupted the pure vessel my parents thought they had refined. The experience of opening my mind to the truth of people besides my father has bent the arrow they fletched so straight to their mark. I only lasted a semester in the Young Republicans. Nowadays I snicker in chatrooms about the spectre haunting Europe and envy the hammer-and-sickle tattoos my friends are getting.

I lingered at the outskirts of college ministry for a semester longer, but today I’m more concerned about the long-neglected physical ailments of my discrete body than the ideological ailments the campus crusaders claim to cure. And I’m more interested in the concrete bodies of the men and women around me in the present more than the form of a single, abstract, future woman. Perhaps someday I’ll raise a child.

If I do, I’ll raise them to be who they are and not to fit the mold of an ideological soldier in a biological army.

My parents have noticed the change. Every time I’m foolish enough to talk to them about what matters to me now, they purse their lips and shake their heads. The model has been spoiled; their beautiful idea is tarnished. They murmur about my professors, the media, my peers, always my peers. Never me. “I” still mean nothing to them; I’m still an arrow to be fletched and strung and released, an empty vessel to refine in fire. I could try to tell them about the Gulf, the daily struggle to belong to a society I’ve been held separate from for decades.

But the struggles of real people have never interested them as much as the ideological battles being waged in their minds, and on that battlefield, I’ve already been lost.

I Can’t Save My Siblings

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Eduardo Sánchez

 

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog, The Girl Who Once Lived in a Box. It was originally published on Sept. 1st, 2015.

by Eleanor Skelton, HA editorial team

 

Growing up homeschooled means you get a lot more time with your siblings than other kids. As an older sibling, it also means you have much more responsibility for them.

My parents told me I didn’t need friends, I had my siblings. They also told me I was the example for them, the prototype.

This set the pattern for some unhealthy dynamics. My first counselor after moving out said my dad’s insisting our only friends being immediate family members was incredibly codependent. Libby Anne writes about being an older child instructed to spank her younger siblings.

Parents expecting more of older siblings is typical in secular culture, but not usually with the same connotations like in fundamentalist homeschooling. As the oldest in my family, I heard things like:

A good older sibling sets the example for their younger brothers and sisters. Even if you don’t think they look up to you, they do. They watch your every move, and often, they’ll try to walk in your footsteps. So it’s important that you behave in ways that set a good example for them. Just like we look to Jesus to be our example, that we look to live how he lived and behave like he behaved, our younger siblings often look to us that way, too. —Taken from Christian Teen About

Statements like this put an excessive amount of pressure on older children.

We’re not just expected to protect younger siblings from danger, we’re responsible for their eternal salvation. And fundamentalist parents often manipulate this idea to check rebellion. To squash any behavior they didn’t like.

I couldn’t get angry if Dad was controlling and demanding, because that wasn’t having a meek and quiet spirit. Suffering without complaint was more like Christ, I was told, and a better example.

If I wore a fitted sweater, I was not being an example of modesty to my sister.

When I asked to have a curfew of midnight instead of 7:30 p.m. in college, I was not demonstrating submission to authority for my siblings.

My mom often said: “What will your little brother and sister think? They are always watching you. You know what Jesus said about those who lead little children astray. It would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck.”

So when Dad said things that hurt, when the house felt like a cage, when I thought of running away in the middle of the night, I didn’t. Because of my siblings. I was responsible for them.

When I thought my parents punished my brother and sister unfairly, I’d try to anger them into spanking me instead.

Junior year of college, I moved out because my parents said the alternative would be transferring to Bob Jones University. I went back and forth, uncertain what my decision would mean for my brother and sister. I’d be the first to leave home.

I told my professors that I wanted to be a good example for my siblings, that I didn’t want to run away or rebel if it would hurt them, that I’d go to Bob Jones if I had to, even if it killed me.

They told me that I could be a good example by moving out, that I could show my siblings that freedom was possible.

But I worried. I knew I couldn’t live at home anymore, but I still wanted to be a good big sister. That fall, I struggled to set limits as my parents barraged me with visits and phone calls, begging me to reconsider.

A couple of classmates, both named Cynthia, asked me what was wrong after one of our Saturday writers’ group meetings.

I gave my fears a voice. I didn’t understand taking care of yourself before helping other people. Fundamentalism taught me the reverse: don’t be selfish, sacrifice everything for others. Shouldn’t I just put up with my parents’ behavior for the sake of my siblings?

One of the Cynthias looked at me and the other Cynthia. She said, “Are you familiar with New Life’s teaching about confronting lies that you’ve believed? You identify the lie, you replace it with truth, and you pray against the power of the lie. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself for your siblings. You’re free to make your own choices.”

