Home matters more than school

How (and why) to build a strong family culture

We’re exploring schools for Moses next year, and the decision making has taken up a silly amount of my limited brain space.

Having been homeschooled from birth till college, I have zero context for “real school” and thus carry many preconceived notions and fears. As children, if we were misbehaving, we were threatened with being sent to the local public school, which sounded like a terrifying child-labor factory, replete with sticky desks and worksheets and inane rules (maybe not that far off).

I had a golden childhood, rich with family lore and closeness and discovery, but I was also raised in a pretty rotten subculture. Our only friends, our entire social circle, was composed of fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers.

I’m not hesitant to call this community “bad.” There were all sorts of unsavory examples of legalism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and borderline child abuse among the families we grew up with. But these kids were our only friends. We didn’t see anyone else except for our siblings and a few stray public-school kids from the cul-de-sac. This was our sole social circle.

I was born the year homeschooling was legalized in my state, and so we were still considered very fringe, in a way that homeschoolers aren’t (as much) today. Homeschooling was for the freaks! And boy, was it.

The kids we grew up with were raised to believe all sorts of things, including:

• Pants are for boys

• Dinosaurs still exist in South American jungles, thus proving seven-day Creationism, but are being hidden by the liberal media

• Voting for a Democrat means that you are also voting for Satan and his increased dominion over Earth

• Girls shouldn’t learn how to drive (that’s what husbands are for!!)

• Men are not only the heads of households but the heads of all authority structures, in any place and time and space

I could go on.

What was strange—but wonderful—is that my parents didn’t believe any of this stuff.

Bad influences

My mother was routinely shamed by her fellow homeschool moms for, among other things, teaching us about evolution, letting my sisters and me wear shorts during P.E., and permitting us to read novels written by non-Christians. We were considered “bad girls” and a radical, secularizing influence on our peers, despite the fact that we were also faithful church attendees who started every morning with Bible devotionals and prayer. We didn’t adopt the extreme party line and thus were dangerous.

It was a weird way to grow up, but I am incredibly thankful for the thoughtfulness of my parents, who created such a strong family culture. Despite the fact that these people were our only friends, we grew up feeling insulated from all the yuckiness that they preached.

The fact that we were raised among a bunch of kids with creepy patriarchal dads and control-freak moms in denim jumpers didn’t matter that much, because our dad was not gross and patriarchal, and our mom wasn’t unhinged. Our subculture was not ideal, but it was a secondary influence. It was a factor that could be addressed and downplayed because we had such a strong home life.

Which brings me to the present. We’re not going to homeschool our kids, for a number of reasons (I like working, and I specifically like working where I do; boys who are homeschooled turn out weird, except for my brother!!; and I don’t want to). I grieve that decision a bit, because I had such a magical childhood, but it was magical because my mother in particular gave up her entire life to ensure that it was so.

“First Steps, after Millet,” Vincent van Gogh (1890)

All of this reflection has led me to the realization of the vital importance of your home culture.

Even if you don’t homeschool, this kind of counterbalancing and correcting is something all good parents do. The home counts for so much more than the school.

Sure, the school environment matters, and it’s valuable for it to be better and kinder for everyone, but home is the foundation. Modern parents of my ilk often overlook this and expect schools to do a lot of work that I think should rightfully belong to the sphere of the home (for example: discipline, a theory of knowledge, moral guidance, identity formation, etc.). Especially if we pay thousands of dollars a year for a private school, we expect to be seeing some pretty hefty returns on these kids of ours. Shouldn’t the school just raise them up for us, teach them how to behave and what to believe and who to be?

On the contrary, home is where children learn who they are and to whom they belong. It’s our first and most important tribe. And a strong culture doesn’t just happen. It is deliberately constructed and reinforced. From my new favorite mysterious Substack:

“When you add children to the family, the demands on the family culture grow. They have to be taught care and consideration for others, respect for their environment, love of God (or veneration of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights or a personal relationship with the preserved corpse of Jeremy Bentham, you do you), and they’ll only learn these things if they see them in their home. Anything they don't see at home, or don't see often enough, will eventually be displaced in favor of its mass culture equivalent by sheer osmosis.”

I am trying to remember this as I worry, needlessly, about where Moses goes to school. I am trying to remember how I was raised and how I was protected from all of the negative influences that swirled about in our tiny social circle. My parents were intentional. They were clear on our family identity, values, and purpose.

But how do we do this, practically? What does a strong home culture look like when you have little kids?

We’re still figuring it out, often on a daily basis, but it’s looked like a lot of investment in time together as a family unit, a lot of ad hoc home education (which Guion mostly does, beautifully and naturally, resulting in our sons knowing an absurd amount of information about fungi), and a lot of discussion about why we might do things differently. The humility to handle that latter conversation feels vital.

Homeschoolers often have a superiority complex arising from our outsider status, which you have to grow out of to be a functioning member of American society. No one likes a weirdo who also acts like she’s better than you. (Take it from me.) From this experience, I try to be careful to explain why we do something differently from other families as an example of our unique home culture, rather than explaining by way of comparison (we do this because we’re more moral, more democratic, etc.).

Sometimes it’s as simple as saying, this is what we do in our family. To a young child, that information, tied to identity, can often suffice. As our children grow, we’ll need more detailed justification, but in this phase of life, we want them to know that home is where they’re rooted, where they belong, and where they can find themselves: first and foremost.

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Gonna rename this Substack: Hear Me Out, I Have a New Niche Opinion That Will Make My Husband Roll His Eyes.

Here’s one:

• Purity culture not only creates toxic men but TOXIC WOMEN

Buy me a glass of pinot noir and I’ll unload my whole fascinating theory.

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Currently reading

• The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

• The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk

• Table for Two, Amor Towles

• The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden