need to, for example, hug someone if they do not want to but also that they need to respect other people’s boundaries as well, including through reading their body language to tell if they do not want to be touched. She described how, when her boys interact with their cousin, Anna, who is an only child and is younger than they are, “sometimes she gets overwhelmed. And I’ll be like, I can see from Anna’s body that she’s had enough. And so we talk a lot about, you need to read people’s bodies as well as listen to their words. The words are absolute. If somebody says no, stop, don’t, whatever, then that is it. But you also need to look at their bodies,” she said, because sometimes a person can be saying “no” through nonverbal communication. Importantly, this was a lesson that Carolyn, like other unschooling parents, did not think children learn in school—that in fact, in training their bodies to conform to the demands and expectations of teachers and other adults, they learn its opposite.
Gendered and Sexual Beings: Identity over Behavior
The parents who engaged in this critique of public schools tended to talk about gendered and sexual expression in terms of their children’s identities or personalities (see table 2.2). To these parents, gender and sexuality were already a part of who their children were, and their expression of gender and sexuality was seen as a reflection of something innate. In keeping with this understanding of childhood, these parents tended to focus far less on who their children would be in the future, and more on who they are in the present. This was evident at the unschooling conference as well, where childhood was framed as a stage of life like any other. There was no talk of training children to ensure certain adult behavior, and only some focus on preparing them for adulthood—notably, in the theme of anxiety about unschoolers being prepared to attend college, which came up on more than one occasion. Overall, there was far less of a focus on shaping who children will be as adults and more of a focus on allowing them to be who they already are. This was explicit in one talk that Lisa, one of the leaders of the conference, gave about mindfulness and parenting in the present moment. Lisa noted that if you ask parents what they want for their children, almost all of them will answer “for them to be happy.” But, she argued, what they really mean when they say this is that they want their children to be happy in the future. Lisa explained that she had come to see unschooling as an intentional way of letting go of this future orientation, and instead focusing on the goal of having happy children—and a happy self—in the present moment.
Like the parents who saw their children as innocent, these parents also feared that school might change their children—not by changing their innate identity but by causing their “true” or “natural” selves to be suppressed or distorted to fit within the constraints of the public-school environment. For example, Julia, a white, middle-income, married mother of three, told me the following story:
There was one time I was sitting on my couch, and my son was five. He wanted these fairy wings, and a fairy wand at Target one time, so I bought them. They were a dollar. And I watched him, running around the living room, wearing his fairy wings, with his fairy wand, dancing, just totally free, not even self-conscious at all, and I was just like, f—— everybody else. I would not expose him to any kind of ridicule for being who he is, whoever he is. I know there are people who look down their nose at [homeschoolers] who [they think] are pulling their kids out of society. I dare them to look at their little boy dancing around in fairy wings, and think about sending him to school. I want my kids, every day, to know that it’s okay to be who they are.
Julia saw her children as being able to be “free” to be their authentic selves in the context of homeschooling, whereas in public school, she argued, they would be ridiculed if they expressed themselves so freely. Such ridicule had the potential either to suppress her children’s expressions of their true selves or to damage their self-identity. Or, as Jamie, whom we met at the start of this chapter, put it when she talked about how much her daughter, Emery, would chafe at the structure and rules of school, “People have asked me, ‘Don’t you think she’ll adjust?’ And I’m like, I do. And I don’t want her to.”
While the more conservative and religious parents tended to see gender and sexual expression as malleable and defined by behaviors, the more liberal and less religious parents tended to see gender as fixed or innate, and as a part of a person’s core identity. While these parents did think children could “adjust” themselves to fit into the rigid gender and sexual norms of public schools, this was definitely not preferable, as they saw such adjustment as compromising their true or natural identity. Rather than seeing it as their job as parents to shelter and guide their children, these parents saw their responsibility as being to ensure that their children grow up in environments in which they are supported and nurtured in being and becoming their true selves.
As Natalie, a white, middle-income, married mother of three, said when I asked her whether she believed that parents should have the right to homeschool their children, “I don’t feel like that’s my right. I feel like it’s my responsibility, in fact, to allow my child to be who they want to be. And not to stand in the way of that, but to actually help with that. Even if it’s not someone that I envision they would be, because they are a human, and they have the right to self-determination.” For parents like Natalie, childhood is not contrasted sharply with adulthood, as it is for those who maintain childhood as a space of innocence; instead, children are viewed as having in common with adults their personhood, and with that, the right to make decisions about their lives. The parents who engage in this second critique of public schools tend to have a more flexible understanding of gender expression. They do not necessarily believe that there is a “right” or morally preferable way of “doing” gender. However, these parents feel this way because they believe that the “right” way for each person to express their gendered and sexual self resides within that person’s core identity. Though they acknowledge that there are many ways of being a gendered person, paradoxically, they have a more essentialist ideology of gender and sexuality than do the conservative, religious parents.
| Table 2.2: Characteristics of the “School as Constraining” Critique | |
|---|---|
| Critique: | School as constraining |
| Understanding of gender/sexuality: | Part of identity |
| What defines “who you are”: | Core sense of self • Innate • Includes personality, temperament, other aspects of identity |
| Goals of parenting: | • Allow children freedom to express themselves—exercise agency • Protect from situations in which core self would be damaged/suppressed |
| Theory of childhood gender/sexuality: | • Innate • Essentialist |
Conclusion: Are Children “Born This Way”?
The parents whose voices are featured in this chapter share a sense that there are aspects of the public-schooling model that are fundamentally incompatible with what they believe childhood should look like. However, as demonstrated, the substance of their critiques is very different: for some of these parents, schools are overly sexual spaces, while for others, they are constraining or limiting to children’s education and identity development.
I argue that the reason some parents see schools as too sexual while others see schools as sexually limiting stems from the fact that these parents hold different ideologies of childhood gender and sexuality. On the one side, some parents want to limit their children’s knowledge and behaviors in order to create a strong and upright “character.” They want to limit these because they understand children as fundamentally innocent, as different from adults, and as having a malleable gender and sexuality that can be easily influenced in the “wrong” direction. On the other side, some parents want to expand children’s options for knowledge and behavior so as to protect their core sense of self. They want to expand these because they see children as fully human and, like adults,