Preparing Sons: Chapter 11 - Part 2

The first post on this chapter covered Maxwell's wild and crazy views on how to control a son even after he's graduated high school.  I'm not sure how effective those ideas are especially if the son has been prepared enough that he's ready to enter the workforce even at a minimum wage job.  Either way, I saved a subsection of the chapter for a separate post.  This section shares Maxwell's obsession with purchasing a house debt-free along with his exceptionally optimistic views on the amount of earned income for first-time business owners.

Maxwell's views on debt-free homes is that owning a home debt-free prevents white-collar crime:

Is the ability to purchase a home debt-free a good goal for sons? Think about what a burden rent or mortgage payments are. They pressure men to work in places where Christians should not be employed. I have known men, under tremendous financial pressure due to their mortgage, who participated in unethical and illegal business dealings. Concern over loss of income should never hold a Christian to a job with which his Lord would not be pleased. (pg. 166)

As a counter-example, the only person I know who was tried for defrauding the state multiple millions of dollars was a man who earned seven figures who married a woman who had a healthy savings account from years of working in science industry.  They owned a lovely home outright.  I won't pretend I understand exactly why the man decided to inflate the number of students that attended our school (which took a good deal of work including creating records for imaginary students and populating classes of imaginary students), but I've always chalked it up to a combination of greed and hubris.  He received some hefty bonuses based on the growth of our school and he had massive narcissistic tendencies.  If I used Maxwell's line of logic, I should argue that buying a house outright leads inexorably to fraud instead of putting the blame on the illegal choices my boss made.

Maxwell discusses slightly the weight that a mortgage or rent payments put on a worker while ignoring the burden that owning a house places on that same worker.   People lose jobs.  Companies fold, downsize and relocate.  Entire industries do the same thing.  I've lived in Michigan my whole life; when a manufacturing sector declines, there's a massive migration of people out of the state and lots of people moving around in the state.  The industry workers leave first, followed by human service providers and businesses that were supported by the workers' incomes.  It happened in the late 1970's, the early 2000's and the early 2010's.   Owning a home narrows the area where a worker can easily access a job without selling their home and potentially makes the worker less attractive to businesses where the worker will have a long commute.   

If a worker cannot get a job within commuting distance, they have to move.  This adds an another layer of stress and financial demands on a family already in hardship.  Trying to sell a house in an economically depressed area is hard; there are plenty of other houses up for sale of similar quality which depresses prices.  In really bad times, the market values are depressed further by the presence of homes which have been foreclosed on.  The location that the family is moving to is generally in a more competitive real estate market so it's quite possible for the family to have to lose half of their investment on their original home and need to take out a mortgage on their new home.

Teri and I would have loved to provide our children with homes according to Proverbs 19: 14, "House and riches are the inheritance of fathers; and a prudent wife is of the Lord." Unfortunately, we are nowhere near being able to do that. However, we can provide them with room and board for as long as it takes them to save up for their house. Even then it is our desire that they will continue living with us until God provides them a spouse. (pg. 166)

I cannot figure out why Steven Maxwell interprets that verse to mean that fathers should give houses to their sons; if that was the proverb, it would state "Houses and riches are the inheritance of sons..." My understanding of that proverb is that married men who have living children and a prudent wife are economically farther ahead in subsistence agrarian societies.  My interpretation is a no-brainer...but most proverbs are simply pithy statements of general societal trends anyways.

More problematically is the fact that Maxwell blithely assumes that parents can afford to house and feed all of their offspring prior to marriage.   I really doubt that most CP/QF families can do that to the point that the Maxwells do. The Maxwells have eight kids spaced across 20 years supported by a father who had a Bachelor's degree in Engineering.  The oldest three kids were working in external or family businesses by the time the youngest girl started preschool.  Compare that with the 19 children born in the same time frame to the Duggar or the Bates family to self-employed parents.  Additionally, the Maxwells have five sons and only three daughters.  Since CP/QF boys are allowed to work outside the home, the Maxwells have had more children who could support themselves (at least partially) by their late teens.  The Coghlan family of the defunct blog "In A Shoe" has eight daughters and three sons; the seven oldest children are daughters. Trying to support 7 adult daughters until they got married is much more challenging than supporting three adult daughters as the Maxwells do now.

If a young man has been prepared well during high school, he should fairly easily be able to earn $35,000 or more a year when he graduates. Start with a yearly income and then subtract tithes, offerings, and taxes. Then money must be put aside for transportation, insurance - medical and auto, and other incidental expenses. If your son is frugal, he should be able to save 50% or slightly more of its income while living at home. (pg. 166)

I had to stop for a minute or two to stop laughing so hard I was crying.  After I could see again, I hit the internet to double-check my instinct.  In 2001, the median income for men who completed high school without college experience was $34,723.   That figure includes men at the beginning, middle and end of their careers; using it as an estimate for what a recent high school graduate could expect is unrealistically high.    For comparison, I began teaching in 2006 for ~$27,000 a year (plus benefits).

This is where Maxwell begins using magic math.  Through the rest of the topic, he behaves as if $35,000 in sales from a personal business is the same thing as $35,000 in personal income.  It's not because Maxwell forgets about removing business expenses from the total in sales.  I'm extremely skeptical that all taxes, health insurance, auto insurance for a late teenage or early 20's man, and all of the incidental expenses that come with a job/career like clothing, haircuts, networking experiences etc, take less than 50% of a man's income.     

Within six years from high school graduation, your 24 year old son will have saved $100,000, not counting any appreciable interest. I find that very exciting. If he earned less than 35,000 a year, it just means he must save a little longer.(pg. 166)

Here's a more realistic scenario.  I worked at Meijers as a cashier for between $8-12 dollars an hour during that time period.  I worked full-time (or close to it) during the summer months and during Thanksgiving through New Years.  The remainder of the year, I worked between 6-20 hours a week depending on the amount of available shifts.  I made roughly $16,000 per year before taxes and "saved" around $7,500 which I used in real time to pay for college.. 

Now, I passed up some shifts due to attending college - but I also cross-trained in the Men's/Shoes, Cosmetics, Pharmacy and Garden Center so I could pick up more shifts during slow periods.  If I hadn't been in college, I think I could have increased my number of hours across the year by about 30% at most because there's a seasonal dead time in January through April followed by a shorter one in late September through October where shifts were hard to find for love or money.  Assuming that I could save at the same rate, I'd make $20,080 before tax saving $9,750 per year.   My expenses were a little different because my parents covered my health insurance and I didn't have a car so I didn't need automotive insurance outside of a rider on my parents' policy but I did pay room and board to college so I think it about evens out in the end.

Saving $100,000 would have taken me 10.25 years at that rate.  There's no way my parents would have wanted me living at home from when I was 18 until I was 28 in hopes of buying my own home immediately. 

