Parenting the Fetus

I hope that Baby #4 won’t come this Wednesday, when we are expecting a foot of snow; anytime after that is fine with me. She’s full term and I’d love to meet her.

“Meet her,” I say, and yet, in a sense I already know her. She just nudged my ribs as if to remind me that she’s always with me, and sometimes she makes me quite uncomfortable with her enthusiastic kicking, flailing, and whatever else she’s doing that makes it seem as if she’s got eight limbs rather than the usual four. At times, she likes to shove my ribs; I’m not sure if she’s stretching out or exploring the boundaries of her world, my body.

Mothering a fetus is simple. (But not always easy.) You just don’t do anything to kill or hurt the kid, you take vitamins, iron, and medicine as needed, and you get checked out to make sure that the kid is doing okay. Unless you develop a nasty health condition requiring bedrest, you then go about your ordinary routine as best you can, within the limitations of whatever discomforts you’re experiencing. I guess you could play Mozart or something, but it isn’t really necessary for the health and development of your baby.

Being a father to a fetus is simple. (But not always easy.) You just have to put up with the inconveniences caused by the mother’s symptoms. My husband likes to talk to our babies and poke at them when they’re moving around, but he, like me, doesn’t really know what our baby looks like–ultrasounds aren’t exactly portraits–or how much she’ll cry, whether she’ll be a skinny or plump newborn, whether she’ll be high maintenance or easy.

In a matter of days, we’ll both know this, and be deep in the weeds of sleeplessness, diaper changes, feeding challenges, and that general loss of equilibrium that comes with a newborn. It’s when “parent” becomes a verb, not just a noun.

And yet we do parent our fetuses. The simple acceptance of them as human beings, as our children to nourish and protect, makes a first-time expecting couple truly parents, even if their lives haven’t been transformed in the radical way that will occur after the child is born. We think about our child. We buy things, wash things, fix things in preparation for the baby’s arrival. We feel and see the child move. This, too, is parenting; I cannot swaddle or kiss or feed my baby, but that is because my body is already embracing her and keeping her fed and healthy. She has a name and a personality already, even if she can only express herself with kicks and shifts.

I cannot wait to meet this stranger, whom I have so intimately known for months now. Nor can my husband and children, who are counting down the days until Baby Bluebird is born. She doesn’t know it, but she’s already part of a family that loves her and is waiting to welcome her to life outside the womb.

Counting the Homeschoolers

I am not the first to point out that problems with public education are being exposed with the COVID-19 situation. Many parents (including my husband and I) took a look at the disaster that was distance learning last spring and decided to homeschool; no data from this year so far make me believe that this was a mistake. Nearly overnight, homeschooling has become regarded with much less suspicion, and it has become much more accepted to criticize shortcomings in public schools. Notice that Elizabeth Bartholet is no longer being promoted in the news for alerting the world to the dangers of parents teaching their own children.

This is good. I believe that parents are responsible for their kids’ education, no matter which educational option they choose, and just as by default we trust parents to make health decisions for their kids so we should trust them to make educational decisions. It is abhorrent and illogical to assume a priori that parents are not fit educators for their children.

Unfortunately, it is also true that some parents abdicate their responsibilities and abuse or neglect their children, including neglecting them educationally. This is not limited to homeschooling, by the way–there are plenty of stories of parents who refuse to hold their public-schooled children accountable. But even in a bad public school, students have more opportunity to reach out to teachers if they are being severely abused or neglected, which is why some of the more hideous cases of abuse involve the child being “homeschooled.”

These are, of course, the minority of homeschoolers. Most of the kids I know who are homeschooled (and I know quite a few) are receiving a generally excellent education, socializing appropriately, and being poster children for why homeschooling is awesome. Many young adults I know who were homeschooled are very pleased with their education and are functional members of society. Moreover, no one who has taught in or gone through public schools can deny that even under “normal” circumstances many children are being poorly educated, perhaps in dangerous environments. Whereas in states with homeschooling regulations the parents of children failing to demonstrate some benchmark of competence will be placed on probation and eventually forced (at least in theory) to send their kids to a credentialed program, no such compulsion exists for public schools; they may lose funding, but the students are not removed from the failing school and made to enroll elsewhere.

