Great Expectations

Again, this post started on Facebook, where a friend and fellow homeschooling parent sent me a link to an article in the Atlantic, Why Parents Need to Let their Children Fail.  Though the article does not mention homeschooling specifically, my friend felt the article might have some implications regarding homeschooling.

I recommend reading the article directly, but if you don't have the time, the gist of the article is a teacher's view of how so many parents today are overly protective of their kids, shielding them from natural consequences, and thus preventing them from growing up.  The author uses a powerful example of a student she gave an F for plagiarism.  When the mother came to her defense, the mother said that the girl didn't write the paper, she did.  Apparently, the mother was not only an enabler, but a plagiarist as well.  The article referred to a survey of teachers and professionals on how high-responsiveness and low-demandingness parents today overparent their children.  The author of this article felt that this overparenting leads to irresponsible and unproductive young adults.  This teacher saw herself as playing a small part in counterbalancing this trend by giving out Fs to lazy and coddled students.  Indeed, the teacher who wrote this article seemed to think that her most important lessons were not English, but moral lessons. She made the following statement about her role as teacher:

You see, teachers don't just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.

First of all, why is it this teacher's place to teach anybody's children values (i.e. "responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight)?  It seems I've read somewhere, several times, that most people believe it's the parents' job to teach values, not the teachers'.  Even if you allow that values are, to a certain extent, unavoidable for teachers to address, most people do not want teachers to consider values to be "the most important skills" that they teach.  Furthermore, this teacher had no evidence to confirm that the children actually learned to accept responsibility.  This teacher merely had faith that, through her consequences, some of the students might learn responsibility at some point in the future.

Another friend of mine (a former teacher--until she had enough!) recently told me some similar war stories from the classroom.  She had been an Art teacher for about eight years in two separate school districts--one largely minority and poor, the other mostly white and affluent.  Despite the poverty, chaos, and funerals, she liked teaching the poor, minority students more than the rich, white students.  The difference?  The rich kids had an attitude of entitlement.  The poor minority students, when they came to school, would show up in Art class and put forth at least some minimal effort.  If they couldn't draw, no one made a big deal of it.  For the most part, they just tried to have fun.  If their efforts were lackluster and she gave them a B or a C, they didn't complain much.  It wasn't like they were trying to get into Vassar.  If my friend did give a D or an F, it was mostly due to poor attendance or extreme defiance.  At that point, the administration often picked up the responsibility of discipline and handling the parents.  By contrast, with the affluent kids, there was a sense that her class was "only Art class" and the students expected an A for just showing up.  My friend had enough when she caught one of her affluent students cheating on an Art project.  She thought something was fishy when a cheerleader who couldn't draw a stick figure turned in beautiful drawings.  It didn't take much detective work to find out that the girl had someone else do the work for her outside of class.  My friend tried to give this pretty white cheerleader an F, but the mother fought her, and the administration buckled.  My friend's only consolation was that, from then on, the girl did her Art projects in class.

Now, with apologies to my friend, I don't wish to advocate plagiarism.  Nor do I promote cheating.  But I have to ask myself, "What does it really matter?"  The girl was popular, pretty, affluent, and her artwork was embarrassingly bad.  So, to save herself the humiliation, she had someone else do her assignment.  Was this cheating?  In high school, yes.  In real life, no.  In adulthood and in the workforce, people have other people do their work for them all the time.  It's called "management."  In fact, in most places of employment, the management makes more money than the regular employees.  In the real world, convincing other people to do work for you is a highly valued skill.  Drawing?  Painting?  Sculpting?  Not so much.  Realistically, same for plagiarizing.  Now, I'm not talking about copyrighted work.  I'm referring to things like policies and procedures, various form letters, and so on.  These types of writings are stolen all the time.  And why not?  Saves time.  Generally the borrowed versions are better than anything most people could come up with on their own.  And besides, most of business writing is fluff anyways.