In case the math scared any of the readers, Maxwell immediately moves the goal posts for a home purchase:

Depending on the location, size, and age of the house your son will purchase, he might not even need $100,000. There's so many possibilities and intriguing options, but nothing happens unless a son has a vision, and you help him prepare. (pgs. 166-167)

Yes and no.  Michigan, like most of the Midwest, has low housing prices compared to either coast.  I grew up in an area of mostly starter homes and live in a fairly depressed area of rural home prices.   I have a hard time finding a home now that was under $100,000.   My first apartment was 600 square feet with one bedroom.  I can find homes for sale right now that are 700-800 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom in both areas - but they are selling for $110,00-$130,000.

I'm sure I could find cheaper homes if I was willing to purchase a foreclosed home at an auction - but those homes often need a lot of work.  In the best case scenario, the home was well-maintained upto the point that the home was surrendered to the bank and had minimal damage during the period it was uninhabited.  Here's a worst case scenario. A family down the block from us had a house foreclosed on when I was a kid.  We met the poor souls who bought the house sight unseen.  They purchased a home that had been occupied by animal hoarders who apparently decided to destroy everything they could on their way out.    The house had to be stripped down to the studs and built back up again - including new electrical to replace the parts ripped out and new plumbing.    I don't know what they purchased the house for - but they spent a ton more than that making the house habitable again.

I want to encourage you with the possibilities for your own son. If a father says, "My son isn't involved with computers and can't make that much money," my question for him is, "Do you think your son could learn to handle commercial lawn mower?" I think you will agree that most sons are capable of running a lawn mower.

Mark, a recent high school graduate, has his own lawn mowing business. It is nothing fancy, just one man with a commercial, walk behind mower. I spoke with him on his mobile phone and he was about to start on another lawn. I asked him if he thought a young man could clear 35,000 a year by mowing lawns. He chuckled and said,"Yes, pretty easily in fact!" Then he pointed out that income came from mowing lawns for only 5 months, during the growing season. (pg. 167)

Mmm-kay. 

I agree that most adult humans can learn to run a lawn mower.  We're not setting the bar real high here, are we?

I agree that random guy named Mark that Steven Maxwell knows believes that someone could theoretically earn $35,000 a year.  I'd like to point out that Mark never says that he earns that much - just that he thinks it is possible. 

Right now, the internet tells me that people who hire a lawn service expect to pay $80-100 per mowing for a suburban size lawn.  My lawn is a bit over an acre and would be closer to $150 per mowing.  We have a 5 month mowing season and let's assume people want their lawn mowed 8 times during that period.  That's around $800 per suburban yard and $1,200 per rural yard.  To clear $35,000 in sales, that means a teenage CP/QF home school graduate (who may not know anyone in his neighborhood) would need to have 44 suburban clients or 30 rural clients. 

Let's discuss the pitfalls that spring to mind:

• No one in the area I grew up used a lawn service.  It was too expensive for a chore that young working families could do on their own.  CP/QF kids in blue-collar suburban areas are out of luck.
• No one in the area I live in now uses a lawn service.  Everyone owns a self-propelled lawn mower except me.  (I'm the oddball who uses a reel mower on an acre lawn.  I enjoy the exercise and the look of horror on people's faces...)  CP/QF kids in rural areas are out of luck.
• A lot of that income is going to be eaten up by business costs:
• A used walk-behind commercial mower is between $600-$2500.  The cheaper end require local pick-up and have an unknown number of clock hours on them which means availability is spotty and the mower might die midseason.  
• Finishing around the home and walkways requires a commercial weed whip for around $150.  
• The mower and weed whip needs to be transported from site to site.  This requires either a pickup truck or a flatbed attached to a pickup truck.   A used light truck with over 100,000 miles on it runs between $7,000-10,000.  
• Both the mower and the truck require gasoline or diesel to run.  Time spent moving the equipment and truck for refueling is wasted so the business would probably benefit from having an in-bed fuel tank in the pickup truck - but small trucks have small beds so the mower might not fit with an extra fuel tank.  
• I feel like having a late teenage boy driving around in a light truck with an in-bed fuel tank and a heavy commercial mower is a disaster waiting to happen.  I'm thinking this will lead to a higher automotive insurance rate - but I could be wrong on that one.
• I hope Nathan, Christopher and Mark sprung for business insurance when they were running mowing businesses.  That's around $500 per year.
• Adding it up and assuming a 4-year loan on the truck gives a low-end of $3,000 to a high end of $5,650 not including fuel costs and automotive insurance.    I'm also assuming they have minimal advertising costs.   That means the business needs 4-7 suburban clients or 3-5 rural clients to clear costs..  (Rural clients have larger yards, but the cost of transporting equipment to rural clients becomes expensive quickly.  44 suburban clients might live in a 10 mile radius; 30 rural clients may be a 30 mile radius.)  
• Who is funding this?  Most families - ignoring CP/QF status - don't have $3,000 to drop on a family member's start-up.

This means our hypothetical new small business owner just out of high school needs to find 48 suburban clients or 33 rural clients to met easy-peasy goal set by Steven Maxwell after getting $3,000-$5,650 to cover start-up costs. 

Yeah.  Good luck.  They'll need it.

Preparing Sons: Chapter 8 - Part One

Whew!  Now that we broke free of the chapter on "Perfectly Harmless Activities that Steve Doesn't Want His Family to Do"  we arrive at the beginning of the chapters on how Steven thinks people should raise sons divided into age groups.    The first age group he covers is three to six years of age.

 Not surprisingly, this leaves me with a few questions right off the bat.  Are children aged 0-2 years solely the domain of the mother or are the details of child rearing before age 3 the same for boys and girls?

I hope it's the latter.  My husband has been very involved with our son since the day he was born.  I was so sick after Jack was born that I could only see him for an hour or so every day before I'd be exhausted and having my blood pressure skyrocket again.  My husband roomed-in with me in the hospital on a tiny couch and visited Jack three to four times a day.   When Jack came home, he was a very labor-intensive baby because of his medical needs - although thankfully he's always been a very easy baby personality-wise - so my husband cared for him from when he got home from work until he went to bed.  He also did the first morning feed with Jack and prepped his bottles.   Jack's much less labor-intensive now, but my husband has continued spending a lot of time caring for Jack.  This is good for both my husband and my son - and it gives me a break from childcare and taking care of the house.

The chapter is pretty long, so this post is going to cover the first two topics: religious education/training and doing projects with your son. 

