Most Parenting Choices Aren’t Matters of Morality

With Mother’s Day on the horizon, I’ve been thinking more often than usual about my Mom and the gifts she gave me, one of which is an unwavering belief that you can learn something from everyone you meet.

The beauty of the online community we have here is that we may never literally “meet,” but we learn so much from each other’s stories. I find that I’m learning the most from the people who seem the least like me. We share something deeper than demographics.

I’ve overcome my initial anxiety regarding who could possibly relate to someone like me, because I’m finding that the surface isn’t overly significant here and there’s so little judgment. But it’s not so in other environments.

When strangers find out I’m a homeschooling mom with ten kids, many assume that they can “explain” me.

Assumption 1: I’m in a cult.

Nope.

Assumption 2: Surely I homeschool for religious reasons.

Wrong again.

My husband and I sincerely try to live our beliefs, and our kids can see every day how those beliefs shape our lives. They can decide for themselves if our beliefs seem good.

My observations suggest that anything resembling a cloistered approach risks pushing kids away from religion rather than helping them develop healthy spiritual lives. So no, our homeschool is not religiously motivated or focused.

Assumption 3: I’ve concluded that “public schools are failing America’s kids,” so I want to give mine a “superior” education at home.

Not at all.

I have no personal problems with the public schools. My extended family includes many teachers at all levels of public schooling, and I can see how dedicated they and many of their colleagues are.

Clearly some communities are struggling and their schools share in the needs and challenges of the kids they serve. But an engaged kid can learn in any school environment. And the public schools in our district are excellent. We have no concerns about the quality of the education that our kids would receive there.

Assumption 4: I must be homeschooling because the schools aren’t safe anymore.

As unspeakably horrific and tragic as school shootings are, I do not see schools as being less safe than any other public place. The closest mass shooting to our home was in a grocery store. We are not “keeping our kids out of the schools” because we are worried about shootings.

So why are we homeschooling?

Sleep.

We homeschool because we both remember being painfully tired during adolescence. We want our kids to get enough sleep. Our hope is that they’ll sleep when they’re tired, and learn when they’re rested.

Every year we give each of our kids the option to enroll in public school. None of them have chosen it so far, but they know that they always can. They participate in extracurricular activities at the schools and other community groups. They do well on standardized tests. They have friends.

It helps that my husband and I have both worked as teachers and enjoy teaching. It helps that we live in an area zoned “rural” with a big yard, yet close enough to a major city to visit cultural institutions. It helps that we are all healthy, that none of our kids have special needs, that we have a stable income.

All of these factors make our choice to homeschool possible. If any were different, we probably wouldn’t be homeschooling.

We aren’t motivated by anger or fear. And we certainly don’t feel that our way is superior. It simply works well for us. That’s it. We ask ourselves, is homeschooling worth the work if it means we don’t have to drag the kids out of bed? For us, the answer is yes (at least for now!).

But no stranger has ever guessed that reason.

Assumptions About Family Size

Strangers’ assumptions about why we have so many kids are also wrong. Again, a common guess is that we’re in a cult. Many also think that we are extreme conservatives or religious fundamentalists, with a belief in the moral superiority of large families.

But we are none of those things. I miscarried my first pregnancy, and during the first trimester of the next pregnancy, I felt so worried and sick that I said to my husband, “If this baby makes it, it’ll be the only one.”

Obviously I was wrong about that, but I meant it. During each subsequent pregnancy, I never assumed that there’d be another after it. Each time I asked myself: What if the baby isn’t healthy? What if I don’t recover well? What if something happens with the other kids? What if we have to move or change jobs?

Every time these were genuine questions. But each of the babies was healthy, I recovered quickly, our housing and income remain stable, etc. But we didn’t assume these outcomes. We never pursued a certain size. Rigidity can’t accommodate the countless variables. And that’s true for each parent.

Any family size is a good size when the members love each other.

Assumptions at Every Turn

Sometimes when people find out that I breastfeed, they declare its superiority and “compliment” me by saying I should be a spokesperson for it. I understand that they are trying to be nice, but I really don’t agree.

Yes, it has worked well for me and my babies. But if it didn’t? I would have used formula. I never want to be a part of anything that makes other people feel guilty about completely valid parenting choices.

We don’t have a TV. We have a very weird old house that we outfitted with a little science lab and a “Creation Station” area, an odd loft that we made into a library and a dank basement hobby room that we spruced up to become “Legoland”… At the open house for this place, we saw people take one step inside and turn around to walk right back out.

Believe me when I say it’s weird. But it works for us. We are grateful to have a house and yard that we can organize around the kids’ interests.

But I feel dismay when people assume that I attach some sort of moral superiority to not having a TV. I definitely don’t. It’s just a personal choice based on my circumstances. If my circumstances were different, my choice would probably change too.

Freedom to Question

I always resist the attempt to attach moral meaning to decisions that really aren’t morally significant. This misplacement of definitive moral valuations frequently leads to the conclusion that we can’t question those choices anymore.

Our kids know the power of “why?,” and when they use it (with extreme repetition sometimes!), it tends to focus on why the world works the way it does. Those are often good and interesting questions.

But we should be sure also to ask why we work the way we do. Why are we making certain choices? If we had a good reason for an action or decision in the past, is it still a good reason now? If we don’t have a good answer, we should change if we can.

If we’ve decided that a certain choice is absolutely right, then we will never choose to question it. And if something forces us to question it, we will rationalize our persistence in order to avoid the guilt that threatens to arise if we change — all because we’ve attached objective moral value to a subjective choice.

I do believe that love is absolutely right. I do believe that cruelty is absolutely wrong. But that’s about the extent of my strict absolutes.

Everything else I regularly interrogate. And that includes homeschooling, breastfeeding, entertainment sources, and all of my other daily decisions.

If something stopped making sense tomorrow, I would change it. For example, if I found out that I had cancer, I’d enroll my kids in public school tomorrow, and there’d be no guilt involved. If my kids hadn’t breastfed well, I would have given them formula with a clear conscience. Every time I’m in a hotel room or at my in-laws’ house, I have no problem letting my kids entertain themselves with TV.

In parenting and everything we do, we can find ourselves internalizing right and wrong designations based on convention or marketing or indoctrination, without consideration of what is actually best for us as individuals. But this approach can harm our health, our families, and other aspects of our lives.

Continually questioning our choices doesn’t mean continually upending everything. We’ll often find that we have good answers. But we may sometimes discover that we don’t, especially as our kids and our own lives grow and change.

We can only make those discoveries if we commit to questioning despite living in a world that tends toward assumptions and absolutes. It may not be the path of least resistance, but it is the path that brings us nearest to our family’s best interest. And we can help each other along it!