My recollection of public high school is that I had two excellent teachers, a handful of surprisingly good teachers, and the vast majority were split between coasters and petty bureaucrats.  I don't wish to accuse my friend of being a petty bureaucrat--I'm sure she wasn't--but I also think there's something in the linoleum of public high schools that brings out the pettiness of even the most well-meaning teachers.  First of all, it seems to me that the vast majority of school teachers have had only one real job, teaching school.  I'm not counting the job flipping burgers, the ideal training ground for petty bureaucrats.  Nor am I counting the summers as a lifeguard at the pool, the perfect job for future coasters.  I'm talking about real adult jobs that require skill and intelligence.  For a teacher who goes from high school to college and onto teaching, his or her experience of reality doesn't extend much beyond the public school system.  As a result, simply through lack of exposure and inexperience, many modern teachers have a warped perception of how the real-world works.  They live in a vindictive world of "fairness" that only occurs in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the public school system.  They can easily become Czars of their own classrooms, and they punish any student who fails to conform.

For the most part, I agree with William Glasser, MD, who has written prolifically on this subject, starting with "Schools without Failure."  With rare exceptions, children do not learn responsibility from receiving an F.  Instead, they learn that they are no good at that subject, and they learn to never apply themselves to that subject again.  This phenomenon is shockingly common.  Today, the majority of Americans would agree with at least three if not four of the following statements:  "I'm no good at Math.  I can't draw.  I'm terrible at spelling.  I'd rather die than speak in public."  A society that confesses incompetence at these most essential skills is educationally impoverished.  But the truth need not be so pessimistic.

In truth, most people are capable of developing minimal competence at all of these skills.  The problem is they have learned (mostly in public school) to give up trying.  Each of these skills requires a certain degree of determination and perseverance, but the school system has taught them that Math requires intelligence, Art takes talent, Spelling is innate, and Public Speaking is only for outgoing personalities.  Nonsense!  Talent is only 10% of the equation.  90% of what it takes to learn Math, Art, Spelling, or Public Speaking is practice. From a young age, educators should give students ample opportunities to practice each of these skills, without humiliation.  Instead, they should meet their students where they are and build from there by recognizing effort.

This is where homeschooling can easily outshine public education.  By allowing a child to work on each skill at his or her own pace until the child achieves mastery, homeschooling walks a child through a pyramid of skills without breezing past skills that will be necessary at later.  This is advantageous to both fast-learners and slow-learners.  A quick student can move onto the next skill and avoid the drudgery of stagnation.  A slow-learner can proceed at a more deliberate pace, actually mastering skills and dodging the frustration of never really understanding the material.

In his engaging book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes what it really takes to learn, the patience to work on a problem until you can solve it.  The thing that separates successful students from failing students is not raw intelligence, but the willingness to stay longer on a problem until it makes sense.  When students stop trying, they invite failure.  Gladwell makes a compelling case for how intelligence is really a small part of what makes a student--or an adult--successful.  Beyond endurance, students learn a whole set of skills that support their educational efforts.  Gladwell explains that social class is actually a bigger predictor of success in adulthood than intelligence, and this is not just because these folks are given better opportunities.  Middle and upper-middle class students learn assertiveness.  If they have been genuinely wronged by a teacher, middle-class parents are more apt to call for a parent-teacher conference.  Lower-class students, by contrast, tend to be more passive.  In this context, what the previously mentioned article called "overparenting" might actually be considered modeling useful social skills.  According to Gladwell, the responsiveness of middle and upper-middle class parents is actually what makes for better outcomes.  These students of responsive parents learn how to assert themselves with teachers and administrators.  Rather than avoid conflict, these parents model and the students learn problem-solving.  They learn not to be intimidated by authority figures.  If kept in proportion, these assertive parents and students might be pains in the neck, but they demonstrate the types of skills that people need to succeed in the real world.  But perhaps there's another factor that hasn't been considered.