The section on "Salvation" is by far the longest one in the chapter - and that's a weird idea for me - but not for my usual issues around being saved.  Cradle Catholics are usually baptized in infancy and that's the only sacrament they receive until they are in 1st-2nd grade.  In the intervening seven or eight years, the kids are learning how to be good human beings.    Parents are working on issues like "Use your words, not your hands (or teeth) when you are angry" or "When you pushed Johnny, he got hurt and felt sad."  Parents are demonstrating why lying is wrong, why we should respect each other and why we should respect other people's property.   Yeah, most little Catholics will pick up a few prayers along the way and are probably hearing sanitized versions of Bible stories, but the major gist of faith formation during this time is helping kids move beyond the age-appropriate self-centered viewpoint of a small child into a small human who thinks about how actions affect others.

Here's Steve's starting point on salvation:

Most of my children have come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior around the ages of 5 and 6. Be careful not to push a child or force him towards salvation in any way. For your child to recite a Salvation prayer without a change of heart does no one any good. (pg. 105)

Duly noted.  Look, the only two examples I can think of from my life of parents forcing their kids to do anything involving religion is 1) dragging pre-teens and teenagers to Mass every Sunday and 2) requiring their teenagers to get confirmed. 

My parents expected us to attend Mass every Sunday while we lived at home.  Looking back, this wasn't about religion nearly as much as it was about having one family event a week.  Well, that and teaching my youngest brother that choosing to stay out past curfew on Saturday night was not an acceptable reason to skip out on Sunday requirements.  Of course, my brother had the last laugh.  One Sunday morning after a long Saturday night, he skipped breakfast and passed out cold just before the Liturgy of the Eucharist began.  Since he was sitting in the front row of seats that didn't have a railing in front, he did a header onto tile stairs.  The edge of the step hit him right between the eyebrows and split the area right above his nose down to the skull.    That's also how we met an attending doctor whose graduate stipend work including socializing Koko the gorilla.....but that's another story.  Either way, I doubt that attending Mass once a week was a real hardship for any of us. 

Forcing teenagers to get confirmed, on the other hand, lead to one huge mess at my parish.  Our home parish was huge.  I was in a Confirmation class with 55 other sophomores.   Of the 55 teenagers, exactly five of us were there by personal choice.   Hell, even my twin sister was there under parental dictates.   The  first-time instructor was completely overwhelmed.   In a class that was supposed to be preparing us to be adult members of the Catholic church, we had lost the "privileges" of using writing utensils and sitting on chairs by the end of the second week.    Week three's class involved sitting on risers in a music/utility room listening to the instructor read a children's book on St. Francis of Assisi.  Eventually, I joined my best friend and another girl in a "book club" where we worked our way through the catechism on Confirmation and discussed what we thought the Sacrament meant. 

The major difference between my two stories and Steven Maxwell's exhortation is the age of the people involved.  Life with pre-teens and teens is dragging reluctant teens to do things that are "good for them" because they are in a very peer-focused period of life.  Kindergartners are completely different critters - and anyone who feels like coercing their kid into a salvation event at that age needs to take several developmental psychology classes.

The next story is Jesse Maxwell's salvation story.   The story manages to be sweet and completely exasperating at the same time.  It's adorably sweet because Jesse's a normal elementary school kid and exasperating because Steven Maxwell is involved:

Six year old Jesse was our most recent child to be saved. He had been mentioning for several months that the Lord was talking to him about salvation. Each time he came to me, I told him that that was great, and we could talk about it when he was ready. I wanted to make sure this wasn't "false labor." I waited until he couldn't be put off any longer. Finally, he came to me and said, " Dad, I really want to talk to you about being saved. Can we talk about it now?" I said we would discuss it after supper.(pg. 106)

Steven Maxwell gives me whiplash - and not only in "Preparing Sons to Provide for Single Income Families".  The Maxwell family LOVES creating cold-calling conversion events - but when a kid in the family shows signs of readiness for being born again, feet dragging commences.   I don't understand why Maxwell dawdles so long on this.  In the Catholic Church, kids have to have reached the "Age of Reason" (usually around age 7) before receiving the Eucharist.  The rationale is that kids have to have reached a certain level of cognitive and moral development before they can have a basic understanding of what the Eucharist is and why it is important.    Maybe Steven Maxwell is waiting for a similar developmental milestone to be passed - but how would he know if he's not talking to Jesse about salvation one-on one?   

I'm also confused about who is the gatekeeper for salvation - Jesus or Steven Maxwell?  If Jesus is telling Jesse Maxwell that it's time for him to be saved, why is Steven Maxwell getting in the way?  I thought that being saved was one of those things that people can do one-on-one with Jesus anyway.  It's surreal to me because Maxwell has essentially re-created the ecclesiastical  governance found in Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Episcopal Churches in himself without the oversight and appeals process available in those denominations.

We went down into my office and closed the door. I asked Jesse a number of questions to determine if you really understood what the Lord has done for him. Did he understand sin and the consequences of it? Did he understand the Cure for sin? Was he able to earn salvation in any way? After I was satisfied he had a good comprehension of salvation, I asked him to go to his room and pray about whether he really wanted to become a Christian. He came back eight minutes later and said that he was sure.(pg. 106)

In this section, the capitalization of "the Cure" is from the book.  Every time I read it, the song "Friday I'm in Love" gets stuck in my head....followed immediately by a bunch of songs from "The Clash" because my dyslexia causes those two bands to get mixed up in my head.   Oddly enough, the Clash's "Do I Stay or Do I Go?" is apropos for this section. 

I wish Maxwell had included Jesse's answers to the first two questions.  The idea of an "Age of Reason" in my church includes the modern understanding that early elementary school kids are in a very concrete stage of moral decision making.  The level of understanding that a kid is supposed to have prior to receiving the Eucharist is that they can label a fairly cut-and-dry moral situation that they've been exposed to before as being moral/good or immoral/bad.   An example would be something like "Bob wants to play on the swing set, but all of the swings are full.  Should Bob push a small child off a swing so Bob can swing?" 

This also recognizes that kids will often default to very black-and-white thinking about more complicated moral situations like "Franz's family is starving.  He walks by a bakery that has lots of bread in the window.  Should he steal the bread?"  For early elementary school kids, they will often answer that Franz shouldn't steal the bread because stealing is wrong; they are too young to have a sense that stealing bread to save lives may be moral.

Since Jesse is allowed to be saved at the end of this, he must have answered "No" to "Can you earn salvation in any way?" - but my sense of humor wonders what would have happened if he had answered "Yes.  You have to convince your dad you are ready to be saved!"  :-P

I love the idea of a six year old praying really hard for eight minutes while deciding to become a Christian.   Absolutely sweet little guy!