I still worry about the homeschooled kids who are abused or neglected. Sites like Homeschoolers Anonymous do not reflect the many adults who were satisfied with their home education experience, but I don’t believe that the stories contained therein are lies, either. I’m also not confident about any community policing itself, including the homeschooling community; people tend not to want to interfere in others’ parental decisions, and this is almost always correct, since outsiders are unlikely to know the family well enough to determine whether actual neglect is occurring. But this humility provides cover for those families who are, at best, setting their children up to fail as adults–and at worst killing them.

The Coalition for Responsible Home Education would like to see more uniform homeschool regulations throughout the United States. This site is much more pro-homeschooling than Homeschoolers Anonymous, but their page “The Case for Oversight” makes it clear that they believe children are harmed by lack of homeschooling regulation. Their “Policy Recommendations” include annual assessment of students by mandatory reporters, requiring the offering of the same range of subjects as those taught by public schools, good parental record-keeping, and that “student learning should show progress commensurate with their ability.” They do not believe that parents should be forced to use the same materials as public schools, nor that children should be at the same “grade level” as their counterparts in public school.

All very reasonable! The problem is that regulations become a hassle for those who weren’t going to commit neglect or abuse in the first place, and still let abuse or neglect occur. How many times has it happened that a child’s situation was reported to his state’s child protection agency, sometimes repeatedly, and still the child was left in the abusive situation until at last he was killed? Too often. The Banita Jacks case was a particularly horrifying example of numerous “protections” failing to offer any kind of protection to children who were mistreated over a period of months and then murdered. On the other hand, treating homeschooling parents likely abusers or neglecters of their children is wrong, too, especially since social workers sometimes abuse their power, and can lead to trauma for the child and whole family. Regulation is an axe where a scalpel is needed.

What is to be done, then? I am not sure, but a good first step might be to ensure that, at the very least, all homeschooled students should be counted. It is reasonable to require parents to notify the school district that they are homeschooling their children, but this is currently not required for all 50 states. I also would like to see “no stakes” standard testing in math, reading, and writing for children at various ages; this would help provide some good data on literacy and numeracy levels among children schooled in various ways. (See CRHE’s page on “Academic Achievement” for limitations to currently-available data on homeschooling achievement.)

Counting all homeschoolers would not stop abuse or neglect. It may stop speculation on how homeschooling, as a whole, matches up to other forms of schooling. It would have to be done right, correcting for confounders, which is not easy, especially since many children experience different kinds of schooling in their careers. I am confident that data from this year, especially, would muzzle people like Bartholet.

More About Faith: Confession Porn

The friend who introduced me to Christianity used to lament that she had no marvelous “conversion story.” Her parents were Christians, she was raised as a Christian, she is a Christian today, the end. God had no need to save her from alcoholism or prostitution or a life of crime.

In time, my friend came to realize that her story is indeed as marvelous and miraculous as those dramatic conversions, even if it doesn’t make for very good stage fodder. God worked through her parents and her own heart to make sure that she didn’t have to suffer the consequences of living outside His will; this is a good thing!

But during our junior high and high school years, lurid confessions were very much in vogue. I was alarmed to discover during a short-term missions trip that at least one quarter of the girls attending struggled with eating disorders, and both regular youth pastors and special guests often shared with us how God had saved them from lives of hopelessness and depravity.

I do not want to make light of these experiences. It is indeed great to see the healing of the broken, the finding of the lost, the resurrection of the dead. Jesus himself celebrates the repentant tax collector, the lost sheep returned to the fold, the prodigal son come back to his father’s house. And those who are raised in a household of faith, while experiencing many blessings, are at risk for joining the ranks of those proud Pharisees who thanked God that they weren’t sinners, which is quite as effective a path to damnation as is immersing oneself in orgies.