Ever since the Child Abuse and Protection Act of 1974, there has been a paradigm shift in how people raise children.  Previously, it was the parents' job to prepare their children to become adults, and the teachers' job was to support the parents in this role.  Nowadays, the parents' role is merely to protect the children from harm, and the school system (starting with daycare and ending with college) takes on the task of preparing them for adulthood.  Often, this has led to a hostile relationship between parents and educators.  Under this new paradigm, it's only natural for parents to protect children from hostile educators, who no longer view themselves as serving the parents.  Indeed, if harm comes to the children, the teachers blame the parents.  And if the students are unprepared for adulthood, the parents blame the teachers.  A once harmonious relationship between parents and educators has become acrimonious as teachers no longer respect the sovereignty of parental rights and parents no longer trust teachers.

Prior to the Child Protection Act, parents expected children to be independent and resourceful.  Today, parents are paranoid that their children will be abducted by a serial killer.  Today's parents are prone to either hover over their children as they engage in structured activities, or parents plant their children in front of the television or game system.  The result is children who don't know how to explore, amuse themselves, improvise games, or resolve conflicts on their own.  As these same children enter middle-school and high-school, just when they need more autonomy, the school systems become larger, more competitive, and develop zero-tolerance policies.  Many students just don't have the social skills to traverse the gauntlet of secondary school.  As a result, many bright students fail.  No wonder the parents don't trust this process.  Habitually in the role of protectors, they merely try to protect their children from the mean principal and vindictive teachers.

The solution to this dilemma is twofold:  parental bonding and higher expectations.  If parents can regain their role as the most important influence in their children's lives, then they can have a positive influence on their values and behavior.  Yes, even in adolescence, it is possible (and used to be normal) for young men and women to value their parents' opinions most.  Today, however, young people value their peers' opinions much more than their parents'.  The same goes for all authority figures, including teachers.  Add just a little bit of stress--divorce, military deployment, poverty, disruption--and young people become indifferent to their parents and authority figures' admonishments.  Sure, students will feign lukewarm attachment to their parents and teachers, but in truth they only comply with requests so long as the parents or teachers provide for the student's perceived needs.  Buy them some new clothes, a cellphone, and a laptop, and they will comply for a while, until they have further demands.  In truth, today's adolescents have an one-sided relationship with their parents.  Young people take advantage of parents who are afraid to take charge for fear of being accused of abuse or neglect.  Parenting a defiant teen today is essentially slavery for the parents, who may feel no recourse but to respond to the teen's demands.

So, in response to this article, the problem is not overparenting, but underparenting.  Generally speaking,  highly responsive parenting is good.  But responsive parenting is not so good if the demands or expectations upon the child are low.  The trouble is that many parents today have relinquished their authority.  It starts at six weeks when they put their child in daycare.  By preschool, their children are institutionalized and compliant with the routine of rote education.  By fourth grade, however, most of their peers no longer consider learning to be cool.  So progressively from fifth grade through high school, students' main goal in school is to prevent their teachers from educating them.  As they grow, they become remarkably adept and subtle at thwarting the educational process.  By high school, the students are in charge.  Like inmates in a state correctional institution, they allow the guards/teachers to run the prison/school.

The reality of this scenario is too much for some students and parents to bare.  These students and families often opt for homeschooling rather than live the lie of public education.  I suspect this occurs mostly at either the top or bottom of the bell curve in terms of educational achievement or expectations.  Some low-motivation students coerce their parents into giving up on public education and sign up for homeschooling, unschooling, or cyberschooling.  These changes to homeschooling typically occur in junior or senior high, just as the student had disciplinary or academic problems.  Other high-motivation students tend to start homeschooling earlier, before the public schools can do much damage.  This often occurs at the behest of the parents.

Outside of homeschooling, the only other way to avoid this phenomenon is to start education much later, after the children have strongly bonded with their parents who are stable and reliable figures at home.  Daycare, preschool, and even kindergarten can actually hinder this process.  On the other end, schools need to expect higher standards of educational achievement.  Schools need to move away from mainstreaming and expect smart students to learn.  If students have stronger bonds with their parents, they will have more respect for their teachers.  In turn, the schools can demand higher competence from these students.  But this approach can only work if the vast majority of the families in the school buy into this high attachment and high expectation approach.  Until then, for high responsiveness and high demandingness parents, homeschooling remains the best option.

