“The red stick had started out as a handle to a child-size broom and then when the broom broke 25 years ago, it became a toy (a walking stick, a bat, a pretend sword) left in the yard until my Dad picked it up off the patio one day, tapped it against his palm a few times and said, ‘This would make a real good spankin’ stick.'”
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“Recently my Mom told me something that shook me to my core. She said, ‘Your father said if you disciplined a child according to the bible, they would not die.’ Then she told me she recognized the Pearls’ book ‘To Train Up A Child.'”
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“As I was growing up, I got very used to hearing remarks and jokes about how many children we ourselves would have when we grew up. Some people would sit down and start doing the ‘if all 8 of you have 8 children’ equations. Then they would start joking about what family reunions would look like.”
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“One day, when I was fourteen years old, I remember asking my mother if she had ever wanted more children than just me and my sister. Her response was an automatic ‘of course.’ And she cried for the rest of the afternoon. That was the first time I heard the word barren.”
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“I, being the second oldest daughter, didn’t have quite as many responsibilities as my older sister Maia. However, I was very aware of her important servant role in our home. She was responsible for meals, taking care of the children, and all the cleaning, as well as getting us to do our endless chores. She was supposed to home school us, as my parents, both unemployed, were either out ‘somewhere’ during the day, or in their bedroom fighting over authority.”
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“My father’s way of parenting during my mother’s recovery time was to lock us outside to fend for ourselves except for meals. This was for about several weeks. It is important to note that this is also when my father stopped working. He interpreted some of the ATI based teachings to mean that it was improper for him to be under a woman’s authority in a workplace…That was also the end of effective homeschooling.”
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“I had been changing diapers for a couple years already, so I didn’t have to learn anything new in that department, but I learned how to make do on little sleep, or to do things half-asleep. My mom loves babies. She kept having them because the old babies grew into ‘little brats’ all too often. Well, that and she believed she had to be Quiverfull.”
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“Within this sort of isolated, dogmatic, and restricted environment where the parents are consumed by what they see as duty to “the Father,” the eldest daughters of Quiverfull families are enlisted as junior mothers to their own siblings…The drawbacks of the lifestyle to the daughters doing this constant care are numerous. They are only recently coming to light because, as these daughters ourselves, we speaking are out about them. That is the focus of this ‘Voices of Sister-Moms’ guest post series.”
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“Socialization is a component that definitely can be ignored or accidentally left out and it has openly (and wrongly) been discounted as being unimportant by many prominent homeschool leaders. Because it has been ignored and dismissed as a necessary part of many homeschool curriculums is the main reason why homeschoolers have gotten the reputation for being unsocialized in the first place.”
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“If you have a Dad that you are estranged from or who is not fully participating in your life today because of being indoctrinated with these sorts of ideas, know that you are not alone and it is also not your fault. We can’t choose our parents and we can’t fix them. You just carry on as best you can.”
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Homeschoolers Anonymous 