They each laid hands on me, praying with me that I’d heal and live in freedom.

I can’t save my siblings. All I can do is be a good human.

My little sister is going to BJU, and my little brother is a serious, quiet teenage boy. I lost contact with them for two years after leaving, so I can’t just speak my truth to them openly.

All I can do is be there and listen.

You Are Their Child, But You Are NOT Their Property: Rose’s Story

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, JosephB.

HA Note: “Rose” is a pseudonym. The following was originally published as “When Generosity Becomes a Bribe” on February 27, 2015 and modified for HA.

I was having a conversation with a, yes a homeschooled-patriarchy-fundamental friend, who I normally can be pretty open with, but I know my boundaries with what I can say and not say. So anyway, we were talking about her getting a job or some kind of income, but being this typical friend, she claimed she was too busy! Bible study, other studies and can any other (ex) homeschoolers guess what else is taking up most of her time. Well if anyone said “help around the house/her parents” then you got it!

I know how manipulative parents can be (whether knowingly or unknowingly), but it doesn’t change a thing. The sub-culture I come from, the Christian homeschool-patriarchy movement, has parents at an advantage, see because they have total control of what their children know/see/hear/do, basically they have total influence over their kids, because of how closed off this sub- culture is. From the start they had the upper hand and us children had the lower ground, as Effie Trinket WOULDN’T say the “odds were NEVER in our favor” and the “odds were ever in their favor.”

What almost all the parents that I know said, including mine, was that “we have no right to complain,” “we have it so good,” “we had nothing to complain about,” “we were being rebellious,” it goes on and on and on, to no end. And since we didn’t have anything to cross reference or cross analyze any of the information our brains were being fed and because we were told that our parents were our sub-ultimate authority, they were always right, they ALWAYS knew best, basically they were God (I feared my parents more than I feared God himself) so we believed it all, every little thing they told us or in some cases what they DIDN’T tell us. And there are some other contingencies, like in some parents cases the need to have control over their children, or the need for people to work for them (as in my dad’s case).

So combine the COMPLETE innocence, being told our life was PERFECT, and the stupidity to believe it all, the control factor, and the result is you’ve got children who are too afraid to do anything outside of what their parents approve of or outside of what their parents need them to do and are too afraid to ask their parents because then they will think we are all ungrateful and rebellious, or they guilt us into thinking we should be happy where we are.

Let me tell you a little of what my experience was growing up:

First off some background. My dad has an anger issue, my mom was totally controlled by fear my entire growing up years. So consider that when I tell my story.

My family didn’t know how to communicate at all, like 0% of the time, so talking about anything of worth was out of the question every time, no matter the subject or topic, thus leaving us children (who had no knowledge or any sense of how to process or think through things, because no one was teaching us) to figure out life and some of the traumatizing things we had been through and all the stuff we didn’t understand on our own. The only talking my family did was when my dad would “preach” as we called it, it’s basically my dad just rambling on (don’t get me wrong, everything I know about politics and well basically my belief system as far as everything but religion goes I got from 20 years of listening to my dad talk) but the “preaching” my dad did only enforced the saying “children should be seen and not heard,” as well as inadvertently hindering our communication/social skills, we grew up listening, NOT talking, so of course communication with other people was extremely hindered and for some of us completely non-existent, which in turn hinders our social skills and then affects our self-esteem. If our self-esteem is impaired and we don’t feel confident with ourselves, then it affects our decisions to do stuff on our own, thus making us more dependent on our parents because we don’t know how to communicate.

Another aspect that plays a part is also a result of the non-existent communication, because we didn’t communicate, the life skills, beliefs, morals, boundaries, etc. weren’t passed down from my parents, we weren’t taught how to figure that stuff out on our own. Which leads me to my next point that plays a part.

My parents believed that part of Bill Gothard’s teachings that children are inherently evil and that they will if given the chance turn away from what you believe or whatever his teaching is. My parents TOLD us what to believe, not how to figure out what to believe, so we only knew it in our heads not our hearts, and since we were told EVERYTHING there was no need to even consider finding out what we personally believed, until someone challenges one of us on what we “believe” so we realize we don’t have the answers, just a bunch of words, that’s when we start questioning what we believe, because if we don’t have answers to questions about what we supposedly have believed for our entire life, we as human beings will start to question our beliefs.