Conservative Resentment

This is in response to a post on Facebook about a letter written to the Waco Tribune Herald of November 18, 2011.  The article was titled, "Put Me in Charge."  Rather than get into a detailed political discussion on Facebook, I decided to address it here instead.

The article was apparently written by a 21-year-old woman who was offended by the vast numbers of people on the welfare rolls.  According to the preface, she was concerned about the future economy if the government continued to overspend on social programs (though I didn't see anything of that nature in her comments).  She proposed to fix welfare by putting her in charge.

She had in mind numerous sweeping reforms:  giving out free cheese, beans, rice, and powdered milk, but not giving out food stamps.  Drug-testing welfare recipients.  Putting recipients to work in a day program.  But worst of all to me, mandatory birth control via implants and tubal ligation.

While I understand the overall sentiment, this article is very dangerous for two reasons:  One, it is a clear case of emotional reasoning.  Two, it doesn't take into account the reality of the world today.  While some of the ideas sounded pretty good, like inspecting public housing facilities and expecting residents to take care of them, much like military housing, the overall sentiment is overly harsh and just impractical in today's world.  For any real change to be made, some fundamental things about our society would have to change first.

Periodically, I see people posting on Facebook about drug-testing food stamp recipients.  This seems to be a fairly popular idea.  In fact, Florida recently implemented such a policy.  But the state of Michigan already researched drug-testing of welfare recipients in Detroit.  The results contradicted many people's prejudices.  Only 3% of the food stamp recipients tested positive, and that was for marijuana.  None of the food stamp recipients tested positive for cocaine or heroin or any other drugs.  Hmm, could it be they didn't have the money to buy drugs?  Could it be that some drug addicts, especially those on cocaine or methamphetamine or opiates, don't care about eating, and therefore don't bother to apply for food stamps?  To me, this type of knee-jerk conservatism ironically smacks of liberal prodigality.  Drug testing costs lots of money and would only catch a few minor offenders and possibly harm children or families.

I think the bigger picture here is the attitude of the article.  At times, her comments seemed sadistic or fascistic.  Again, I'm not entirely in disagreement.  I know where she's coming from.  In my experience, those who protest most loudly about welfare are hard-working folks who put in 60-70 hour work-weeks in hard-labor jobs.  They figure, If I have to work 60-70 hours a week, then why should they get something for nothing?

But no one stops to ask, Why should I have to work 60-70 hours a week just to survive?  Adjusted for inflation, factory workers in the 1960s typically made the equivalent of a six-figure income in today's economy.  On top of that, in those days, overtime was actually paid not at time-and-a-half, but at double-time, dissuading employers from overworking employees unless necessary.  Nowadays, many of these hard-working folks are "exempt" from overtime as their base salary is more than one-and-a-half times minimum wage.  Their employers take advantage of this loophole and work them outrageously long hours.  In this way, employers save about $20,000 in health insurance by hiring one person to work 80 hours rather than two.  They also save on things like company trucks, workers comp, and so forth.  The point is that, in today's economy, the choice for most people is between working like an indentured servant or collecting welfare.  The best disincentive to welfare would be real jobs paying living wages and working reasonable hours.

A real change in the economy would probably require some measures against globalization.  In the 1960s, the U.S. still had a global economy because it wasn't viable to import and export everything on the scale we do today.  If you owned a television, it was manufactured in the United States.  Today, few (perhaps no) televisions are made in the U.S.  That means there are no comparable jobs for the people who used to make televisions, or for the children of the people who used to make televisions.  Granted, now many families can afford a television in every room.  But are we really any better off?

The one thing the complainers about welfare seem to miss is that perhaps these programs are the result of very deliberate and real decisions by those who are living in a different stratosphere of wealth.  Picture the men and women at the Bilderberg Group or at Bohemian Grove getting together and discussing the global economy.  They can pay a worker in China $2 an hour AND pay an American to collect SSI for around $3.50 per hour for a total of $5.50 per hour.  If they hire an American factory worker, they will pay anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour.  They save a ton of money going with the Chinese worker.  And to keep Americans from rioting in the streets and ruining the whole system, just sell 'em a cheap TV and give 'em some food stamps and SSI.  I'm not saying this is right.  I'm just saying that my imaginary scenario is more true than most people realize.  Getting angry at welfare recipients is not the answer.

