In an earlier post, I mentioned that Marina Sears frequently uses a logical fallacy known as "poisoning the well" in her book "The Battle Of Peer Dependency". Poisoning the well is a tactic to preemptively discredit people on the opposite side of the argument by declaring that opponents have a series of negative connotations that are not supported by wider evidence.
A great example of poisoning the well is encapsulated in "Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies" which posits that the longer a discussion goes on the internet the higher the chance of an analogy between one side and the Nazis or Hitler becomes. An example of Godwin's Law is the argument against vegetarianism of "Hitler was a vegetarian!". I have no idea if Hitler was a vegetarian - but the evil of Hitler was killing millions of people which is unrelated to his eating habits. Similarly, there are many people who are vegetarians - but that doesn't mean they will kill millions of people.
CP/QF writers need to prepare their readers for two possible groups of people who could undermine their message. For Mrs. Sears, the first group is rank outsiders who are not CP/QF adherents. That group is easy enough to discredit by claiming that True Christians homeschool and shelter children extensively unlike those Ungodly Heathens in public schools. The second group offers a much harder challenge. This group consists of homeschooling Christian parents who let their kids interact freely and without excessive oversight with other homeschooling Christian teens.
The first sentence in the quote is excellently crafted to align people who let their teens hang out with other teens with inexperienced Christians. You know, those baby Christians who don't know the real truth of the Gospel which is forming nuclear families that align under a paterfamilias for the extent of his life.
You don't remember that from the Gospels? That's because you're a baby Christian - not a mature Christian like Marina Sears.
I particularly appreciate how Mrs. Sears manages to smear every sign that a Christian might have of actually following the Gospel. Near as I can tell, a teenager who is attending church willingly, polite to all, behaving morally while giving back to their community by tithing, teaching and serving others is the ideal teenager in all religions.
Wait. All religions except Mrs. Sears' personal cult. Her teenagers manage to do all those things without having any friends at all.
But did her teenagers do all those things? I'm always impressed by how very little well-known CP/QF teenagers accomplish. It's not the teenagers' fault; their parents have them so extensively sheltered that they have no chance to shine in teaching, in service or even in being polite to people who are very, very different from them.
The most insidious problem with Mrs. Sears' theological practice is that it pits families against each other and promotes hubris. Instead of emulating good traits in families that have happy teenagers, Mrs. Sears encourages her followers to mentally denigrate people who make different choices by declaring them to be materialistic or shallow.
The next quote set off my cultic thinking alarm bells.
Whatever you do, parents, you cannot trust your own eyes.
Your teenager is having fun with other teenagers while playing volleyball at church. No! Volleyball is a known gateway sport which leads to friends which leads to thinking - and you do NOT want you teenager to think.
You think that sending siblings to chaperone each other is a safe bet? WRONG! Your teenagers are sheeple! Sending two teenagers to a youth group talk on the history of the Bible will lead to friends which will lead to a romantic relationship which will lead instantly to sex and unplanned pregnancy. An unplanned pregnancy will make you look like a bad parent - and the most important thing is avoiding any criticism from anyone - so don't let your kids go to youth group.
You think you know your teens well enough to figure out which ones need extra support around peers to make good choices and which are secure enough to make good choices? Fool! Kids act differently around their peers than adults! There is no correlation between the choices your kids make around their parents and other adults and how they will act around peers!
I thought the point of CP/QF homeschooling was that parents - mainly the mother - would spend so much time around their kids that the mom would have a solid understanding of the strengths and flaws of each of their kids. Using that insider knowledge, I assumed that CP/QF homeschooling families would be better able to adapt character training for each kid. The kid who is a bit lazy gets extra support on learning how to work. The kid who is overly cautious learns how to be a bit braver. Done correctly, I assume that CP/QF kids should be more than ready to deal with a smidge of peer pressure - such as it is - by their teenage years because they've been steeped in the morals and ideal of their families while having their innate characters strengthened.
Instead, their teenagers are apparently as impulsive, reckless, and blind to moral danger as the average preschooler.
Why on Earth would I raise my kid in a method that promises to keep them underdeveloped, immature and incompetent?
I wouldn't - but I have no desire to keep my son dependent on me for as long as possible.
IOW, I'm not the target audience of the author.
This is a bit horrifying to read. One of the hallmark traits of an abuser is a drive to isolate their child/spouse/friend from any relationships outside of the one they share, to convince and force that person to be dependent on them. Abusers will systematically seek to remove and criminalize all methods of escape and aid so that the object of their desire is physically and psychologically trapped in an enmeshed relationship with them, thus guaranteeing that the abuser's needs will always be met.
ReplyDeleteI believe that Ms. Sears truly loves her children and wants what's best for them. I also believe that she may have struggles with severe anxiety, trauma, and insecurity that prevent her from perceiving what that would be. Not all abusive parents operate from a place of callous selfishness, some just have too many struggles of their own to be able to care for their children appropriately. And I think that Ms. Sears perceives her children's capabilities and needs through the distorted filter of what she subconsciously believes would pacify her own pathological ones.
My take is that Mrs. Sears had some severe untreated anxiety before her husband was suddenly killed in a tragic car accident. After that point, she's coped by becoming severely controlling of her children so that they remain dependent on her. She goes into anxiety/control spirals whenever her kids do something that undermines her control over them.
DeleteI hope she likes/loves her kids - but you have no feeling of the individuality or personality of any of the kids by the end of the book. Maybe she scrubbed all reference to them as individuals as a way to protect their privacy. Or maybe she's so centered on controlling her anxiety that she can't spend energy on her kids. Either way, it's a rough way to live - and a terrible life for children.
