"What I Wish I Knew . . ."

Yesterday I was directed by someone on the Well Trained Mind board to a parenting article entitled Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling. I thought the title was a bit melodramatic, since I don't personally know any families who have had real crises with their adult homeschooled children, but whenever someone who has grown children looks back and talks about mistakes they have made, I listen! The author, a man named Reb Bradley, is a pastor and has written several parenting books. He has several kids, the oldest 3 of whom are married and out on their own. Apparently, those 3 had some instances of rebellion that really surprised him because he basically thought he had done everything exactly right. As it turned out, the Lord showed him some blind spots that he says are common to homeschooling families. Some of these are more likely to be committed by homeschooling parents, especially ones who are really into sheltering, but others could be problem areas for any family. The article is long, so I am going to summarize his 6 points here by pasting some of his comments under each point. I printed out the whole article (17 pages!) so Bob could read it, and we could discuss it.

Contributing Factors to Rebellion in Young Adults

1. Self-centered dreams

One of the reasons parents homeschool is because they want to accomplish something good in their children. Success in homeschooling requires that academic, moral, and spiritual goals be set. It is only natural for parents to have high hopes and dreams for their children. However, when we begin to see our children as a reflection or validation of us, we become the center of our dreams, and the children become our source of significance. When that happens in our home it affects the way we relate with our children, and subtly breaks down relationship.

2. Family as an idol

We know we have made our family an idol when we put our hope and trust in it more than in God – we look to it rather than God for our identity and significance. And we know we look to our family for our significance when it has the most power to lift us up or to demoralize us. It is most obvious in a public setting when we either glory in our children or become enraged when they embarrass us. Our children are either the source of our pride or our disappointment, depending on whether or not they help us achieve our image of a strong family. A great problem with idolatry is that idols require sacrifice, and we end up sacrificing relationship with our children for the idol of the family. When we elevate the image of the family, we effectively trade our children’s hearts for our reputation.

3. Emphasis on outward form

Preoccupation with results often leads to emphasis on outward form. When we are preoccupied with achieving results it is natural to admire the results others seem to have achieved with their children. We like the way the pastor’s kids sit reverently in the front pew and take notes of their father’s sermon, so we go home and begin to teach our children to sit reverently and to take notes. What we don’t know is that the pastor’s kids conduct themselves with reverence and attentiveness not because he “cleaned the outside of the cup” and simply drilled them to do so -- he lived a genuine love for Jesus that was contagious, and watched as the fruit was born (Matt 23:26). Parents are destined for disappointment when they admire fruit in others and seek to emulate merely that expression of fruit in their own children. Fruit is born from the inside -- not applied to the outside.

4. Tendency to judge

One of the side effects of focusing on keeping the outside of the cup clean is that it becomes easy to judge others by our personal standards. You see, in setting standards for our family, each of us must work through a process of evaluation and analysis to decide what is safe, wise, or permissible. Once we become convinced of our personal standards, not uncommonly, it follows that we believe they should apply to others as well.
One of the things that characterized the Pharisees was that they created their own standards of holiness related to outward appearance, and then belittled others who didn’t hold to their standards. Jesus spent a lot of time exposing the Pharisees for their shallowness and their self-righteousness judgments, yet, many of us homeschoolers have inadvertently followed the Pharisees’ path -- we have overly elevated outward form and we have condescended to those who appear less enlightened . . . Pride is so deceptive that we won’t know our judgments are even judgments. We will think we are just making observations and feeling pity, when in fact, we are looking down on others from our lofty place of confident enlightenment. It is a high view of ourselves that allows us to condescend to and belittle others in our mind. And if you already knew all this, be careful – pride will even cause us to be amazed that others didn’t see what was so obvious to us.

5. Over-dependence on authority and control

When we are preoccupied with outward form our focus tends to become shallow and behavior oriented. We look upon our children as if they are roses that can be trained to grow a certain direction by constant pruning and binding. Subsequently, we rely heavily upon our authority in an attempt to bring our children under our total control. We assume if we give them the Word of God, shelter them from harmful influences, discipline them consistently, and maintain high standards for their outside, that their inside will inevitably be shaped. . . No amount of parental control or restriction will guarantee that a child will turn out exactly as directed. Obviously, our training increases the likelihood our children will cling to the faith when they reach maturity, or turn back to Christ if they do enter a season of rebellion, but our training does not guarantee the desired outcome. . . . I wish Bev and I had understood this when our oldest three were young. We saw them as wet clay that would succumb to our persistent shaping, so we not only taught them, but dominated and controlled them well into their teens. We were chiefly authoritarian in our approach, and rarely saw our children respond to us with disrespect. We weren’t ogres – our home was full of affection – but we relied upon fear of our authority as the main source of motivation for our children. What we didn’t realize was that there is a great difference between intimidating children into subjection and winning their hearts into submission. Intimidating children into subjection merely gains outward compliance. Winning their hearts means gaining greater opportunity to influence their values.