This leads to the most offensive comments in the article about forced sterilizations and birth control.  From biology we know that there are two basic strategies for having offspring.  One is to have lots of babies and hope for some of them to survive.  At the extreme, insects and fish lay lots of eggs in the expectation that a few will survive.  At the lower end of this strategy, foxes have maybe a dozen offspring.  With this large litter strategy, most of the energy is invested in having the offspring.  Once the babies are born, very little time or energy is spent on raising them.  On the other extreme, humans typically have one child at a time.  Bears have two.  In these cases, the parents spend a lot of time educating and raising their young in the hopes that this education will give them the edge to survive and, in turn, breed the next generation.

In humans, both of these survival strategies can be seen, even though the overall biology is for one child to be born at a time.  Thus, in difficult economic times, the trend is not for parents to have less children, but actually for disadvantaged mothers to have a brood of children.  Demographically, we know this to be the case.  In our culture today, with some exceptions in religious families, the poorer the mother, the more children she is likely to have.  This is not necessarily single-mothers taking advantage of a glitch in the welfare system, it is simple biology.  The more children they have, the more likely at least some will survive.  She doesn't want birth control.  She wants to have babies.  It's programmed into her biology.

So the answers to the problem of welfare are far more complex than the simplistic comments from the newspaper in Waco, Texas would lead one to believe.  Living wages, globalism, healthcare, tort-reform, and family stability are just a few of the factors that contribute to the current situation.  I'm all for real conservative solutions to liberal prodigality.  But we have traveled very far down the rabbit hole, indeed.  It will take far more than fascist posturing to fix this problem.  But I don't see anyone really doing anything meaningful to fix it.

By the way, the writer in Waco didn't even address the most egregious of the welfare programs--Public Childcare Subsidies.  It seems that every solution to welfare only makes the problem worse, as if the solutions were coming from "The ABCs of Communism."

Why We Started this Blog

Several years ago, maybe a year before we started this blog, my wife and I were working on a book.  The working title was Judicious Christian Parenting, and we felt this blog would be a good way of promoting the book.  As we were writing, especially when we were ourselves struggling as parents, we sometimes asked:  "What makes us such authorities on raising children?"  In all honestly, the answer was, "Nothing, we are not particularly good parents."  Nonetheless, at the time, our children seemed to be on the right track and we felt we had a voice and something to say.  Turns out that, most of the time, we were the ones who needed to hear what we had to say.  Writing the blog and especially the book forced us to clarify our values.  As a result, some ideas that were more or less vague at the time have become crystal clear now.  If our mission statement was to clarify our Christian values, we certainly succeeded in that endeavor.  But I don't know if we strengthened our family or anyone else's.  As it says in the Scripture, our Christian values have sometimes turned "father against son, brother against brother (Matthew 10:35)."  Being a Christian is difficult.  So, in the midst of all this struggle, it's not hard to see why this blog and the Judicious Christian Parenting book fizzled out.  We wrote three or four tormenting chapters, hashing out the details.  But our message changed as we were writing, our audience narrowed, and we felt as though we were preaching to a very small choir.

If there was a good or genuine motive for writing the book, it was to argue against a trend we saw coming out of the Christian community.  Let's call it Reactionary Parenting, and the most extreme and dangerous advocates of Reactionary Parenting were the Ezzo's.  Essentially, Ezzo Parenting and its secular counterpart, Babywise, represented a rebirth of authoritarian parenting methods.  Based upon an Evangelical interpretation of Original Sin, the parents' job is to counteract the negative effects of their children's inherently sinful characters.  To this ends, the Ezzos instituted strict bedtimes and feeding schedules, and they discouraged parents from forming excessively emotional bonds with their children.  At best, the Ezzo method resulted in some well-disciplined and obedient children.  At worst, the Ezzo method was associated with numerous pediatric cases of failure to thrive, many adolescent examples of alienation, and perhaps many irreparable rifts in family relations.  Though Reactionary Parenting may have appealed to a number of Evangelical Christians, it clearly contradicted contemporary psychology and, more importantly, common sense.  Not to mention that it's based on a heretical interpretation of Original Sin.

