as many decisions for herself as much as we possibly can. And everything that we don’t let her make a decision on, is up for negotiation. We try to leave it up to her as much as possible, because if she can’t make her own decisions even when we’re here to support her, what’s she going to do when we’re not there to support her? How is she going to make any decisions for herself? I mean, you see it all the time, you know, kids leave the safety of their home, and the support of their parents, and they go kind of crazy, because they’ve never had that opportunity before. Or God forbid, they’ve never been able to make any choices, so they don’t even know what they like to do; they don’t know what they want to do with their time, because they’ve never been given the opportunity to figure it out.
One of the clear benefits Jamie saw of raising Emery in the way they were raising her was that it provided Emery with a sense of self, and more specifically, a sense that she deserved to be treated with respect. Jamie gave a compelling example of this in describing a recent visit from Emery’s grandfather:
My father-in-law was here visiting last week, and he is of an older generation—and he is not nice to little kids. He teases them, and he gets joy out of making them cry from teasing them, and stuff. [ . . . ] But she stood up to him. He was teasing her, and she didn’t like it. And she told him to stop. And he continued. And I told him to stop. And he continued. And she left the room. And she was afraid I was mad at her. I was like, “I’m not mad at you, you did exactly what you were supposed to do, you asked him to stop, and he didn’t, and that’s not your fault. That’s on him.” And she stood her ground, and she was very firm, and said no. And [later] when she had her chat with him, she told him, “I don’t deserve to be treated like that. I told you to stop, and no means no.”
Jamie was impressed with Emery’s firmness. “It’s not easy for kids to stand up to adults, especially if it’s an older family member,” she said. “But she stood her ground. She knows that she deserves more respect than that, because we’ve told her that she deserves more respect than that.”
Jamie wanted Emery to know that she deserved to be treated with respect, even as a child, and even by the adults in her life. But, she went on to tell me, she did not see traditional schooling as providing an environment in which children are treated respectfully. She explained, “It’s not really very respectful to tell a kid what they can and can’t wear every day, or how they can and can’t do their hair, or what have you, or what they can and can’t play with. I just don’t think that’s very respectful of them at all.”
For Jamie, it was of utmost importance that Emery develop a sense of autonomy, which included a sense that she could make decisions about her own life and her own body, and that she could say no to others who tried to get her to do things that she did not want to do. Unlike Claudia, who saw homeschooling as a way to exercise control over her children’s behavior, keeping them from having the kind of autonomy they would have, but not be able to handle, in public school, Jamie saw homeschooling as a way to provide Emery with the ability to exercise control over her own life, giving her a higher degree of autonomy than she would be able to have in public school.
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Claudia’s and Jamie’s perspectives align with the two central critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools that emerged in my fieldwork. In this chapter, I discuss these critiques, and demonstrate that they correspond with two competing ideologies of childhood: one that views children as “in process,” as developing toward selfhood, and the other that views children as already selves, capable of exercising agency and autonomy. These two different ideologies of childhood result in differences in homeschooling practices, and highlight the way the “homeschooling experience” may look very different for children depending on their parents’ ideological standpoint. I further argue that these two different viewpoints are the subject of a much broader cultural debate about the nature of childhood that is currently ongoing in the United States, a debate that centers on the question of whether “who kids are”—including their gender and sexual identities—is innate, or something that is learned or cultivated. This debate is playing out in local elections and at school board meetings, on parenting blogs and in the opinion pages of newspapers, in classrooms and in churches,1 and it has important implications for how we understand children’s rights, and the responsibilities of individuals, families, schools, and the state to provide for children. Thus, the way in which homeschooling parents talk about childhood matters not only for how we understand homeschooled children but for how we understand childhood more generally.
Childhood Gender and Sexuality
Understandings of childhood are historically and culturally situated; in fact, the very idea that there is a distinct phase of life that falls between infancy and adulthood is, historically speaking, relatively new.2 The emergence of the idea that childhood is marked by a special, even sacred quality is even newer. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer chronicled, compulsory education only emerged in the United States when the “productive child”—who was expected to contribute to the labor and upkeep of the household, through housework, caring for younger siblings, and/or paid labor—gave way to the “sacred child”—who was believed to be in need of protection from the adult world.3 As the ideology of the sacred child took hold, schools were seen as the ideal place for children to spend their days, both to protect them from participation in labor and to care for their developing minds. The concept of the sacred child has thus always been intimately linked to ideas about the role of education—and, in particular, public schools—in children’s lives. As the role and importance of public schools have been increasingly questioned in recent years, have our ideas about childhood also changed?
And what, exactly, is “sacred” about the sacred child? One key component of this ideology of childhood is the concept of childhood innocence—but children’s innocence has always been somewhat contested, and these debates often play out in the context of education. For example, behind debates about abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex education in schools is the question, do children need to be protected from knowledge about sexuality, or does keeping them from such knowledge harm children?4 Not only do changes in social beliefs about education warrant an examination of changes in understandings of childhood, then, but they also indicate a need to interrogate broader social anxieties about childhood gender and sexuality.
Theorists of childhood gender and sexuality emphasize the importance of the institutional context to how children experience and understand gender and sexuality.5 Two institutional contexts that are especially important in children’s worlds are the family and education. The family is generally the first context in which children learn about gender and sexuality, both through explicit talk about these concepts and through the implicit lessons that come from taking part in gendered family life.6 Schools, too, are spaces where children both receive implicit and explicit messages about gender and sexuality and also “play” with gender in their interactions with other children.7 Parents perceive the environment of schools to be highly gendered, and their concerns about peer influence at school tend to be formulated in racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized terms: that is, parents construct racial, class, and gendered “others” as potentially dangerous influences on their own (assumed-to-be) innocent, impressionable children.8 Because parental concern about the school environment is a common reason parents cite for opting to homeschool, we would thus expect gender and sexuality to factor into their narratives about this decision.
In this chapter, I look at the ways in which gender and sexuality appear in the narratives of homeschooling parents in order to expand our current theoretical and empirical understandings of gender and sexuality in the context of both education and the family. Looking at a case in which the lines between these institutions are blurred opens a space for novel conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in childhood. I ask, in what ways are parents’ concerns about school environment and academic instruction grounded in their conceptions of gender and sexuality? How do homeschooling parents resist—or reproduce—popular notions of gendered childhoods?
Childhood Gender and Sexuality in Parents’ Motivations for Homeschooling
There is great variation in the motivations of homeschooling