The Quiverfull Families Next Door: Part 3
Homeschooling is a hallmark trait of a Quiverfull community. CFC takes great pride in their homeschooling families and offers North Country residents the opportunity to pay for resources for home education through Christian Fellowship Academy (CFA). As a ministry of CFC, CFA influences both parents and children to conform to their Quiverfull ideals (see one family’s experience at CFA here).
Not all homeschooling families are part of the Quiverfull movement. Some BIPOC parents might homeschool their children to provide education that encourages Black excellence, and parents of special needs children may homeschool to provide extra attention and individuation. Many parents in the US have been reassessing education options to ensure their children are safe from school shootings. Homeschooling on its own is not problematic, but many Quiverfull parents choose to homeschool, because they believe that they need to have absolute control and influence over their children’s educations, worldview, and beliefs in order for them to grow up to be good Christians.
In fact, leaders in high-control religious groups like CFC tell their followers that homeschooling is a requirement for godly family life that will guarantee children grow up to be ideal Christian adults. Consider this blog post from 2005, where Darlene Sinclair passes judgment on “secularized society” and explains how her version of homeschooling is the antidote:
“Spain, like much of Western Europe, is extremely hardened; humanism reigns and licentiousness abounds. In my short time there, God allowed me to connect with several leaders in the Christian world, all of whom expressed deep concern for the future of the Spanish church regarding the next generation.”
Darlene’s response highlights homeschooling’s purpose within the larger Quiverfull goals:
"My husband and I believe our children have a destiny in the Lord. We are responsible for training and preparing them to fulfill that destiny. Homeschooling is the tool that we have chosen as part of that preparation. We want them to be established in a Biblical worldview and the public schools are unable to do that. Homeschooling provides a wonderful opportunity for building relationship as well. But homeschooling in and of itself is not the answer. I do believe it is the best platform for Biblical instruction, but it is not the end - it is simply a means. Your parents must begin to look at their children as God looks at them. They must see the need to invest their lives in the future generation. This is not a quick harvest. There is no immediate fruit. This is a 20 year process. Your parents will need continual reminders, constant encouragement. You will need to cast the vision again and again and again. You will need to be in it for the long haul. Changing a cultural mindset is a huge undertaking. It is not accomplished overnight. A large ship is not turned around quickly or easily. It is a long process that requires patience. But in this case, it is essential. You are headed for destruction unless you turn this around. When the Church sits idly by, allowing the future generation to be lost, its own destruction will soon follow."
As mentioned in our previous Quiverfull post, White Christian Nationalism and the Quiverfull movement often run together. We see this in Darlene’s dismissal of Spanish culture and her need for Spanish families to align with her own perception of God’s goals for families.
The Quiverfull desire for total control becomes clear in Darlene’s essay on the Four Pillars of Homeschooling:
“I was first drawn to home education, in part, because I wanted to be the primary influence in the lives of my children. I was not ready to share that privilege with anyone else. I knew full well that a teacher gains significant status in a child’s mind and many a time, much to my dismay, I have heard a student choose to acknowledge the teacher’s counsel above that of the parent. I did not want that to be the case with my children. Therefore until my place of honor was well established I would need to guard it jealously.”
While the “homeschooling rights” movement in the US has been around for decades, homeschooling rights have become nearly synonymous with “parental rights” in recent years. Politicians use homeschooling rights and parental rights legislation as rallying cries for various politically charged issues such as vaccination, medical decisions, education, and harmful anti-LGBTQ legislation (especially trans-affirming healthcare).
Parental rights legislation may seem innocuous enough on the surface, but it can easily be used to legally justify abusive and neglectful parenting practices. “Parental rights” is often used as coded language for “mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine” in homeschooling circles, allowing parents to abuse the vulnerable people in their households.
Physical abuse in the form of corporal punishment is especially common in Quiverfull households. Darlene Sinclair, who homeschooled all of her nine children K-12, has repeatedly championed corporal punishment in her blogs over the years:
“The rod and reproof give wisdom: but the child that is left to his own will, bringeth his mother to shame. Proverbs 29.15 NKJV
That's pretty plain advice in my book. Looking at other translations only supports the "black and white" of it. I am aware of teachers and camps that wiggle around the concept of the rod. But my studies and investigations have only confirmed that it is physical discipline. And of course, the Word itself supports itself. Amazing.
Check this out:
Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.You shall beat him with a rod, And deliver his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13,14 NKJV
Or this more modern translation:
Don't be afraid to correct your young ones; a spanking won't kill them. A good spanking, in fact, might save them from something worse than death. Proverbs 23:13,14 The Message
Yup, that's right. Physical discipline. Beating. Spanking. Not popular these days, I know. In fact, just writing those words causes me to flinch. I have been inculcated with other concepts. But the Bible doesn't follow trends and fashions. It stands on its own. It stands in clear opposition to current philosophies.”
Many formerly homeschooled individuals have disclosed that their parents applied corporal punishment to “cure” their inability to focus or understand the material. This creates unsafe and fearful learning environments, especially for children who struggle academically.