Of course, there were reasons for the remarkable success of the Ezzo Parenting books, mostly as a reaction against the increasing prevalence of Permissive Parenting.  It seems that most modern parents want to be best friends with their children, and the results should be obvious.  Children, adolescents, and young adults are increasingly spoiled, insolent, and lazy.  They claim to be egalitarian judges of what they view to be right or wrong, and they dare adults to think otherwise.  They demand control over their own influences, lifestyles, religion, and morality, but without the requisite responsibility or self-support to make these decisions.  In their adult lives, they fail to meet developmental milestones at appropriate ages, but they argue that these milestones are simply outdated.  In the past, this form of adolescent relativism was strictly confined to those raised in non-religious families.  Today, even children who attend church-group several times a week will most likely develop these pagan values.  With each generation, children from Christians and pagans evolve from being obviously distinct to becoming indistinguishable.

For a solution to these parenting traps, we turned to an unlikely source, Diana Baumrind, an experimental psychologist with atheistic and socialistic leanings, who also happened to be of Jewish decent.   Baumrind had originally described three basic parenting styles:  Authoritarian (eg. Reactionary or Ezzo Parenting), Permissive (eg. modern Permissive or Democratic Parenting), and Authoritative Parenting (a parenting style that takes the best of either style).  According to Baumrind, Authoritative Parents are warm and open to the child's will, while also being directive and placing high expectations on their children.  Baumrind's three types of parenting proved an apt solution to much that was wrong with Ezzo Parenting as well as modern, Permissive Parenting.

We spent the first three or four chapters of Judicious Christian Parenting on Baumrind's three (actually four) different parenting styles.  It turns out that her categories are a good way of classifying different Christians.  Some Christians are Reactionary or Authoritarian, others are Progressive or Permissive, some are Laissez-faire or minimalist, and a few are Authoritative or Judicious.  We spent several years critiquing Progressive Christians and their Permissive Parenting styles, as well as critiquing Reactionary Christians and their Authoritarian Parenting styles.  But most of all, we racked our brains trying to figure out what Judicious/Authoritative/Interactive Christian parents would be like and how we could incorporate the best of these traits into our own parenting methods.  Implicit in all of this search was concern over the souls and futures of our children.  We wanted to raise Christian children, and we were well-aware that nowadays few  grown children follow their parents' religious practices.  We theorized that those children who do follow their parents' examples are not from Authoritarian or Permissive backgrounds, but from Authoritative families.

But we were also writing in a period of transition (or perhaps our writing and research led to that transition).  We went from being modern Catholics with ecumenical sensibilities (i.e. Progressive Christians with therefore somewhat Permissive Parenting Styles, virtually indistinguishable from most mainline Protestants) to becoming Traditional Catholics with a conviction that the Catholic Church, particularly the pre-Vatican II church, is the one true church necessary for salvation.  With this transition, our intended audience shrank to comparatively microscopic proportions.  We were no longer thinking about a generic Christian audience; we were thinking about Catholics, especially Catholics who, among other things, attend Latin Mass.  We knew that most Evangelical Christians, especially Christians attracted to Ezzo Parenting, would be unlikely to read our blog or book.  And we knew that the forces driving Progressive Christianity and Permissive Parenting had reached epidemic proportions, poisoning the modern Catholic Church, and therefore causing Western Civilization to lose its Catholic foothold on Christianity.  Increasingly, we were coming to see this modern form of Christian belief as "form without the content," or, as Kant might have said, "void."  In other words, in modern society, Christianity is merely a personal belief with only subjective value and no objective reality.  As such, Christianity without at least some reference to the traditional Catholic foothold is subject to caprice and abandonment.

