that six-year-olds shouldn’t be talking about.” When I asked her for an example of the types of things to which she was concerned about children being exposed, she recounted hearing a child at her church talking about sex: “There’s a little boy, he was probably six or seven, and he was talking to someone about—he knew how babies were made. And, he knew, pretty in detail, how babies were made, for a six-year-old. And I was like, oh my goodness! And then I heard his mom talking about it and how she was mortified that he knew all this stuff, and that he had learned it from kids at school. And I was like, oh my gosh, at six! That’s kindergarten!” Though Jasmine implied that the knowledge this young boy was recounting was factually correct (“he knew pretty in detail”) and focused on the biological process of “how babies are made,” she felt that this was not knowledge that a young child should have. In noting that he had acquired this knowledge from his peers in a school setting, Jasmine constructed schools as spaces in which children are not protected from this knowledge—and thus as potentially threatening spaces.
This concern about what information children are exposed to was not limited to very young children. Janice, a white, married, middle-income mother of four, did not homeschool her older three children, now adults and parenting their own children, because at the time, she was not really aware of homeschooling. Janice and her second husband had adopted their now-teenaged son, Mark, as older parents, and she explained her decision to homeschool him in relation to her older children’s experiences in public school, saying, “I wish they hadn’t been in that environment. And there was just a lot of garbage that I didn’t need my children being raised around. Not that I’m interested in protecting Mark to the point where he couldn’t function in society. But there’s some things a sixth-grade girl doesn’t need to learn until she’s in high school.” When I asked her to clarify, she named both sex education and the language students used in school as examples of things to which middle and high school students should not be exposed. Interestingly, her example implied that it was more important to protect girls from exposure to this knowledge than boys, indicating that the protection of children’s innocence is a gendered process.9
Children as Innocent
Parents frequently justified their concerns about what their children would learn in school by invoking a discourse of children as innocent. For example, Veronica, a white, married, low-income mother of five, stated that because they were a Christian family, “I try to keep them . . . [sighs] sheltered in a way? But not so sheltered that they’re weird? [Laughs] You know, just try to keep their innocence as long they can. I think in public school they lose their innocence sooner.” For Veronica and Janice, as well as other parents, children’s loss of innocence is seen as inevitable; it needs to happen in order for them to transition from childhood to adulthood, and is also necessary to some degree so that they will not be so naïve as to be unable to function in society. However, this loss of innocence is something that they see themselves, as parents, having the power—and even the responsibility—to delay for as long as possible.
This is not to say, of course, that homeschooled children are not exposed to ideas about sexuality. As many scholars have pointed out, the general lack of explicitly sexual content in children’s social worlds does not mean that these social worlds are not filled with messages about sexuality—particularly about the normative expectation of heterosexuality.10 This was quite evident in the four Christian homeschooling conferences that I attended as part of my fieldwork for this project, where one of the frequent themes that arose was that homeschooling allowed parents to spend more time with their children, and thus helped Christian parents to more effectively model for their children the proper relationships between husband and wife, and parents and children. In all of these talks, there was an ever-present expectation of children’s future heterosexuality: boys were always framed as future husbands and fathers, and girls as future wives and mothers, all within the context of heterosexual families. Importantly, however, these talks made clear that children are always expected to be heterosexual in the future, but not in the present; as children, they are, or should be, more or less asexual. Speakers emphasized that sex and sexuality were very dangerous for children, and a sexually permissive culture was frequently cited as one of the many “enemies” of the homeschooling movement. The overall message was that any exposure of children to sexual themes—outside of the normativity of marital heterosexuality—is threatening and harmful.
There was one notable moment of rupture in this discourse, however, in the form of a talk at one conference, which focused on protecting children from child sexual abuse. The speaker, Jennifer Hillman, a young mother of two daughters, was at the conference promoting a program she had developed called “Bailey Bee Believes,” the aim of which is to educate and empower both parents and children in order to reduce the incidence of child sexual abuse (CSA). Hillman argued that a necessary step toward eradicating CSA is to talk about it openly in our communities, and that giving children access to certain knowledge can make them less likely targets of CSA, and more likely to report inappropriate behavior from adults. She advocated for teaching children the proper terms for their anatomy, including genitals, because, she argued, predators rely on children not having the vocabulary to tell others about experiences of abuse. Hillman’s presentation countered the dominant discourse about sexual knowledge that I saw at the Christian homeschooling conferences. She complicated the idea that any exposure of children to sexual themes is dangerous, by arguing that not educating children about some things actually puts children at higher risk for sexual abuse, and thus for the loss of their innocence. The fact that this presentation felt so surprising and norm-breaking to me is illustrative of how otherwise strong and consistent these messages were across these conferences.
Given the strength of the messaging around children’s sexual innocence at these conferences, it is perhaps unsurprising that the parents who saw public schools as damaging to children’s innocence were primarily conservative Christians who framed sexuality as a moral issue. However, not all of the parents with such views were religious, and for those, and even some of the religious parents, concerns were not framed around morality. Aspen, a white, middle-income, politically conservative but nonreligious mother of two, cited “protecting their innocence” as one of the main reasons she and her husband decided to homeschool their sons. Aspen explained, “The things that children are exposed to in school before they’re emotionally or mentally prepared to deal with them are shocking to me. And scary, and it’s just gotten worse over the years, and we just felt like, you’re a child for such a short period of time, and once you’re exposed to something you can never take it out of your brain and un-learn it, and we just wanted to protect that, and them, as long as possible.” For Aspen, children’s innocence did not need to be protected for moral reasons, but rather because a failure to do so might damage them emotionally or mentally. Another parent, Ruth, who was a white, middle-income, married mother of three, identified herself as very religious, but nevertheless explained her desire to protect her children from sexual themes in biological, rather than moral or religious, terms. She stated, “I have read that all of this constant exposure to sexual themes can trigger their hormones? And I don’t know how accurate that is, but girls are going through puberty younger and younger, and I thought, well, if that’s a part of it, then I’ll just try to delay it as long as I can.”
What both Aspen’s and Ruth’s comments imply is that, underlying this desire to protect children’s innocence is a fear that being exposed to certain ideas and concepts about sexuality has the potential to change children. Other parents implied this as well, often with comments about not wanting their children to “grow up too fast.” Margaret, a white, middle-income, bisexual, heterosexually married mother of two, who identified as politically moderate and nonreligious, talked about trying to limit outside influences on her daughter while also being open enough with her that she is not too sheltered: “We have a very open dialogue with her, we don’t censor things, she’s not as sheltered as I think a lot of homeschool kids are. We try not to—we’re trying to prepare her for the real world, but also still, you know, give her time to be a kid, and not feel like she’s being forced to grow up too fast. I want her to enjoy being a kid.” These parents all understood that their children need to “grow up” eventually, and that their innocence could not be maintained indefinitely, but they all felt it was preferable that their children avoid this change from innocent child