My dad owns his own business, its more like a family business, with the rest of the family being used as “slave labor” as I like to call it. Basically, that means us kids worked for my dad for no pay, most of us didn’t want to be in the business for various reasons, but the connecting common reason was my dad, he gets angry, he has a different work ethic than what I think is right, and does things that don’t make sense to even the most experienced business person. I don’t know where it came from or how he got into doing this but my dad has this manipulative way of getting his way, getting people to do things. I’m a good example, from the time I can remember I always wanted to be a secretary, and I verbally said it, too. What I didn’t know was that I was laying the groundwork for five + years long battle with my dad about working in his business, what I didn’t know at the time was that my mom was encouraging my dad to get me more involved in the business, she helped ruin what potentially could have been a good father/daughter relationship. I’ve always had this strange connection with my dad, it has influenced a lot of my decisions regarding my dad, but most of the time its a blessing but these past years its been more of a curse than anything! I hate hurting my dad, maybe because I’m afraid he conditionally loves me and if I hurt him he won’t love me, idk. but one thing that drives me to do a lot of things is my attempt to measure up to get his approval for him to be proud of me, because I’ve never been able to get anything right with my dad, in business and in life, I’ve never chosen a career path that he agreed with that he approved of, I’ve never been able to understand what he wanted done when I did work for him, therefore never completing anything and that equals failure in my dad’s eyes.

What I’ve realized over the past couple of years is that my dad has these standards that are impossibly high and there is no way in heaven that anyone could possibly meet them (not even God).

And my dad has a specific way he wants things done, he likes them done perfect and his way, I think what I’ve heard him say before is that saying “if you want it done right, do it yourself.” Well, I think maybe my dad could have come up with that saying because he practically lives by it, which makes it hard for those of us who work/live with him because then we are never measuring up never getting it right, and for me with the connection I have with him it’s especially hard and discouraging! Because all I’ve ever wanted was to get one thing, ONE THING right with my dad! But it seems to be an impossible task because I’ve been trying for over a decade now and its only gotten me more discouragement, more self loathing, more self-condemnation, and more reason to run!

I just have one thing to say to YOU. NEVER let someone else’s opinions/views/words affect how you live your life, how you look at people, how you choose to walk that path.

And NEVER let your parents make you feel like crap when you want to do something for yourself, for your future. NEVER let them use you for their benefit while hindering your dreams. NEVER let what your parents say about your life affect your choices, your lifestyle, or your beliefs…..but….remember this is coming from a girl who has lived with controlling, manipulative, judgmental, critical parents, I know that not all parents are this way, but a lot of you homeschoolers (ed) know what I’m talking about, and those of you who are in denial, I hope that someday you accept the reality that your parents aren’t perfect, never were, never will be, that maybe they didn’t get everything right with you growing up, I hope that someday maybe you will accept (if applicable) that your parents may have screwed you over.

My parents used their generosity as a weapon, when it was brought up about us kids not getting paid to work, they would always say “you work for meals, room and board (NO I’m pretty sure that comes with being a parent, that is a requirement when you have children not something the children work for, that the children work for) stuff like that was always said when we brought up injustices or things that weren’t right. AND when parents say stuff like that about the child, like working for room and board or for food, eventually it will make the child feel like they are a burden or that maybe the parents didn’t want them, and in my family’s case (with no communication) this could be a very, very dangerous thing, something that could be deadly.

Not all are as obvious as my case, (even though at the time it wasn’t) there are more subtle ways of parents manipulating and using their kids. It goes like this, they make it (knowingly or unknowingly) so that you are the one choosing to “help out”, choosing to “work for them” willingly helping with the younger ones, willingly helping with cleaning, cooking, shopping, etc, it becomes a crutch that the parents maybe knowingly or unknowingly will use, if you still deny it then ask yourself this question: “what if I left, what would they do?”

DO NOT LET YOUR PARENTS USE YOUR LIFE AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR USING YOU AT YOUR EXPENSE.

WHEN THEY HAD YOU THEY KNEW IT WAS THEIR DUTY TO RAISE YOU, IT’S A REQUIREMENT THAT THEY FEED, CLOTHE AND HOUSE YOU AS YOU ARE THEIR CHILD. BUT YOU ARE NOT THEIR PROPERTY. DON’T LET THE TWO GET CONFUSED!

AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO “PAY THEM BACK.”

Picking Things Up from the Culture, Homeschool Edition

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on April 12, 2015.

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that, when speaking of my conservative evangelical homeschool upbringing, I frequently say “I was told X” rather than “my parents told me X.” There is a reason for that—sometimes I can’t remember whether my parents actually taught me some specific aspect of purity culture or political conservatism or whether I just picked it up from the Christian homeschool culture around me. After all, I read the homeschool magazines we subscribed to, listened to the speakers at homeschool conventions, and socialized with the other homeschooled children.