No, the issue that concerns me now is that for us foolish teenagers, the focus became sin rather than Savior. I mean, we rejoiced greatly to hear of the wayward being rescued, but this rejoicing was so intense because we’d been hearing tales of depravity leading to dire life circumstances.

For the past several years, I have not attended a church that puts up guest speakers giving their testimonies. I hope, however, for those churches that do–and such testimonies can be very inspiring–there will be the occasional “quiet” story. “God saved me from gossiping about others.” “God saved me from being lazy.” “God saved me from being unloving.” These confessions would not be titillating, not flashy, but they reflect the experience of a substantial portion of sinners.

“Credible Profession of Faith”

I have a problem with my own children that didn’t arise when I was a child: When can I be confident that their belief in Christianity is their own and not merely parroting back what their dad and I have taught them?

For me, it was easy. My parents weren’t Christians. When I was 6, my friend told me that I needed to say sorry to God for the bad things I’ve done and ask Jesus into my heart, and that I would then be a Christian. I believed what she’d said, prayed “the sinner’s prayer,” and tried to figure out from there on how I was supposed to live now that I was a Christian. I was pitifully ignorant about how to do this, and asked my dad to read me the Bible; we gave up in Genesis, but eventually I took up Bible reading on my own and attended church with my friend’s family. With age and (I hope) a bit more wisdom and maturity, I tried analyzing the tenets of Christianity with a truly open mind and positing that I was wrong, that atheism or another faith is correct, but I wasn’t able to rid myself of my faith and still have it today.

Most people would not consider a 6-year-old’s profession of faith “credible.” My friend’s (and then my) church was credo-baptist, meaning that you weren’t baptized until you were old enough to convince your pastor that you truly believed and understood Christianity; my friend and I were baptized when we were 11 and her younger brother was 8. Churches that baptize infants generally have some other ceremony that recognizes a child’s full induction into the Christian community, such as Confirmation or the public recital of membership vows, and this usually occurs some time between the ages of 8 and 12.

I understand the skepticism about a very young child’s declaration that she now believes in Jesus and His saving work on the cross. My husband and I have of course prayed with and for our children since their infancy, taught them Bible stories and songs and prayers as soon as they could verbalize, had regular family worship, and tried our very best to indoctrinate them into the Christian worldview. The 5- and 7-year-old certainly consider themselves to be Christians, and the almost-4-year-old believes in God and Jesus although his knowledge isn’t terribly complete. We have explained some other beliefs as well, always from the standpoint that they are incorrect, and we try to model a life pleasing to God as far as we can–which includes, of course, modeling asking forgiveness when we mess up.

But there is no clear, easy delineation between “child mimicking belief” and “believer.” Mind, there is no clear, easy delineation between “professed believer of any age” and “true believer”–but this issue is more prominent, I think, for children who have not yet been seriously confronted with doubt and trouble and an atmosphere of hostility toward Christianity. My 7-year-old would like to take Communion. She can explain the meaning of the Lord’s Supper; she reads her Bible; she asks us questions and seems satisfied with the answers we give her. Is she really ready to take vows/be confirmed/make a credible profession of faith?

I don’t know. She’s still so young, and very much influenced by her father and me. (Which is a good thing.)

On the other hand, I was even younger when God gave me the gift of faith, and it was real faith–it has persisted through hardship, experience, study, and even passing through a liberal Jesuit university. Mind you, I had several misconceptions about the nature of God, Jesus, and Christianity, but then again I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’ve got everything right even now; I trust in God’s holiness and wisdom, not my own.

So, Christian parents: I ask you. If you do not have a formalized process by which a child is considered a full member of the faith community (i.e. going through catechism, etc), what made you believe that your child’s faith was true and genuine?