I then asked if he liked people telling him what to do. He said, " No." I explain that salvation meant Jesus becoming his boss. I ask Jesse to go pray again about whether he really was willing to make Jesus his boss. He went away and came back four minutes later. " Yes!" He wanted Jesus to be his boss. I asked whether he would like to have Mom with us when he prayed, and he thought that would be a good idea. We went upstairs to the living room and knelt at the sofa. I prayed for him, then let him in prayer. At that moment, Jesse Maxwell became a child of God. (pg. 106)

*giggles*

Imagine Jesse's utter desolation when he realized that his parents were still able to order him around!  He had gone through all that work to make Jesus his boss only to find out that Jesus subcontracted the work!

Be very careful using metaphors with small children; they are not the best at abstract thinking at age six. 

The last section is on doing projects and chores for kids.  Surprisingly, Maxwell and I are on the same page with this one.   My parents expected us to pitch in around the house in an age-appropriate manner starting from.... well, I don't remember not being expected to pick up my own toys and put dirty laundry in a hamper so I'm assuming we started as toddlers.  My little guy is too young to do anything around the house yet - but I already explain to him that he helps me out when I'm doing chores by either playing quietly by himself or telling me stories - which is what I call when he babbles to me while I clean the kitchen.  :-)

This next story sounds like something I did with my parents when we were kids:

This morning well our family was over working at Nathan's house, six-year-old Jesse spent the longest I'm picking up sticks in the yard and bringing them to me. He was so pleased to be able to help, and he was performing and needed to ask. One of my jobs was to break the sticks up into small pieces for the trash bag. He loves seeing a pile of sticks need to grow before me. We had great " fun." Joseph and John, the older now, we're also over there glad fully working with us. (pg.108-109)

Lots of CP/QF bloggers discuss endlessly the importance of teaching kids to have a good work ethic - and my two-cents is the best way to do that is to working hard and willingly yourself and have the kids join in as they are old enough.   My parents kept an eye on our elderly neighbors and did their yard chores.  Looking back, it was never something my parents discussed with us kids.  The people next door were too old to safely mow the lawn, rake leaves, and shovel snow; we were young and healthy so it was only sensible that we took care of their lawns, too.  We were free to complain about taking care of our home yard - but I don't remember ever complaining about taking care of Vivian's yard next door.   Complaining about that would have been insulting to her - and a sign of severe ingratitude for the fact that we were healthy and strong. 

We also learned by listening to our parents the importance of allowing people we helped to keep their pride.  Vivian was always extremely thankful that we cared for her lawn - and we kids always pointed out that raking her lawn gave us HUGE leaf piles to play in and snow for snowball fights.  As we outgrew "playing" as an excuse, we shifted to "I need more exercise" or "it's good cardio-training for soccer".

Fun is fun - and work can be fun, too.  I completely disagree with Maxwell's theory that the only way people will find working fun is if they don't have access to entertainment like TV, movies or fiction to read.   I spent several hours yesterday planting twelve fruit trees around our yard.  Raising perennial fruit crops is a lot of work, but it's a work that I find deeply satisfying and that increases the amount of fruit my household eats.  Ditto for raising chickens, planting a vegetable garden or crocheting dish towels.

Maxwell and I may be on the same page, but he includes an anecdote about his impatience with his kids in a "Oopsie" lightweight manner that is completely different from his tone in discussing his wife or children's foibles:

I have discovered that I get more than I bargained for when I have young children helping me on projects. If the project has any degree of difficulty, I have the opportunity to work on my character! You see, I become impatient when trying to answer a million questions while concentrating on my work. Little boys ask questions like," Daddy, why did you break that bolt off?" or, " Why can't we do it this way?" If I don't mentally prepare for the fact that the task will take longer with my son's participation, I will become frustrated. Then, instead of having a wonderful shared time, we are both unhappy. Therefore, make sure you begin a project with proper expectations. (pg. 109)

Ok, Steven.  You find it frustrating when you have to multitask with small children around.  Welcome to adulthood, dude.

Pause for a moment and imagine what Teri's life must be like while you were off at work.  She was trying to homeschool the older kids, wrangle the younger kids and keep up a home....with little voices chiming in their two cents all_the_time.   If "Why did you break that bolt off?" is annoying, imagine "why did you break that cup?", "why are we having eggs for breakfast?", "why can't I go outside?" and three million other questions every day. 

Makes having a kid underfoot while repairing something around the house take on a different light....

This last story is terrifying:

A family we know shared with us how one of their young sons stuck a drill up his younger brother's nose and pulled the trigger. The mom said she had never seen anything bleed so profusely. Please do not underestimate your child's ability to do something he shouldn't. Exercise much caution. (pg. 110)

Small children are extremely bad at judging relative risks.   They have no life experience and are still equally connected between fantasy and reality.   Small children and hand tools are a bit risky even under adult supervision - but small children should never ever be left near power tools even with supervision.    My dad directs plays for local high schools so we spent lots of Saturdays playing in the seating section of the auditorium while Dad and high school students built set on the stage.   Notice the clear spatial division between the kids and the power tools; the tools were located on a raised stage that we were not allowed to be on (or even the steps up to the stage) unless Dad told us we could come up.  We were allowed to come up once all the tools were secured OR if Dad needed us to sit on a piece of lumber to act as a counterweight while he was cutting it. 

Hopefully, the drill only had a short bit for driving screws on it.  That can mess up the soft tissue in the nose - but a longer bit could start ripping into the internal bony structures in the sinuses - and that's a whole new level of nasty complications......

CP/QF Crazy: Civil War Conspiracy Theory Writ Large

Oh, boy.  It's pretty rare that a portion of a CP/QF screed causes me to stop dead in my tracks, but this one did it:

During the War for Southern Independence 140 years ago, many black Confederates fought for the freedom to be stewards of their own land and that of their masters, refusing to be subjected to the tyranny of a coercive, centralized Unitarian State in the name of emancipation. In the same way, let us, as married women, contend for our God-given right to be full-time housewives to our husbands and servants to other members of the Body of Christ, forsaking the world's current administration of centralized government, socialism, and statism.

This is part of Antonia Cunningham's 2003 work "Against the Proletarianization of Women" which I accessed at Blessed Homemaking and was originally posted at Ladies Against Feminism.  The entire essay is reminiscent of any revisionist history spouted by Geoffrey Botkin or his daughters beginning with the assertion that the US was founded as a Calvinistic utopia that was overrun by Unitarians and spiralling into pride-protecting fantasies about the causes of the Civil War. 

I'm not descended from Northern abolitionists.  My ancestors who were in the US during the Civil War period were all located in the Upper South mostly in Appalachia.  In so far as we can tell, my ancestors never owned slaves - but I also assume that the lack of slaves was due more to their poverty than it was due to an understanding of the evils of slavery. 

The first sentence in the quote is baffling in its oversimplification.