My parents removed my siblings and I from public schools in order to remove us from external influences. But they didn’t remove us from external influences entirely, because, short of locking us in our rooms, they couldn’t. What they did was change the set of influences we were exposed to. But in their choice of a new set of influences—that of Christian homeschool culture—we were sometimes exposed to things they may not have agreed with in a way they never never thought about.

For example, when I was a senior in high school a friend of mine tried to talk me out of going to college. She said women were supposed to serve, and that college was entirely hedonistic and self-centered. She told me she planned to spend those years as a mother’s helper in other homeschooling families, before marrying and beginning her own family. I agreed with her premises, and was left unsettled. If my parents hadn’t had such a solidly upper middle class expectation that I would go to college, I might have been swayed.

For all of homeschooling parents’ rhetoric about how “peer dependent” public schooled children are, we homeschooled children could be quite influenced by our homeschooled peers. Part of me finds this ironic. But then, the point was not so much to remove us from peers entirely as to change the set of peers we were around. My parents opted to expose us to Christian homeschooling culture rather than to the culture of the local public schools.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad my parents didn’t subject other Christian homeschooling families to a detailed theological review before allowing me to socialize with their children. I mean yes, they did draw some lines, but they could have drawn those lines much more narrowly. By way of example, I recently came upon an article titled When Catholic Homeschool Kids Get Lonely that really made me cringe. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s easy to think that if Catholic parents put their children in the Catholic Youth Group at the local parish, all will be well and this will solve the ‘loneliness’ or the ‘socialization’ issue, but my husband and I have found that sometimes this can create other problems. Simply put, our experience with the Catholic Youth Group in our particular area has been mostly negative and counterproductive in helping us to raise our daughters for Christ. When we would bring our children to some of the youth activities, we were disheartened by what we experienced and witnessed.

Many of the children who attend these functions also attend the public school. They go to these functions because their parents make them, not because they really want to be there. While there, we would hear them using foul language and witness them picking on other children, bringing that whole “public school mentality/environment” with them into the youth group activities. The parents who were chaperoning these activities couldn’t be everywhere at once, so much of the cursing and mean-spiritedness took place when the chaperones weren’t watching.

Not only this, but my husband and I were appalled at the way in which the girls who attended these functions dressed. We decided not to sign our children up for any more youth group activities in this area.

One of the reasons why I made the decision to homeschool was because I didn’t want my children to be negatively influenced by bad peers. If I keep them out of the public schools for this reason, but then put them around those same children in a youth group activity, what have I accomplished? They’re still around the bad peers.

. . .

If there is a local homeschool support group in your area, this can be a good thing, especially when most of the parents whose children are in these groups are doing what they do for the same reasons as you. However, I do want to offer you a word of caution regarding some of these groups. Not every homeschool support group is Catholic.

If you are raising your children in the Catholic Faith, it is better to be a part of a Catholic homeschool support group than a Protestant one. Experience has taught me over and over again that when Catholics join a Protestant homeschool support group (especially an evangelical one) subtle attempts are made in order to “reach out to” and “save” the Catholic’s soul. Religious tracts are distributed, and invitations are given to attend this church service, that Bible study, this Children’s Kids’ Klub, or that Vacation Bible School.

Because of this, I refuse to allow my children to participate in any of these groups. If a group of kids and parents want to get together for the sake of picnicking and playing ball, that’s one thing. But when one group tries to impose its religious beliefs on another because it does not accept and respect the religious beliefs of others, a line has been crossed.

. . .

If there are no Catholic homeschool support groups in your area, you might consider starting one yourself. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that in order for it to be successful, it has to be complex, time-consuming, and difficult. Just getting together once a week in a park for a game of kickball with hot chocolate and doughnuts could be a great way to start. Using a church fellowship hall in order to host these meetings is something that a lot of Catholic homeschool support groups pursue.

Although having companions can be fun, nothing can take the place of a close Catholic family.

If a parent chooses to homeschool to remove their children from the influence of public school children, and then chooses to opt out of both church activities and established homeschool groups again because the children involved are deemed bad companions . . . well, let’s just say that if a parent refuses to allow their children to socialize with any children who do not share their beliefs in exactitude, the children will be very lonely indeed.

But because my parents did expose us so fully to Christian homeschooling culture, I’m often unsure what my parents actually believed and what I simply picked up from that culture. Sometimes I know the answer without hesitation, because I remember this comment or that. But other times I don’t. And I find that fascinating.