Homeschooling can be a dangerous tool in the hands of abusers and those who believe they have a God-given right to exert total control over another human being. Children who are homeschooled have very little access to mandated reporters. Their parents are their teachers, guidance counselors, principals, caretakers, and disciplinarians. Sometimes homeschooled children are also “homechurched,” further isolating them, or participate in churches where abuse or neglect is endorsed or will go unreported. Homeschooled children at CFC are encouraged not to tell people about bad or scary things happening at home. Darlene says:
“Lost in our culture today is a sense of family pride and loyalty. We would do well to regain such things. My children learn to stand up for their sibling if he is the subject of a less than edifying conversation. Private family matters are to remain exclusively that: private. Never should they indulge in gossiping about a sibling or parent, nor should they allow gossip to be shared in their presence.”
While it is an extreme case of child abuse, the story of the 13 Turpin children shares common themes with other homeschooling abuse cases: isolation, starvation, and physical abuse. The Turpin children were found chained, emaciated, and abused in the basement of their California home in 2018.
It is not uncommon for child abusers to use homeschooling as a means to gain constant access to their child victims. Little regulatory homeschooling oversight exists in most states, and while parental rights advocates would say that this is a good thing, the children who are neglected physically, emotionally, and educationally have no say at all. Lax regulation and neglectful legislative oversight costs children’s lives.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education provides examples of how harmful extremist parental rights legislation could be for children:
“In the absence of necessary legal protections, at least 156 children have been murdered in homeschool settings over the past twenty years, a rate higher than the national average among school-age children. Thanks to a lack of oversight, the thirteen children of homeschooling parents David and Louise Turpin endured horrific abuse for over two decades, including being chained to their beds for months at a time, before one escaped and called for help. After teachers at 14-year-old Teddy Foltz-Tedesco’s school noticed he was being abused and called child protective services, his mother and stepfather withdrew him from school and began homeschooling him to escape scrutiny. His stepfather later murdered him. Raylee Browning, an 8-year-old homeschooled girl in West Virginia, died of sepsis after drinking from a toilet because her father refused her access to water. After registering their son as homeschooled under Kansas law, the parents of 7-year-old Adrian Jones tortured him to death, then fed his body to pigs. Leelah Alcorn’s parents withdrew her from public school to homeschool her as punishment for being trans, cutting her off from all support at school. The isolation and abuse that followed caused her death.”
Except for a few states that require home educators to have at least earned a high school diploma, homeschooling parents in general are not required to have any specific training on how to educate children and meet developmental benchmarks. This can and does lead to children being educationally neglected and ill-prepared for adult life outside of the home. And while homeschooling can be a good tool for children with both physical or learning disabilities, if a parent is not equipped to meet those needs it can have detrimental effects on children. Homeschooling parents are not trained to recognize the signs of learning disabilities such as dyslexia and may miss them when they present in their children. Worse, they may dismiss learning disabilities as laziness and punish their children when they need help the most.
When states do not require any formal training or qualifications for parents who want to educate their children at home, parents may be unable to teach challenging concepts. In practice this can look like parents handing their children a math textbook and expecting them to teach themselves mathematics from a book.
If a child struggles to understand a subject on their own, and their parent views their struggle as laziness or disobedience, they may punish their child instead of taking responsibility for their own failure as teachers. This creates an unsafe and inadequate learning environment for children.
Homeschooling parents with financial resources can ensure that their children get a personalized education through tutors, co-ops, or extracurricular lessons. However, this kind of tutorial-style homeschooling is a privilege not many can afford, and Quiverfull families may still reject the idea of anyone but a parent having influence over a child. In Quiverfull families, homeschooling a whole brood of children is a full-time job most often taken on by stay-at-home mothers. Sometimes preteen and teen girls are tasked with overseeing the education of their younger siblings, and adult stay-at-home-daughters provide an in-house “free” tutor. It is seen as a woman’s role to train and educate her children, and this almost always means that she forgoes working outside the home. Single income Quiverfull families often struggle to meet the basic needs of their many children.
One CFA alum and CRHE volunteer who shared their insight on homeschooling with CFCtoo earlier this year had this to say:
Homeschooling is not inherently abusive. What it is, inherently, is isolating: something that works to the advantage of abusers both inside and outside the family. Children whose education is limited, whose contact with outside communities is cut off, and whose access to basic resources is often constrained by authority figures who are at once parent, teacher, and spiritual leader, become vulnerable targets for abuse.
Homeschooling doesn’t cause abuse, but it creates both the fertile ground for it to flourish and a sturdy shield against outside intervention. New York State’s homeschool laws are more robust than many in the country—for example, parents must file annual notices, individualized instruction plans, and quarterly reports—but they still leave space for educational neglect and other serious forms of abuse by homeschool parents.
Homeschooling is not inherently bad, but we cannot ignore the fact that it has been used to cause immense harm in countless children’s lives. All children deserve access to robust, child-centered, and safe education. If you would like to know more about how to strike that balance within the context of homeschooling, we recommend looking into the resources available at The Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