 There is a world of difference between the choices available to a free black person living in the South compared to an enslaved person living in the South.  Enslaved African-Americans made up 93.8% of the population of African-Americans in the South at the beginning of the Civil War  By definition, an enslaved person is a person who does not have the freedom to choose whether or not to obey their master - and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best and absolutely sick at worst. 

In terms of options available to black men in the South during the Civil War, being an armed combatant for the Confederacy was not available until three weeks before the end of the War.  The Confederacy paid some pensions to African-American men who had documented service as laborers during the Civil War; no pensions were ever paid for African-American men who served as soldiers in the Confederacy.  If the main cause of the Civil War was about "states' rights"  or "freedom from centralized government", why didn't the Confederacy allow units of free black men?  Why not offer freedom to slaves in return for fighting against the North? 

The answer is pretty clear: the Civil War was about slavery, not about states' rights.   The US Constitution gives states all rights that are not expressly reserved for the Federal government.  Let's see which of the rights reserved to the Federal government the South wanted to revert to state-level prior to the Civil War:

• Did the South want states to coin money?  No.
• Did the South want states to regulate foreign commerce including import duties and taxes? No.
• Did the South want states to regulate interstate commerce? No.
• Did the South want states to establish post offices? No.
• Did the South want states to punish crimes on the high seas? No..
• Did the South want states to fix standard weights and measures? No.
• Did the South want states to raise and maintain armed forces including militias against insurrections? No.
• Did the South want states to enter treaties with foreign states and declare war and peace? No.

The largest argument against the "states' rights" theory is that the states that succeeded from the Union didn't operate as 11 independent state-nations; no, the Confederate States' Constitution states that the purpose is to form a permanent federal government.  The Confederate States did pick up a few rights that were reserved to the federal government - but I've never seen a states' right essay that mentioned the importance of impeaching federal judges who live in a state,  taxing ships that enter ports, issuing bills of credit, and creating inter-state treaties involving shared waterways.    Of course, that same document made sure that slavery was legal throughout the Confederate States.

Really, it's not that complicated.  The Civil War was about the future of slavery in the US - not about states' rights.

Preparing Sons: Chapter Six - Part 3

I'm back!  I'm sorry for the longer than expected break.  Our trip to Pittsburgh was one day longer than I had planned for and traveling long distances with a 12 month old adjusted baby wiped me out. 

I realized when we arrived in PA that my long-suffering laptop power-cord had finally died from an internal wire break so I was sans laptop until a replacement cord arrived today. 

Pittsburgh was amazing and my niece is the brightest little thing ever!  She and my son had a standard toddler-old baby love/hate relationship.  My favorite moment was after one of the adults made her relinish one toy for my son to play with she muttered "Baby bye" which I translated to "Time to get rid of the baby, people!"   Watching her at the Aviary and the Botanical Gardens was so fun; she wanted to look at everything.  My mom, my sister and I introduced her to the joys of swimming; she was hesitant at first but soon was putting her whole face in the water to try and blow bubbles.   We watched the Winter Olympics together and she learned the words "hockey" and "curling".   Unfortunately, she also screamed "NO!" everytime we tried to convince her that the hockey team she liked was the Detroit Red Wings rather than the Pittsburgh Penguins.  :-)

It was a great weekend - and a weekend filled with activities that the Maxwell clan forbids.  Modesty guidelines prevent them from swimming.  Professional and amatuer sports are out.  Heck, television is out.  Technically, the Aviary and Botanical Gardens aren't entirely forbidden - but I've never seen a picture on the Maxwell blog of family members visiting any cultural attractions outside of agricultural fairs.  Most places frown on patrons attempting to convert other patrons on the sly; it changes the experience of the patrons in a negative way.

This section of the chapter focuses on the horrors of youth team sports.  I am biased strongly in favor of youth and adult league sports.  I played soccer, softball, volleyball, and basketball as a kid and pre-teen.  In high school, I played one year of soccer.  During late high school and college, I acted as an assistant coach for girls soccer at the elementary school because I enjoyed teaching girls how to goal-tend.  Athletics taught me how to use my physical strength while compensating for my undiagnosed exercise-induced asthma and low flexibility.  I learned how to communicate effectively with others on the fly.  I learned how to motivate others and how to accept support from teammates. 

I loved to play positions that required aggressive physicality; I led my team in rebounds in 5th-8th grade mainly by being willing to do whatever it took to get a hold of the ball once it hit the rim or backboard despite the fact that I reached my adult height of 5'3" at age 10 and was shorter than average by age 13.  I loved diving for shots in soccer especially the ones where someone was running at me on a breakaway; it was the best game of chicken ever!  I played catcher in softball and lived for runners who tried to go through me,  I played rough and tumble pick-up games of basketball with the boys at recess during 7th and 8th grade.  Looking back, I've always felt constrained by societal expectations that girls were supposed to be non-aggressive, passive and weak.  Sports were a place I really be myself long before I knew how to bring assertiveness into my day-to-day life. 

I benefited as well from my lifelong issues with cerebral palsy, too.  I've spent most of my life tripping over my own feet because my legs don't always move like I expected.  Because of that, I learned how to fall in ways that minimize injuries to myself and developed a high pain tolerance for bruises on limbs.  To this day, my husband will ask me about a nasty looking bruise on a leg or arm and my response is "Oh, I smacked my arm with the car door last week.  Huh.  That looks more ugly than I expected."

I love sports.  Steven Maxwell abhors team sports - and goes into amazingly wound-up hyperbole right off the bat:

Team sports are generally accepted as a good, proper, and beneficial activity for youth. What about Christian youth? A child only has a limited amount of free time in a week. Have the parents evaluated what the best use of this time is? (pg. 95)

*rolls eyes*
Yes, Steven.  Parents evaluate activities for their children all the time.  It's the reason that many parents choose traditional schooling; they feel that their children will receive the best return on the amount of time spent on education.  Other parents choose homeschooling for the same reason.  

Ironically, I live within a short distance from three colleges founded and run by Calvinistic-Baptist denominations.  All three of them have competitive sports teams - so Steven is moving in his own realm of crazy here.

After a workshop one evening, a man discussed with me his son's involvement in team sports. He wanted his son to learn to work hard and with others on a team. I asked him whether he could think of no better way to accomplish these goals.

I have not observe team sports building the proper spirit of teamwork. Rather they foster a spirit of pride. If you want to develop teamwork, have your son work with his siblings on some projects. If he can work with them, he can get along with anyone. If you want him to learn to work hard, take him with you when you help a widow with some home repair. (pgs. 95-96)

For any poor soul who decides to have a conversation with Steven Maxwell in the future, keep in mind that anything discussed is fodder for his next book.  Maxwell is not listening to your argument; he's simply waiting for you to stop talking long enough to interject why your choice is completely wrong.    Likewise, when he seemed to be watching his young sons play sports he was really judging the amount of "teamwork" compared to "pride" shown by the kids.  

