I Repent of The State Babysitting My Kids K-12

I have one big question for God, when I get on the other side: “Why did you let me have children, when I was barely an adult myself?” (And not really. Only my age qualified me as an adult.)

Recently, my youngest son, who is turning 22 this month, told me that the founders of this country were “rich, racist assholes.” I co-founded his charter school, where I skipped him from K math to 2nd grade math; I helped choose conservative and accurate and rigorous curriculum; and I sought out every educational and experiential opportunity I could, his first 18+ years.

I made him do the dishes and pull weeds; eat healthy food; and do service in third-world countries. I helped him and his siblings start little businesses, to get a taste of entrepreneurialism. If the coach didn’t play him as much, or a teacher disciplined him, or another kid was mean to him–I did not rescue him from consequences and let him fight his own battles, rather than being a helicopter mother as my generation of parents is becoming infamous for.

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Now it’s clear to me, and I wish I’d figured it out sooner: the worst mistake we ever made was delegating the education of our kids, to the state. I assumed that because we lived in a conservative state, and I helped choose his school’s conservative curriculum, that I was making him a well-educated little brainiac, ready to go teach or write like me; or engineer like his dad; or build like my brother; or litigate like another of my brothers; or fix things that break.

His values have turned out so different than mine, and I’m still figuring out why.

When the kids came home for months of lockdown in 2020, lots of parents had a brutal wakeup call, to the indoctrination camps the schools have become. Suddenly many of us learned about Critical Race Theory and many other doctrines our kids are marinating in.

(CRT hard-codes victim culture, and vilifies white folks, just for being white. Wherein, if you’re white, you must be “privileged,” and a cultural oppressor.)

It makes a lot more sense, now, why the comedian Jim Breuer said he sent his first child to college, and 6 weeks later she came home for a visit and walked around yelling “RACIST! SEXIST!” at her parents. (Plus you should enjoy this comedy routine for a break, anyway–he got a NEW YORK audience to laugh at the COVID madness and woke-culture madness.)

This helped give me a clue about how my son thinks George Washington and Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton were “racist assholes” who should be dismissed for their archaic thinking that set up the greatest and freest nation possibly in the history of the world.

I’m deeply regretting delegating his education to people whose values are apparently very different than mine—especially the university degree I paid for. My son feels that a girl he knows can become a boy by taking some hormone blockers, then some hormone drugs of a boy, and then get a couple of surgeries mutilating her genitalia. 

Me: “God assigns gender. Not doctors or surgeons–or teenagers going through an awkward phase.”

Him: “That’s so intolerant!”

I mean, I get it, there have always been generation gaps. I read Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff: And It’s All Small Stuff, years ago, and totally agree with Carnegie, that there’s not much worth worrying about too much.

This boy of mine is the youngest of four, so it’s not my first rodeo, with not over-valuing any one thing he says.

You know what they say, “If you’re not a Democrat in your 20’s, you have no heart; if you’re not a Republican in your 30’s, you have no brain.” And I don’t even much care about or value the political parties. I’m just FOR the people who want to preserve stuff like the opportunity of the free market system. And law and order. And rule of law. The right to choose what pharmaceutical products I want (or don’t).

I’m FOR being able to say no to your kid, when what they’re wanting is nonsense.  I’m FOR good old-fashioned values, like the kind that birthed this nation my dad, and both my grandpas, fought for in wars.

But this generation gap seems…so much more. I don’t think any generation in history went from their kids sitting in a church pew on Sunday learning about how they were made in the image of God, to believing that you’re a woman if you “feel” like one. (Whatever a “woman” actually is, which is a question you’re no longer allowed to ask.)

How did we get so far apart? Do you think this just “goes away” when the kids get a bit older? I mean, some of these woke Millennials are 40 years old. I think it used to be really HARD to cancel your parent, and now it’s mostly a function of rage-clicking a few buttons on a device.

How did this happen? I don’t think I’m the only parent asking this. One of my 6 brothers and his wife pulled their four small children out of school last year, even though both parents are busy, successful professionals.