6. Over-reliance on sheltering

[Let me just insert here that this man was, to my way of thinking, an extreme shelterer--very few "approved" videos, no playing with neighbors, no secular publications and very few Christian ones that didn't completely agree with everything this family promoted, no youth group, no harvest parties, etc. He goes more into all that he controlled in the article, and tellingly, he spends most of his time--almost half the article--on this point, so it was obviously a real biggie for him!]

Sheltering our families from bad influences is critical for their safety, but it is possible to become imbalanced and rely too heavily upon sheltering. We do this in a couple of ways.

1. We are imbalanced when sheltering from harm is the predominant expression of our parenting. Are we more concerned with protecting our kids from that which is bad or with putting into them that which is good? I want to ask that again: Are we more concerned with protecting our kids from that which is bad or with putting into them that which is good? Consider that rearing children is like creating a family menu. If we keep them away from all junk food and feed them only prunes, their bodies will respond negatively. Protection from too much junk food is obviously a good idea, but their bodies need balanced nutrition. Physical health is achieved by both avoiding what is harmful and taking in a balance of what is good. To raise spiritually and morally healthy children we need to do the same. We must certainly protect them from harmful influences, but more than that, we must give them that which strengthens them spiritually and morally.
In my case I protected my oldest children from harm more than I invested into them health. I certainly taught my children a great deal about God and Kingdom living – we saturated them with the Word and Kingdom stories. Their lives were full of outreach and ministry, but comparatively, I was most intense about sheltering. I was continually analyzing the effects of every aspect of life, and my children never knew what thing Dad would declare off-limits next. Those parents who aren’t analyzers like me just wait for their favorite teacher to expose for them the next unseen danger to their family. In imbalanced homes parents are most passionate about protecting children from harmful influences, and the children see that passion, then come to view Christianity as mostly about “avoiding bad stuff.” When protection from the world becomes the defining characteristic of Christianity, we shouldn’t be surprised if our kids grow up and forsake the lifeless “religion of avoidance” they learned from us.

2. Sheltering is a critical part of parenting, but if parents keep it their primary focus, the children will grow up ill equipped to handle the temptations in the world.

If we isolate our kids from the world until they are adults they may appear to us to be spiritually minded and strong in character. However, it is how they ultimately engage the world that proves their spiritual resilience. This is because sheltering does not transform the human heart – it merely preserves it, temporarily. Sheltering is nothing more than keeping something flammable away from a fire.


I think for me personally, the biggest problem area for me would be treating the family as an idol. It is so easy to feel validated and measure my success as a parent by the nice comments I get while out with the kids, and it likewise is easy to be very angry when they don't hold to my standards--not because I am so worried about their heart attitudes, but because it is embarrassing to me! So I guess this sin flows right into #4, an emphasis on outward form instead of inward fruit. It is easier to just focus on outward expressions of obedience, but that is not what helps a child really internalize your values.

My high school boyfriend, Craig, was from a family with a real authoritarian father, one who emphasised the outward form of obedience but not the heart attitude. His dad was nice, and there was certainly love in the family, but the dad was so arbitrarily authoritative. He made big decisions as to what the kids could do on the spur of the moment, with no exceptions and no appeals, no trying to make things work or whatever. It was very frustrating to the kids (3 boys and one girl). Also, they were the kind of family that were at church every time the doors were open, but there was not so much an emphasis on the actual relationship with Christ--just the outward appearance of good. All of the children rebelled at some point, Craig starting our senior year of high school (after we broke up--I kept him on the straight and narrow, LOL!!). Interestingly, the end of our sophomore year or beginning of our junior year, Craig was not nominated to the National Honor Society, which was a big surprise, since his grades were just fine. But our math teacher, Mrs. Bragg, told him that she could see a spirit of rebellion in him and that she didn't consider him to be a good leader, so she didn't let him in. (In a nutshell that's what she said, LOL! Not those exact words!) We were so shocked, and I didn't believe her, but as he starting showing outward signs of rebellion a year later, I was pretty amazed by her insight because she was exactly right. And now, seeing how the rebellion of the rest of his family, I would have to say that his father shares in the blame for it, although of course, each child is responsible for their own decisions ultimately.

So anyhow, an interesting article, one that I encourage you to read in its entirety. It's always good to hear from those who have gone before and can tell us pitfalls to avoid!