The argument that working alongside siblings under the eyes of parents is identical to working with random people assigned to a team under an assigned coach is palpably absurd - and tired.  For the vast majority of parents in the USA the goal is to raise independent adults.  Independent adults can support themselves financially independently of their parents.  They choose to set boundaries between their family of origin and their immediate family.  Adults can behave morally without having their parents overseeing their every move. 

Steven Maxwell's goal is not to raise independent adults; he aims to keep his children dependent and under his control. 

How has his plan worked out for his kids? 

Well, his oldest four sons are married - but his oldest two daughters are unmarried at 36 and 25. 

Christopher and Joseph each had a failed engagement prior to meeting their wives. (This explains why Steven was so irritated when John's now-wife Chesly's family announced their engagement before the wedding; twice bitten, thrice shy.)  By comparison, I've never had a wedding called off after a publically announced engagement in my extended family of 50+ adults.   

Nathan's running a successful business; Nathan, Christopher, Joseph and John have each had a business fail.  

I would need a whole lot better set of outcomes to deprive my son of sports.

Maxwell attempts to explain what a massive time commitment sports were on his family:

Nathan and Christopher were great Little League baseball players. They loved baseball, and we love to watch them play. Going to the games was fun and a real family affair. Practices will begin in late February, and the games will continue into June. Then if you were " fortunate", your son would be chosen for the All-Star team and participate in another couple of months of practice and games. The end result was an incredible amount of time invested for the whole family. (pg. 96)

I went down a rabbit hole after I read this passage and tried to figure out how old his kids were when they were playing Little League.  I stopped because Steven Maxwell has bent or mangled the truth so many time previously in the book that the ages of his sons are moot.  This passage could be describing Nathan at 12 and Christopher at 10 or they could have been 6 and 4 years old; Maxwell would write the same story either way.   

The amount of time invested for a family with two kids playing Little League is not as massive as Maxwell makes it sound.  We usually practiced 2-3 a week and had a game once or twice a week - and often the game replaced a practice.  Maxwell wasn't a coach - and a careful read implies that he and Teri didn't stick around for practice times.   Assuming that the boys needed to be driven 15 minutes each way to three practices and played one 90 minute game a week, that's an investment of 6 hours of driving + watching games total.   Remember, the Maxwells had a total of three kids when Nathan was at the maximum age for a Little League with one stay-at-home homeschooling mom. 

The Maxwells clearly lived somewhere a lot warmer than Michigan; our outdoor sports season doesn't begin until early April which caused the season to be run pretty tightly. 

If the Maxwells hate the All-Star team so much, they don't have to let their son try out.  It's not mandatory.

The next section makes Steven Maxwell's main reason for removing his kids from sports clear: he cannot deal with losing control of any aspect of his sons' lives.

What did allowing our sons to play baseball cost us? We could no longer set our own schedule. We were at the mercy of the coach decide where we had to be and when. We were no longer controlled whom our sons associated with. They were part of " the team" and were to bond with each other. The greatest price we paid was at our family evening altar time.

Family Bible study is very important to me for the development of my family. I value it next to importance to my own Bible reading and prayer time. I was now forced to sacrifice our family altar time to the god of sports. I was choosing to give up my opportunity to teach my children God's Word - - the one thing that would have the greatest impact on my son's ability to lead and provide for their families. Finally, this realization hit home! (pg. 96)

My first response was indignation; Maxwell's in la-la land if he thinks the coach has control over practice and game times!  

My second response was bemused recognition of Maxwell's privilege as an male engineer if he's up-in-arms over losing control of his schedule.  Welcome to reality!  Try balancing practices and games with a guest service job, a demanding college schedule and using limited public transportation - or two adults working 5 jobs.  Try keeping a homeschool schedule with a difficult baby and a sick toddler.  Heck, try keeping that same schedule in the year Mary was born.   

The Maxwell kids might get to know other kids!  Kids who have not been pre-screened to avoid single-parent families, divorced families, ideological disagreements with the Maxwells or mothers who work outside the home!  Oh, the horrors!  The other kids might.... I can barely say it.... they might discuss a TV show!  Oh, the humanity!

No, really.  That's humanity.  We're a jolly mess of differences - but most people can work together long enough to play 7-9 innings of baseball. 

That whole "altar time is sacrificed" spiel?  Completely made up.  Here's how I know: The Maxwells included their family schedules in "Managers of their Homes" and family evening prayer time was scheduled for 30 minutes in the evening.   In a traditionally schooled family, the athletes would need some time before or after sports to do homework, but the Maxwell Family homeschools - and didn't have any evening homeschooling blocks in any of the schedules in "Managers of their Schools".    Teri Maxwell is a bright cookie; with only three kids at home, I'm sure she could prep a dinner during the early afternoon that was ready to eat by the end of the game.  If altar time was truly a priority, the Maxwell Family would be able to fit 3.5 hours in a week pretty easily around sports.

The next quote demonstrates how little of a priority emotional regulation is for Steven Maxwell:

Teri and I knew it would be the last baseball season for our sons. After the final game of the season, I took Nathan and Christopher out for a soda. With tears running down my cheeks, I explain to them why we are ending team sports for our family. I shared with each of them how much team sports was costing our family and that we could bear it no longer. To my joy, they both accepted my direction. I firmly believe that as a result of this decision, we have seen God pour out unimaginable blessings into our sons lives. (pg. 96-97)

I have a very dark sense of humor.  In my mind's eye, the two boys are in slightly dirty baseball uniforms including hat and stirrups enjoying root beer floats at Dairy Queen when Steven Maxwell starts visibly crying over the fact that "God doesn't want you to play sports anymore!"  The boys exchange slightly worried glances at each other - is Dad ok? - before saying something like "That's ok, Dad.  We're ok with that."  Both boys are a bit relieved; after all, they're not great players and watching Dad glower every time the coach talks to them has gotten old.  (Did I mention I suspect that some of Steven Maxwell's disdain of the All-Star Team is because Maxwell didn't make the team as a kid and his kids didn't either?  Hmm.....)

Just imagine.  If Steven Maxwell had never entered his oldest boys in team sports, Nathan and Christopher might have been spared the pain of two failed businesses and one failed engagement.  How did Steven Maxwell make such a grievous mistake?  (I'm being sarcastic, of course.)

A few pages later, Maxwell throws in one last horror story of how team sports can lead directly to porn:

I know someone who was introduced to pornography by his own father. The father had the magazines in his home, and the boy found them. How horrible for a father to cause the entrapment of his son. I know another young man whose baseball coach introduced him to pornography. The team went to another city to play a championship game and stayed overnight in a hotel. The coach " treated" the team to a stack of magazines for their entertainment. (pg. 101)

I can't imagine handing a stack of porn magazines to the teenagers; it's such a gross idea. 