I’m sure five years ago, they’d never questioned the validity of the science teachers being experts on science, and math teachers being necessary because you haven’t done calculus (or maybe even algebra) in decades.

Honestly, I consider handing off the forming of my children’s minds to (apparently) the woke culture, to be one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I’m writing this to officially repent. If one person shows this to a parent of a child in elementary school, and that parent realizes that educating your own kid might be opting them out of the Matrix--it will have been worth writing.

Because, I want a do-over. I made an enormous mistake.

I want to go back and be the teacher to my children. Even though I struggled in Calculus and didn’t take Physics. (And have also not needed either, in my professional and personal life, since.)

I used to sneer at the “unschoolers,” and I thought you had no business home schooling if you, yourself, didn’t at least get a college degree.

But I repent of that, too. If all I did is take my kids to the library once a week, check out lots of books, guide the subjects to some degree, and have them write papers on each book, which I reviewed and gave feedback on–

–I think they’d get a better education than whatever has Woke-ified my kids. (Which I’m still really unclear on, to be honest. I trusted the scholastic babysitters a lot more than I should have.)

I have a child who got a degree in Business Management and says she has no idea whatsoever how to manage a business.

I have another child saying he wants to get a master’s degree in Family Studies, and I have told him how anything ending in Studies is a nonsense degree he’ll have to fund on his own, since it leads to nothing besides avoiding the workforce for another two years.

I had dinner with friends recently, whose son is a huge gamer. I told him that I’m reading a dystopian novel called Ready Player One from 14 years ago about how teens would live in the “metaverse” and essentially abandon all social activities in real life, in favor of a virtual reality.

I told this kid I was going to give him the book when I was finished (since it predicted the life he is now living). He laughed out loud. He almost spit his water across the room.

“A book?!” he spluttered. “What would I do with a book? I haven’t read a book in my life!” This boy is about to graduate high school, and his parents brag that he gets good grades.

I’m not entirely sure how my own youngest son graduated high school. And he got good grades, too. I don’t think I saw him do homework three times. And he slept in, refusing to go to class, approximately one-half of the time.

(Trust me, I tried. It was a never-ending battle, for years. After a while, I chose my relationship with him, and my sanity, over trying to shovel a 6’4” 17-yo out of bed by myself. His answer was usually, “All we do in there is watch movies anyway.” And the school banned detention. I guess it offended parents.)

Keep in mind this was PRE-COVID. Since COVID, absolutely any parent and teacher will tell you, they have been just passing kids, kids who didn’t learn the subject or do the work.

I actually DID take my kids to the library once a week, all summer, and they came inside for “quiet time” every day at 3 pm. During “quiet time,” they could either read books, or make up games to play with each other, till 5 pm every day. (Something my mom did, too, and it made good readers out of all eight of us kids.)

I kind of wonder if that’s where my kids (and my brothers and I) got our most valuable education. From our own self-directed learning, reading library books. One summer I read over 30 biographies of American Native Americans.

My kids chose what topics they wanted to read about. I had them keep track of page count they read, on a chart, rewarded them (with non-cash rewards), including double points for books I picked for them. (Otherwise, one of my sons read only fantasy novels, and one of my daughters read only silly girl-fiction I thought was brain candy and beneath her reading level. So I bribed them to read things that would challenge them, and make them think and learn.)

I did a recent blog post about canceled parents, after hundreds of parents commented on my Facebook post that they, too, had been canceled by one or more of their children. I had realized over the previous year that it’s happening more than ever before–I realized that as horrible and shameful as it feels, this isn’t happening to just me.

I wonder if parents feel like I did, as a young parent. Like I’d have to devote myself to hours a day of lesson plans, and then sit and instruct my children all day in front of a whiteboard, Monday to Friday, to give them the equivalent of what they’d get in class. I was certain homeschooling was a fulltime job, and I was also convinced that I “didn’t have the personality for it.”

From what I can tell, though—hindsight being 20/20--given that kids who’ve never read a book and rarely went to class are graduating high school and even college, you might be better off giving your kids a stack of books and a couple of uninterrupted hours a day with no devices or distractions.

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