The Austin bomber is an opportunity to discuss the
impossibility of parents controlling how their children turn out, and the
pathologies that result when they try.
As soon as reports came out that the 23-year-old man mailing bombs
into Austin had been homeschooled, the predictable vitriol began.
(Link to website for twitter posts)
That Muslim
family comparison is an interesting applied to reporting from New York Magazine and
the Austin-American Statesman, which saw fit to cite
portions of the Austin bomber’s college writing in which he says natural
marriage makes sense because neither two men nor two women can actually have
sex. Do we ever see mainstream media quoting the portions of the Quran that
command violence and subjugation against unbelievers? To ask that question is
to answer it. So why, then, is this disparate public treatment of Christian and
Muslim murderers justified, especially for a media that inexplicably continues
to pretend at “objectivity”?
Acquaintances
tell media the young man’s family was “strictly religious” and regularly
attended church, Bible studies, and what sound like fun-filled activities with
many other homeschooling families. His relatives in a statement said they
are “devastated and broken” and praying for the families of the young man’s
victims as well as his soul. One can’t really ask for a more humane response to
hearing such terrible news about a family member.
Of course, it’s no surprise to see the Left using a horrible crime
to tar homeschooling even though the Left howls when people apply the same kind
of analysis to bomb-generating Muslims or environmentalists. We’re all used to
this kind of embedded, unfair, and utterly unapologetic cognitive dissonance by
now.
So let’s talk about something not as well-worn: The impossibility
of parents controlling how their children turn out, and the pathologies inside
and outside homeschooling that result when they try.
The Pitfalls of ‘Loving’
Your Kids to Validate Yourself
It may seem obvious: Parents can’t control their kids. We’ve all
known great parents who had a kid go off the rails due to the child’s own bad
choices and despite his parents’ attempts to steer him aright. Yet even though
we know this is true we act in ways that pretend it is not.
This can be especially true for homeschool parents, who make
unusual sacrifices to give their kids a better life. Tim Wise’s tweets above
mock this good desire. But there’s something inside that mockery. Although
badly and cruelly, it points to the truth that kids can and sometimes do reject
even the most loving parenting and home environments. It also points to the
truth that parents’ insecurities can deform their kids in the name of
sacrificial love.
In his “Four Loves,”
philosopher C.S. Lewis discusses this form of bourgeoisie virtue-signaling:
“the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its
objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this
all the more ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is
a Gift-love and therefore regards itself as ‘unselfish’.” He illustrated with
an example of a mother we all have encountered at some point:
Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for
her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it.
‘She lives for her family,’ they said; ‘what a wife and mother!’ She did
all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to
send it out to laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But
she did… She was living for her family. She always sat up to ‘welcome’ you if
you were out late at night; two or three in the morning, it made no odds;
you would always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you, like
a silent accusation. Which means of course that you couldn’t with any
decency go out very often.
I recently taught at a homeschool co-operative, in which several
families meet, usually once a week, for classes that various parents teach.
While we were preparing lessons, a homeschooling mom dropped this comment: “I
would feel so guilty if I didn’t homeschool my kids.” I asked why, and she
replied that essentially she would feel she was deficient as a mother if she
did not educate them personally, in kind of a parallel to moms who feel
deficient because they’re not the Pinterest type who makes all her kids’
clothes and toys from scratch and grinds grain she grew herself to make
homemade, organic, high-protein amaranth bread.
I have different mom hangups than this, so this struck me as a
crushing spiritual and psychological burden for a mother to assume. But we do
this thing all the time, especially highly conscientious moms, who in my
experience are highly concentrated among the homeschool set. Yet this control
dynamic exists among plenty of parents, and not only homeschoolers, either.
Some call it helicopter parenting. Others call it tiger mothering.