 Obviously, I can't rule out that the story is true; there are sick people in the world - but I'm boggled at how this coach handed off a stack of porn mags to his team.  It's pretty rare for a coach to travel with an entire baseball team alone; normally there would be other parents in the hotel staying overnight before the game.   How did the team keep the parents from hearing about the great porn award?  Teenage boys talk a lot - and they are not great at keeping their voices down.  I have a mental image of the Bela Karolyi knock-off Simpsons character standing in front of a bunch of teenage boys and saying "Good job.  You get porn mags.  Make you men." 

Now we are all up-to-date on how youth team sports will destroy parental leadership and lead directly to porn.   Remind me to sign my son up for tee ball and U-5 soccer in a few years. :-)

Adoption Issues: Communication between Home and School

Well, the baby is feeling a bit better today - but I caught his cold.  I'm running far enough behind that reading in a chapter of either of the book reviews will have to wait until the weekend - but I have a blog post review waiting in my back pocket.

I wrote a previous blog post about the Corkum family: two parents, two biological kids, one adopted son adopted in accordance with best practices followed by the adoption of three unrelated teenagers who were substantially older than the other three kids.  The last three adoptions have been a complete mess and by 2016 all three of the kids were living in other placements.

Prior to the oldest adopted kids leaving, the most disruptive kid was placed in public schools.  Melissa Corkum had previously home schooled all of the kids using the classical method so this was a hard transition for her.   She wrote a post about things that the kid's teacher has said that are emotionally devastating to her.   The post made me laugh because I've said all of these things to parents (or something pretty close) before and I can promise that the teacher did not mean what Mrs. Corkum heard.

Statement One:

“She has been super cooperative for me.”

Preparing Sons for Single Income: Chapter Four

Chapter Four  - titled "What Does It Take to Make Ends Meet?" - is Steven Maxwell's fleshing out of how life choices affect budgets.   The chapter presents obvious, basic budgeting advice, potentially ruinous financial advice, judgmental condemnations of people he knows and family stories into a fun read.

The first anecdote shames a random couple that Mr. Maxwell knows:

I know young wife, Beth, who acquired a taste for nice jewelry. Tommy, her husband, loves her very much and wants to please her. Guess what Tommy buys Beth? Jewelry - - beautiful, expensive jewelry. Even though Tommy earns a good income, it isn't sufficient to support extravagant purchases. The couple has chosen to rely on credit cards to feed Beth's jewelry appetite, and they have amassed thousands of dollars in high-interest debt. (pg. 39)

Preparing Sons for Single Income: Chapter Three

The title of this chapter is "What is his REAL earning potential?" - but an equally valid title is "Find out what Steven Maxwell REALLY thought about his co-workers - and how greatly God favors him!"

The gist of the chapter is that a son's earning potential is mainly affected by his view of work, his character, his willingness to learn, God's Blessing and God's Discipline.  A hard-working, ethical, eager man will make more money than a lazy, cheating, dullard will - unless the eager beaver is being punished by God.

Since three sentences do not make a chapter, the rest of the section is fattened out with anecdotes about co-workers Steven Maxwell disliked and vignettes from his life.  To keep readers' eyes on the final prize - and shove some more humble-brag down their throats - the chapter begins with a reminder of how great Nathan is:

Who would have ever believed that a young home school graduate might make as much money as his college degreed father? Who might guess that the same son would be paid to write an instructor's manual for college professors teaching computer security? This is exactly what happened in our family! (pg. 29)

Nathan has had a remarkable career trajectory, but we don't need to be reminded of it every chapter.  Nathan did successfully write a book about computer security - but that was a one-shot deal.

I've noticed an interesting paradox in the Maxwell Family writings.  Steven Maxwell is extremely against college education for his children - but he brings up his college degree frequently and brags about Nathan making money by writing a college textbook.  No matter how far he's turned away from advanced degrees for his offspring, he continues to use the prestige of colleges to showcase his family's achievements.

The next anecdote is where Mr. Maxwell shares his dislike of a former co-worker named "Jerry".  Hopefully, that's a pseudonym.

When I worked for Boeing, Jerry was on my team. He was close to 60 years old and held a four-year engineering degree. Jerry was a genius. Unfortunately, no one wanted him on their team, as the man would not complete a task. Normal, mundane work was an incredible bore to him because he had a multitude of side interest that were always more important than his work. As a result of his poor work habits, Jerry only received token wage increases. He viewed work as a necessary evil to be put up with in order to receive a paycheck. His check was a ticket to the toys that made his life worth living.

At one point, it sounded like Jerry was going to be fired. However, as a last-ditch effort, Boeing transferred him to a job that involves solving problems for production lines. Finally, they found a job that interest Jerry enough to keep him motivated. As a result, Jerry and everyone around him were happier. If Jerry had viewed work is a gift from God and something to be greatly prized, he wouldn't have come so close to being fired. Plus, he would have been receiving pay increases through the years like others. (pg. 30)

How close did Jerry really come to being fired?  If he was as completely useless as Mr. Maxwell portrays him, I highly doubt he would have been employed for Boeing for any period of time.  I'm also curious how Mr. Maxwell knows all this information about Jerry.  Was Jerry a coworker on equal footing - and the gossip mill kept everyone up-to-date - or was Jerry Mr. Maxwell's subordinate?  The fact that Mr. Maxwell knows that Jerry received "only token" raises is a bit strange if they are coworkers.  How embarrassing would it be professionally if a worker who has been branded as unenthusiastic and problematic under Maxwell turned into a shining star in a different department?

Most likely, though, Steve Maxwell and Jerry were coworkers.  In that case, Jerry's biggest sin in the eyes of Maxwell is that he had the audacity to have enjoyable hobbies outside of work.  On page 44, Jerry's hobby purchases include "rifles, pistols, cameras, metal working machines and amateur radio equipment".   Later in the book, Mr. Maxwell discusses some of the hobbies that he's renounced over the years and at least one is more expensive than any of the items that Jerry bought.   On a side note, a skilled metal worker with engineering background may well have a side career making specialized parts for custom orders.  Which makes me wonder again - is Jerry's sin sloth - or making money in an enjoyable fashion without "God's Blessing"?

