Claudia and Danielle, like other parents who utilized the childhood-innocence discourse, were not worried that, for example, public school would make their children gay; in fact, none of the parents I interviewed expressed such a fear. Rather, they worried about the school’s influence on their thoughts and their behaviors. Claudia summed up the importance of homeschooling in this project, saying, “The values, and the things that we hold dear—they’ll be lost for them if I don’t take these early years and share with them why we think the way we think, and why it’s the righteous way to think—if we didn’t establish that first and let them get all their questions out and have open dialogue and discussion about them, then they may not have a firm foundation, a firm beginning.” She later added, “There’s a lot of opportunity there, to teach what’s appropriate. But, without supervision, they’re going to make the wrong decisions. They just need guidance, into making the right decisions.”
I argue that in emphasizing behavior rather than identity, these parents rely on an understanding of childhood gender and sexuality as malleable, rather than fixed, and as marked by choice (see table 2.1). It is not how their children choose to identify, but rather a question of how they choose to behave, that defines their character, or “who they are” as a person. Such beliefs are evident in Claudia’s statements about how children need to be guided in such a way that they will be more likely to make the right decisions, choosing righteous beliefs and appropriate behaviors, as adults. Or, as another parent, Donald, put it, rather than putting his children in situations where they would face such decisions, “We want to slowly develop them.” In other words, although these parents believe there is only one correct way to enact gender and sexuality, they paradoxically adopt a social-constructionist view of gender and sexuality in childhood.
| Table 2.1. Characteristics of the “School as Overly Sexual” Critique | |
|---|---|
| Critique: | School as overly sexual |
| Understanding of gender/sexuality: | Defined by behaviors |
| What defines “who you are”: | Character • Evidenced by behaviors • Formed during childhood |
| Goals of parenting: | • Protect children’s innocence • Shape children’s character • Lay foundation for right behavior/choices (including gender & sexual expression) |
| Theory of childhood gender/sexuality: | • Malleable • Social constructionist |
Critique #2: School as Constraining Gender and Sexuality
Alongside the critique of public school as overly sexualized and a threat to childhood innocence, a second, very different critique featured prominently in my interviews. In this critique, parents—usually politically liberal and mostly, though not exclusively, nonreligious—were critical of schools for being spaces where children’s gender and sexual expression are constrained. As with the previous critique, parents saw this constraint as coming about both from the school curricula and from students’ peers. Rather than focus on what children were exposed to from their peers, however, these parents spoke more about the differences in the type and quality of peer culture and peer interactions that exist between public school and homeschooling.
Critiques of Curricula
Several of the parents I interviewed were strongly critical of sex education in schools, but rather than be concerned that children were exposed to more than they could handle, they were concerned that they were not being exposed to enough information. One parent who felt this way was Raya, an Indian-immigrant, middle-income, married mother of two sons, both of whom had previously been in public school. When her older son, David, was in middle school, she signed a permission slip allowing him to participate in the school’s sex education program, but was surprised when he came home one day with a flier promoting abstinence. In her mind, abstinence should not be part of a sex education curriculum; thus she explained her reaction to the flier:
I think, first of all—kids are going to have sex. Alright? But I think the biggest problem is, that they turn it into this awful, terrible, not okay thing that only the bad kids do. I think instead of presenting it as this awful, terrible thing, if you just taught them the facts, okay, here’s what it is, here’s what can happen, here’s what you should do, and if you could abstain? Eh, you won’t have to worry about any of those things. But I think that teaching them that you expect them to abstain, is guaranteeing that they will not come and talk to you if they are thinking about it. I mean, if I had a daughter and she was going to do it, I would be like, “Honey, you can do it, in our house. So if something goes wrong, or if you don’t want to do it, you’re comfortable.” Instead of “Oh my god, I don’t even want to hear that you’re going to do this.”
Raya believed that teaching abstinence is unrealistic because teenagers are sexual beings. Beyond limiting their access to information that would help them make decisions about sexual behavior, she also thought that abstinence-based education was unnecessarily moralizing. Raya identified one of the lessons of this type of education as being that people who do not abstain from sexual activity are “bad,” which discourages teens who are engaging in, or considering engaging in, sexual activity from seeking out their parents’ advice on their relationships. Raya believed that this can lead teens, particularly teen girls, to engage in sexual activity in which their comfort and ability to consent may be compromised. In expressing this belief, Raya sounded much like the Dutch parents in Amy Schalet’s examination of how Dutch and American parents differently understand teenagers and sexuality; unlike the American parents, the Dutch parents thought it was important for their teens to be able to have sex in the home so that they could do so in a comfortable environment.13 Raya recognized that this stance was rare among American parents, and attributed her own adoption of this view to having lived in several other countries before moving to the United States in her twenties.
Mia, a white, low-income, married mother of two sons, also critiqued abstinence-based sex education. She was among several parents who felt that sex education that is primarily or exclusively morality based, or even just primarily biology focused, misses important educational components because it is divorced from concepts like respect, consent, pleasure, and sexual violence. Mia told me a story about how, when her older son was eleven, she seized on his question about a condom they had seen on the ground earlier in the day to have a very comprehensive conversation about sex. Though her son had been hesitant to talk about it at first, she recalled,
That night after dinner he said, “Mom, I want to know more about that thing,” and we had the whole talk. I mean, all of it. Rape, birth control, abortion, adoption, condoms—all of it. And the emotional side, you know, don’t push a girl, no means no, and you don’t have to do it with everybody. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re manlier if you do it. And he was like, “Why do people do that?” And I said, “Because it’s fun, and because it feels good.” You know, it was a little weird at first, but I was trying real hard to make it not weird, and so once I started being like, really just, calm about it, he had all kinds of questions. And it was great.
Like the parents featured earlier in this chapter, Mia said that she was glad that she, rather than a school, was the one to provide sex education to her son. However, unlike these other parents’ reasons, Mia’s was that she wanted to address a more comprehensive range of issues than her son would be exposed to in a school setting. She commented that she “want[s] him to know everything, real and true and open and honest,” and that such a holistic understanding of sex would not be what he would get if he took a sex education class in a public school. She also explained that, after this conversation, she was not worried about him talking about sex with anyone else, because she knew she had covered so much ground with him already.
For Maria, a Latina, low-income, married mother of three daughters, the lack of open discussion about sexuality