The trouble for us as Catholic parents trying to raise Catholic children was that some of our children were already approaching adulthood.  Our older children's foundation in religious instruction was so weak that we stood little chance of raising them to be Catholic.  No, they had not been tainted by modern parochial education.  Instead, they had attended public school so they were brainwashed according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  And while they had received modern Catholic Religious Formation, their knowledge-base was remarkably empty.  If they had learned anything of substance about being Catholic, they had learned it from us.  At CCD, they socialized, did a few good works, and became indoctrinated into feel-good Catholicism.  Hardly anything likely to have a lasting impact.

Our oldest son, now a Junior in college, has one distinct advantage.  His college program has an emphasis on the study of the Classics.  There's really nothing like a study of Plato and Aristotle to set a time bomb in a young mind, leading to a certain kind of conversion before the age of forty.  He's unlikely to become a flat-earth Evangelical, and he might not become a Traditional Catholic, but a study of the classics is the perfect antidote to everything that ails modern education.  So we have great hope in his future religious formation, even if he is currently in the hands of the clumsy Brethren.  As Erasmus said, "In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king."

The progress has not been so clear with our second son.  We started home-schooling at the same time with all our children.  While the oldest was then a Freshman in college and escaped homeschooling, our second son was entering 10th grade.  He viewed homeschooling as a punishment, and his view of our motives was far from charitable.  So we have struggled with him.  There have been some hopeful moments.  But overall our relationship with him has been troubled.  We gave him plenty of time to get up to speed, but he only engages in short bursts.  Currently, he is showing no outward signs that he will either apply himself academically or religiously.  We have only two consolations.  One, we have been able to instill a small amount of religious instruction that he would not have otherwise received.  And two, homeschooling has forced his real level of motivation and adaptation to become evident.  In public school and later in a state university, he could have skated by until his Freshman or Sophomore year of college. Reality is sometimes painful, but at least we have not wasted years thinking he was okay when he wasn't.  Of course, we hope that he will eventually come around.

With the younger children, our optimism is almost inversely proportional to their ages.  As Lenin said, "Give me four years to educate the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."  A big portion of our hope is that we have pulled them out of the public schools and daycare system (okay, the younger children were never in daycare) before the modernists could inflict too much damage.  Similarly, the Jesuits (not a group I currently admire, but historically among the best) have a saying, "Give me a child until the age of 7, and I will show you the man."  There's nothing like instilling a small child with traditional Catholic faith--the Baltimore Catechism, the lives of the Saints, Catholic history including the Crusades.  They devour this instruction.  And it takes root in their souls, their characters.  Everything they do in later life will be informed by their current education, whether they become scientists or religious, men or women of reason or of faith.  Not only have we removed them from the secular indoctrination of modern education, but we have been able to provide substantive religious instruction.

My clinical supervisor, a child psychologist, recently told me something like, "Once a child becomes a teenager, there's very little you can do."  He explained, "An adolescent can come up with more ways to mess things up than a parent can invent to control the situation."  This is not to say that there is nothing a parent of a teen can do, but it does imply that parents of teens should be realistic about their expectations.  Essentially, parents of teens should strive to portray themselves as allies, without taking responsibility for the adolescent.  To children, parents are simultaneously antagonists and protectors, punishers and guardians.  But to adolescents, reality is the real antagonist, and parents need to withdrawal from their role as protectors.  This can mean allowing teens to make some stupid choices.  It can also mean being there emotionally but not financially when the choices inevitably fail.  This is a difficult dance, one that we as parents of teens are just now learning.  Of course, this dance would be much easier if we had already thoroughly steeped the children in our belief system prior to their brains leaving their bodies in adolescence.