Is she for real? This is so sad! Her poor children were not allowed to have any friends :-( And if peer dependancy is such a thing I would think that her Children together with other children from strong homes could help and show good peer dependancy om teenagers growung up under other cirkumstances.
ReplyDeleteShe must really be doing something wrong if her children as teenagers will start behaving immoraly as soon as they get a friend. Her goal should be to make her children strong enough in what they believe, which might not always be exactly the same as what she believes, so that they can stand strong when they meet people who don't believe the exact same things. How does she expect her children to survive as adults in the real world?
Does anyone read and take advice from this book. I thought that the Bible teaches to be in the world but not of the world....
This book was published and promoted by IBLP (Institute of Basic Life Principles) which is a cultic organization that teaches that Christianity is really about having a huge family that homeschools, home churches, and keeps women/children dependent on men. This is the group that the Duggars from "19 Kids and Counting" and "Counting On" are members of.
DeleteThere was another cultic group called Vision Forum which had roughly the same views as IBLP that folded after the founder was accused of molesting his family's teenage nanny. The most famous family from that group is the Botkin family.
How does it work in the long run? Not very well. The cult teaches an ethos that most people in the real world are lazy so when an employer meets one of the cult members who has been trained to have a strong work ethic the employer will be so excited that they will overlook the fact that the person has a homeschooled high school diploma and no other credentials and hire them on the spot! Since that myth was disproved pretty quickly, the cults pivoted to arguing that real men shouldn't work for an employer because employers will force you to do evil things. Instead, men should start their own business!
A tiny percentage of families make this work well enough to be upper middle class.... but that tiny percentage also tends to contain families where the father entered the cult after having a college degree AND the family ended up with 5-8 kids total. The rest of the families who follow the rules tend to end up dirt poor.
The other irony of these cults is that they call themselves people who are following what the Bible teaches correctly - but they almost never quote the Gospels. They quote bits of Proverbs. They occasionally pull out part of a Psalm. They quote bits from Pauline Epistles that are pro-family - but they quote the Gospels around once per full-length book.
DeleteThat's mainly because none of their core life beliefs are supported by the Gospels.
She must love all the social distancing right now.
ReplyDeleteThey were social distancing before it was cool!
DeleteI hate the pandemic. I hate all the deaths and suffering. The term "social distancing", though, now gives me a far more effective way of describing the amount of isolation that these parents were advocating for their children because that's about how isolated most of these families are.
I love your sarcasm here. I really don´t love Ms. Sears´ paranoia and lack of trust in her kids´ capabilities. How can a kid learn to deal with new people and gauge how trustworthy they are if they´re not allowed to try? How can they gain trust in their own ability to do so when the most important person in their lives clearly doesn´t trust them? It makes me scared they will be easy prey for abusers in later life.
ReplyDeleteThe rates of abuse in CP/QF culture terrifies me. On the infamous Fox News interview with Jill and Jessa Duggar, the fact that the two of them admitted that they've met with so many other families where sexual abuse happened is really, really scary. Lifetime rates of sexual abuse are at around 1/4 women and 1/7 men (although men are probably higher due to underreporting) - which makes me wonder why the rates are so much higher in the families the Duggars know.
DeleteBut then I thought about it. CP/QF teaches women and children to take whatever is given to them by the male leader of the family. Women, especially, are taught to never ever have needs. Children are taught to obey the first time an adult tells them to do something. Add in a culture of repression around human sexuality and you've got a society where predators can abuse multiple victims with little fear of reprisal. Especially since fundamental Christianity is all about forgiveness - but not about atonement. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is not about lack of consequences. Forgiveness is acknowledging that someone who has hurt you recognizes the severity and wrongness of what they did - that's all.
Yes, I'm also struck by this overwhelming lack of trust she places in the people who have been strongly (and almost ONLY) influenced by HERSELF their whole lives. I mean... on so many levels that's messed up.
ReplyDeleteIf she even thought about this logically for half a second she would see this is not a good plan.
They are being told they're not trustworthy their entire lives, and then suddenly one day *poof!* you're married. And now you get to make all the decisions for your own family and tiny babies! Congratulations! You are TOTALLY trustworthy now all the time. (What even in the world?????)
My other question was... how does she feel about what Acts describes as the early church? Everyone sharing everything, holding things in common. Sounds like a whole helluva lot of "peer dependency" going on there. So much so that two people were struck dead when they lied because they didn't want to be part of the group, so to speak.
How does she reconcile this?
Yeah, I have no idea what her plan was to transition her kids into a marriage with another person. That's the whole problem with the SAHD movement in a nutshell - although this is as much about sons as it is daughters. Kids are kept very, very sheltered from everyone else...and then are dumped into a marriage where two very sheltered people need to set up a new home and family without ever having done that on a tiny scale like working on a group project with classmates, sharing a locker or, you know, working.
DeleteThe Apostles and Disciples were peer-dependent too, don'tcha know!
My two cents is (as always) that CP/QF either don't read the Bible as much as they swear they do - or they read the Bible without any form of comprehension. I find the first situation less disturbing than the second, actually.
I try to be sympathetic with people like Sears, due to loss and clear, severe anxiety. But the amount of hubris in the clear belief of her superior spirituality is extremely grating on my nerves.
ReplyDeleteI have a great deal of compassion for her untreated mental illness; it's a horrible way to live.
DeleteBeing widowed so young and with so many small children is incredibly rough.
But becoming a self-absorbed spiritual hoity-toity isn't good either.