for mothers to manage their children’s lives. This trend is informed by two primary beliefs: the first, consistent with the ideology of intensive mothering, is that parents must rely on expert advice in caring for their children; and the second is that implementing this advice is an individual, private decision.23 As “expert advice” on child rearing has proliferated, parents—particularly mothers—are faced with an onslaught of contradictory advice on how to best raise their children. But it is seen as their responsibility—not the responsibility of the “experts”—to sift through this competing advice and make individual decisions about what is best for their children.24 Thus, mothers are required to be the ultimate experts on their own individual children—even when this means going against certain expert advice, as is the case with mothers who choose not to vaccinate their children.25 This is certainly the case with homeschooling, as “expert advice” advocating both for and against homeschooling abounds. An understanding of how mothers make the decision to homeschool, and how they understand the gendered nature of this decision, is thus central to understanding gender inequality in the era of neoliberal motherhood.
The Study
I carried out the research for this project between August 2013 and May 2016. During this time, I conducted a survey of over six hundred homeschooling parents, interviewed forty-six of those parents, and attended five homeschooling conferences and conventions across the state of Texas. The parents I surveyed came from all over the state and represented a wide range of political stances, religious affiliations, and motivations for homeschooling. The survey asked about homeschooling experiences and approaches, motivations for homeschooling, and political and social views, including, for example, views on same-sex marriage, abortion, school prayer, and sex education.
More than half of the parents who responded to my survey said that they were interested in being interviewed for the project as well. Out of these parents, I carefully chose a diverse sample to interview in person. The purpose of these interviews was to elicit the narratives of homeschool parents about how and why they made the decision to homeschool, their homeschooling approaches, and the advantages and disadvantages they see to homeschooling compared to traditional public schooling.26 I selected interview respondents in such a way as to collect as diverse a sample as possible. I was particularly interested in having a representation of various political views (conservative, moderate, and liberal) and degrees of religiosity, and thus attempted to initiate contact with roughly equal numbers of conservative and liberal, and religious and nonreligious, respondents: of the forty-four focal interviewees, one quarter (eleven respondents) identified as politically moderate, while 39% (seventeen respondents) identified as conservative or very conservative, and 36% (sixteen respondents) identified as liberal or very liberal. Half of the sample identified as not very or not at all religious, and the other half as somewhat or very religious.
I also engaged in participant observation at various homeschooling conferences and conventions throughout the period I was carrying out this research. I attended five such events between August 2013 and April 2015: three large, explicitly fundamentalist Christian homeschooling conferences, one small Catholic homeschooling conference, and one small conference of unschoolers—those who engage in “child-led” homeschooling. At these conferences, I acted as a participant observer in order to understand the narratives of homeschooling families as part of a larger set of discourses (collective ways of thinking and talking about a subject that help to organize social life).27 I participated as a regular registrant, attending various talks, workshops, and special events/performances, and “window shopping” among the vendor areas. Attending these events helped me to contextualize the experiences of the parents I interviewed within the broader homeschooling culture.
Why Texas?
In many ways, Texas is an ideal place to study homeschooling. Despite its reputation as a deeply conservative state, Texas is, in fact, a large, diverse state with a wide range of political perspectives represented. While there is a massive religious infrastructure in place in Texas (as in much of the United States) to support homeschooling, there are also plenty of resources available to support nonreligious homeschoolers. In fact, I learned during this research that some consider the capital city of Austin to be one of the epicenters of progressive, “alternative” education in the United States—a trend that includes “unschooling,” or child-led homeschooling.
Texas is also a great place to study homeschooling because it is relatively easy to homeschool in the state. Regulation of home education in the United States—like regulation of education in general—occurs at the state and local levels.28 There is a great deal of variation in homeschooling regulations across different states.29 Currently, Texas is considered one of the least restrictive states in the United States in which to homeschool, with the Home School Legal Defense Association, a conservative homeschool advocacy group, calling Texas “a model state in upholding parental rights.”30 The Texas courts have ruled (and the Texas Supreme Court has unanimously upheld this ruling) that homeschools in the state of Texas are considered private schools, and thus are subject to the same (lack of) regulation as any other private school in the state.31 If a parent in Texas wants to homeschool, they simply need to withdraw their child from school with a note explaining that they will be homeschooling—or, if the child has not started school yet, they simply do not need to enroll the child.
Because these structural constraints on homeschooling vary by state, Texas serves as an ideal case for studying parents’ motivations for homeschooling. Extrapolating from national numbers, I estimate that the number of homeschooled children in Texas could exceed two hundred thousand—and I suspect the number is actually much higher.32 With Texas having far fewer hoops for parents to jump through to withdraw a child from public school than most other states, and a lack of strict curriculum requirements or testing, it would make sense that parents who are considering homeschooling in Texas may be more likely to actually begin homeschooling than parents considering homeschooling in other states. Thus, Texas is an ideal location for this study because there is a wide variation in parents’ motivations to homeschool, including those whose motivations are not based on strong ideological or religious commitments.
Roadmap of the Book
In the chapters that follow, I examine the discourses about childhood, education, government, and parenting that homeschooling parents draw on in discussing their motivations for homeschooling. In other words, rather than just look at the motivations themselves, I take a deeper dive into the ideals they express about children, families, education, and the state in order to highlight some of the prominent differences, as well as the points of convergence, among parents who may have homeschooling, but little else, in common.
Homeschooling is a social movement that has served as a container for multiple, competing ideological perspectives, and that has grown in both popularity and diversity in the last decade. In chapter 1, I discuss the history and present state of homeschooling in the United States in order to contextualize the narratives of the parents featured in the remainder of the book. I first provide a brief history of the modern homeschooling movement, highlighting the ways in which both conservative and progressive education critiques have driven the movement. I then discuss the current state of homeschooling, including the legal status and regulation of homeschooling, the spectrum of homeschooling instruction approaches, and research findings about the outcomes of homeschooling, as well as about demographic trends in the kinds of people who homeschool.
In chapters 2 and 3, I ask how homeschooling parents understand who children are and what childhood is, and interrogate how these understandings impact their decision to homeschool. In chapter 2, I examine two different critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools that arose both in my interviews with parents and in the homeschooling conferences I attended. First, some parents critique schools as overly sexual spaces that are a threat to the sexual innocence of children and see homeschooling as a way of protecting their children. Second, some parents argue that