Whatever it is, it’s fueled by anxiety, guilt, and above all the nagging
feeling that if your child turns into a bomb-mailer, it will be because you
potty trained him using disposables instead of cloth trainers, or at age three
instead of infancy. One consequence of this is that when your kid fails at
something — as he regularly will — you only have yourself to blame, since you
did everything in that child’s life for him. As they do, this phobia produces
the very reality it exists to shield against.
Thinking You’re Helping
Doesn’t Make It True
As
psychology professor Jordan Peterson points out below in a characteristically
powerful description of a facet of his field, this relationship pattern
undermines the child’s coming of age in ways that are endemic now in our
culture. At its deepest level, he says, some mothers do this because their
child’s growth threatens their identity as a mother. Elsewhere he’s said he thinks this is
the most likely pitfall of homeschooling.
A mother’s true job is to work herself out of motherhood by gradually
allowing, even pushing, her children to stand on their own two feet, walk, then
run — sometimes away from her. This is a particularly female tendency that
could often be remedied by allowing fathers more parenting influence, as they
are more likely to push for kids’ independence. Overly anxious mothers tend to
smother their kids in the name of “helping” them, which ultimately sets their
kids up for stunted development and pathological behavior.
Cindy
Rollins, a homeschool mother who has graduated eight kids, recently told how
one of her sons who worked in college admissions observed he could always tell
the homeschooling families on a visit, because the mothers asked all the
questions while their nearly adult children, the college applicants, sat in
silence.
A couple of
years ago, a series of scandals among
homeschool leaders coincided with the adulthood of the generation of kids whose families had begun
homeschooling with its 1980s resurgence. These kids and their parents
began openly discussing their
disillusionment with the idea that homeschooling could ensure a happy and good
life. The well-known homeschool leader and pastor Josh Harris, son of a
homeschooling dynasty, posted the following on his
blog from the also well-known Reb Bradley in 2011:
In the last couple of years, I have heard from
multitudes of troubled homeschool parents around the country, a good many of
whom were leaders. These parents have graduated their first batch of kids, only
to discover that their children didn’t turn out the way they thought they
would. Many of these children were model homeschoolers while growing up, but
sometime after their 18th birthday they began to reveal that they didn’t hold
to their parents’ values.
Some of these young people grew up and left home
in defiance of their parents. Others got married against their parents’ wishes,
and still others got involved with drugs, alcohol, and immorality. I have even
heard of several exemplary young men who no longer even believe in God. My own
adult children have gone through struggles I never guessed they would face.
Most of these parents remain stunned by their
children’s choices, because they were fully confident their approach to
parenting was going to prevent any such rebellion.
Most of
these folks were Christians, so it’s terribly sad their pastors and the largely
Christian leaders of the homeschool movement did not preach the gospel to them
better. This would have reminded them that salvation “is not your own doing; it is the
gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast,” so our identity
and self-worth ultimately need to come from something deeper than our
ticked-off to-do lists and sparkling, Instagrammable appearances.
We need to
keep from the twin overreactions of attempting to control all things our kids
do or abdicating our responsibility to them and our community by letting them
run wild. We cannot make our kids be good, but good parenting — which includes
letting them fail and make their own choices at the appropriate times — can
overall increase their odds. We need to parent according to timeless principles about
morality and human nature that can be applied flexibly to specific
circumstances, not stuff our kids into systems that
we naively and desperately trust to ensure perfect outcomes.
Fittingly enough, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn poignantly gets at this
great truth that all parents, and all people, need to hear and frequently
ponder:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line
separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor
between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and
through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the
years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good
is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted
small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth
of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human
being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world
in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
It is certainly much easier to lie to ourselves that we can
control life’s outcomes, that homeschooling our kids — or getting them into the
best preschool at age three, or the top college, or making them concert
pianists or star athletes or whatever other sign of achievement we settle on —
will ensure their entrance into heaven or at the very least validate us as
amazing parents. But that lie has one hell of a payback.
Joy Pullmann
is executive editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education
Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,"
out from Encounter Books in 2017. Get it on Amazon.