Another theme with which we have struggled is popular media.  Earlier in the blog, in a post called i-Think, Therefore i-Am, we talked about modern technologies and inferred some thoughts on popular music and movies as well.  This is a difficult area.  For us, excessive restrictions in this area can quickly cause strife with neighborhood children, extended family, and our own children.  Perhaps our biggest struggle in this area is with our own laziness.  Honestly, it's easier to let the children watch television or play video games.  And we don't wish to start an argument with, for example, a visiting uncle or another child's parent.  To us, it is amazing how few adults have any real boundaries for what movies or video games children can watch.  This lack of discretion is partly a matter of social class, but it's also about Christian values, or lack thereof.

When I sat down to write this blog, something was weighing on me.  Oddly enough, it's taken until now for me to get around to it.  Something has happened in our culture.  I see it everywhere, but it's really hard for me to explain to unsympathetic ears.  Perhaps the most obvious example is daycare.  Sometime in the 1970s, mothers started entering the workforce en mass.  This created a demand for childcare.  Oddly enough, churches, the same institutions that might have been conveyors of traditional Christian values, became in large part the providers of daycare.  At first, they had "Mom's Day Out" programs, and later these expanded into 5 or 6 day a week childcare facilities.  This was logical, in a way, since churches had Sunday school facilities that were in disuse throughout the week, and they could make economic use of these spaces.  At first these programs provided childcare for children ages three and up, but quickly they started accepting children as young as six weeks.  Almost overnight, the majority of American mothers (80%) were dropping their children off at daycare as they traipsed off to work.  Here's what really bothered me:  I could accept daycare (among many other things) if it weren't for one particular phenomenon--it's as though this is how it's always been.  Sure, modern mothers may joke about how things were in the 1950s, when women "had to stay home" and "live boring and empty lives."  But this characterization is inaccurate by thirty years.  There were virtually no daycare centers until the 1980s.  It reminds me of a secular movie I once saw, The Lathe of Heaven, in which the main character dreams the world has changed, only to awakened to a world that has change as in his dream, only everyone else believes the world has always been so.  I have conversations about some of these issues with people my age or older than me, and I am stunned.  Don't they remember?  Do they really believe that, prior to birth control, people had frequent casual pick-ups?  Do they really believe that single mothers were ever so common prior to welfare and child-support laws?  Do they really think that children have always been so detached from their parents?  I can accept that some people believe that the vast social experiment that has occurred since the 1960s has been beneficial, but I cannot accept that it's always been this way.  What kind of Orwellian dystopia am I living in?

This leads to my fundamental and disturbing insight.  My liberal family, friends, and associates and I can disagree about values, but we should be able to agree on the facts.  I may not value daycare or birth control the way that other parents do, but we should agree about the facts surrounding the issues.  But this is not my experience.  All of the agenda-items in the vast social experiment require much propaganda or marketing before they can be implemented.  What's really remarkable is how fast the change is taking place.  Essentially, for society to forget living history and to believe that life has always been as it is today is a marker of hypnotic suggestion.  Call it education, propaganda, indoctrination, marketing, or hypnotic suggestion, there are forces that are purveying these forces upon our children and our society.  Even our Christian religious institutions are becoming purveyors of these social experiment agendas.

There are a few antidotes.  As I stated earlier, a study of the Classics can be such an antidote.  I would include religion in this form of study, if religion is studied critically and in historical context.  Various forms of critical thinking can be helpful but probably not sufficient, especially Geometry and Algebra.  Removal from the sources of indoctrination, for example, withdrawal from public schools can be important.  Limiting exposure to modern movies and television is helpful, though I might say that with older children critical analysis can be quite instructional.  Entrenched education in traditional Christianity is indispensable.

The forces of change in our culture are strong and hard to resist.  Some of these changes are mostly good, for example, the civil rights movement.  Others are mostly bad, for example, the secularization of our culture.  In principle, not one of these changes is entirely good or entirely bad.  But for small children, it's just better to believe the men in the white hats are good guys and the men in the black hats are bad guys.  They can learn to differentiate when they get older.  The trouble is that nowadays the public schools, the media, and the entertainment industry teach children that there's really no such thing as good guys and bad guys, that bad guys are just misunderstood and good guys are just the one's on our side.  In such a relativistic world, young people don't stand much chance of distinguishing the good from the bad when they become young adults.  God help us all.