My job was to answer call-in questions that homeschooling parents had. Our company wrote the curriculum, so we were supposed to have all the answers. Math questions outnumbered all others, and I did my best with the Pythagorean Theorem, which was a knot in everyone’s stomach. After a few years on the job, there was nothing I hadn’t heard.
Then I got the call.
“Hello,” the homeschooling mother said in a sweet voice. “I have an 8th grade student using your curriculum, and we have a big problem.”
Even though I feared she was going in the direction of linear functions, which made me sweat a little, I assured her I could help.
“Well,” she began, “The Diary of Anne Frank is part of her literature course.”
“Right,” I said, relieved at a literature question, which I knew I could answer easily, even before my second cup of coffee. “How can I help?”
“Well,” she said—now letting some exasperation rise in her voice—I refuse to let my daughter read this book.’ She paused for a few beats, during which I had no idea what her reason was going to be. Then this: “I only let her read stories with happy endings.”
I knew enough about homeschooling to understand that some parents (not all) homeschool their children precisely to keep them inside their own comfort zones. After all, the world can be scary and unpredictable. All parents crave safety for their kids, and keeping highly edited lessons confined to the kitchen table gives some of them control over what their children are exposed to.
It’s one way to go.
It wasn’t the way I chose with my own public-schooled kids, but there were days I wanted to adopt that course of action and just keep my kids from ever finding out how cruel and rotten the world can be. The first time I took my sons and daughter to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., I spent the entire afternoon rethinking my decision. Was it too much? Why did I think they needed to see—much less understand—the blackness that can descend on people’s souls?
I grappled with those questions and often felt envious of the homeschool crowd for not having to make the decisions I was making about my kids’ exposure to this imperfect and hopelessly flawed world of ours. In the end, I chose to tell them. Because it’s the truth, and the truth happened. It happened when my parents tried to explain to me why I was watching people in Birmingham getting hosed down and attacked by police dogs during Civil Rights protests. It did at the World Trade Center. It did at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
As parents, it’s our right to shield our children from anything we choose. I didn’t want my kids to be blindsided by the truth—that sometimes there is no happily ever after—that would arrive someday no matter what I tried to shield them from. And I didn’t want that realization to rear its head when I was no longer there to catch them.
For me, my thinking found its permanent home when my daughter, the youngest of my three, was about four and we were watching a TV show fictionalizing colonial America. In one scene, a slave mother was being sold away from her child, a little girl about my daughter’s age. I considered turning it off, as much for me as for her. It was wrenching—the mother pleading, the slave owner ambivalent, the child terrified.
My daughter turned to me and asked, “Did that happen in real life?”
“Yes,” I said.
She thought for a second or two and came up with her own answer, completely logical to her four-year-old sensibilities. “Well, I don’t think it really did.”
I understood her self-made reasoning. She yearned for that same protective shelter that lures lots of us parents, too. That quest for happily ever after. And I didn’t want to tell her the truth that night. But I did.