Men who are diligent, honest, resourceful, dependable, and responsible workers will do well. These days there are so few such people in our society that employers are hungry for them. From talking with several employers, I have learned that character is often more important than skills and qualifications. Employers are willing to train a person who has good character as long as certification and degrees aren't a mandatory requirement for the job (for example, an engineering job). (pg. 31)

I love that qualifier of "excluding jobs that require degrees and certifications" attached at the end of an ode to the importance of character.  Let's see, that caveat includes all but the lowest levels of medicine, education, law, engineering, social work, most professional ministry positions,  and science/technology jobs.  Jobs that do fit that criteria include food service, hospitality, entry agricultural jobs, customer service jobs, and janitorial work.   For men who are planning to be a single-income breadwinner for a large family, the careers that require degrees or certifications have a larger income as well as more constant availability of jobs. 

Eddie had worked with Tommy for about a year. Eddie was aware that Tommy fraudulently recorded his time on the job, and later Eddie had to confront Tommy on some other ethical issues. Eddie naturally assume that Tommy would have some hard feelings towards him after the confrontation. Tommy ended up leaving the company and going to work somewhere else. Months later, Eddie was totally amazed to receive a job offer from the new company for which Tommy was working. Even more surprising was the story behind the offer. Tommy's new boss asked him to recommend a person who the boss to be able to trust explicitly. The job would involves sensitive computer security, and ethics were a great concern. Tommy told the boss that he could wholeheartedly recommend Eddie as that person! (pg. 31)

I'm willing to bet one Whopper Junior that "Eddie" is actually Nathan Maxwell - and that the actual situation was completely different than reported here. 

My assumption that Eddie is Nathan Maxwell is based on the fact that Eddie's career revolves around computer security. 

For the rest of the story - none of it matches good business principles.  Eddie's not describe directly as Tommy's boss so I don't understand why Eddie would have to confront Tommy about ethical issues; generally, co-workers report job performance issues or crime including time fraud to their supervisors.  Confronting a co-worker about ethical lapses is treading on thin ice; that's moving close to harassment if the accusing person is wrong and shows questionable judgement in failing to report the issue to an actual manger if the accused person is doing something actionable.  Tommy heads off to a different company and offers up Eddie's name as a good hire for someone who is highly ethical.  I suppose that is possible - few things are truly impossible - but that doesn't mean it is prudent for Eddie to take that job.  In this situation, Tommy is BAD NEWS.  He's shown previously that he's okay with time fraud and some other workplace issues - and now Eddie is connected with him because Tommy recommended him for a job.   All of this is assuming that Tommy is acting in somewhat good faith - Eddie might be being set up as a fall guy for the next scheme that Tommy's running. 

I'm often skeptical as hell - but I bounced this story off of a lot of friends and colleagues; there was universal agreement that Eddie should run away from that job offer as fast as possible.

This next section was memorable for me because Steven Maxwell was trying to make his new home business sound like a major risk:

After 20 years of corporate engineering work, I came home to start a family business. It was an agonizing decision because I wanted to be certain it was God's will. As much as I desired to work from our home, I was scared to do it if it wasn't God's explicit will for my life. When I was confident it was His will, I came home. At first I only had a vague idea of what I might do. I felt God was leading me to sell printing and computer forms. Christopher, who was 18 at the time, was going to work with me.

We knew absolutely nothing about selling computer forms and printed materials, yet God led and blessed us as we went. The Lord provided a friend in the same line of work who is living in another city and was willing to give us some ideas about starting a print brokering business. He also provided us with a list of companies that did wholesale printing for him, something of great value to us. Then we were on our own and probably should have failed miserably. We have no training, no experience, and no skill, but God blessed mightily by bringing work. We have now been in business four years. There have been many changes since we began. We experience times without abundance, but our God has met every need. What a wonderful testimony to God's faithfulness! Yet, if we believe his word, it should not be surprising at all. (pg. 33)

Starting a new business takes guts - but not all new businesses are equally risky.  Steven Maxwell did plenty of good preparatory work by talking with someone in the same field who wasn't a direct competitor.  He also had a deep network of contacts from his years of corporate work and could tap into Nathan's budding contact network as well.   The fact that the company that employed him had reduced its workforce by 75% in two years could potentially be beneficial to the new business as well since the movement of coworkers to different companies would increase the number of companies that he had contacts in.

I find his attempts to argue that they were untrained, inexperienced and unskilled disingenuous.  He was not a Daisy Scout selling cookies for the first time; he was a mature, experienced businessman with previous job experience in marketing, sales, and engineering.  That doesn't guarantee that the business will succeed - but it reduces the risk of failure greatly.  He also had a huge benefit in that he had a young adult son who was willing and able to work with him as well as Sarah who was scheduled time to do projects for his company as she got older.

Finally, the relative risk of the times where the business wasn't making money isn't the same for all families.  Maxwell had been working in the corporate world for 20 years and as an electrical engineer should have been making above average yearly salary.  Yes, raising eight kids is expensive - but I've had extended family who raised larger families on much smaller incomes.  By the time Maxwell started his first business, he most likely owned a home, owned one or more cars, and had most of the clothing/home goods as well as home schooling materials for his family.  Compare that with a CP/QF couple who are in their mid-20's with two small children and a third on the way;  a time where the business fails to support the family is much, much harder.

In 1985, we moved to Washington so I could become a salesman for my company. My previous job had been at the company's headquarters doing marketing, but I wanted a sales position because the money was far better. However, after a year of hard work, everything that could go wrong had! I began calling out to the Lord to show me what was wrong. Out of the blue, a vivid memory popped into my mind. It was of the test I took to qualify for the sales position. This test was designed to compare my personality with the profile of the company's top salesmen. I recalled asking myself, as I completed that test, how the ace salesman would answer each question. Then I would write that answer down. It never occurred to me that I was being dishonest and, in effect, cheating.

My heart sank at the realization that I, as a child of God, had lied on a test. I felt awful and ask the Lord to forgive me. I knew that I needed to resign, because I had obtained the job deceitfully. Immediately I began looking for another job, but God soon convinced me that I needed to quit my sales position first. I definitely did not like the idea of being without a job but knew that I had to obey and told my manager that I had to quit. It brings tears to my eyes as I remember her looking at me and saying I could take two full weeks with pay to look for a job. I didn't even need to come into work! I was flooded with such incredible joy and knew in my heart that I was back under God's provision. Within a short time, I was employed by Boeing and again experiencing God's blessing in my vocation. (pgs. 34-35)

Well, I guess blaming "God's punishment" for lying is one view of the story.  My view is slightly different.  Lying on a personality test is a bad idea; the company thinks that certain personality traits make good salespeople and apparently Maxwell didn't have those traits naturally.  Having said that, Maxwell was going into the new position with his eyes open; the company gave him a test that laid out what skills make conventionally good salesmen.   The net outcome was that Steven Maxwell was a poor salesman - regardless of how God felt about the situation.  To me, blaming God for the natural consequence of a series of poor career choices is immature and childish.

Likewise, "God's blessing" of his manager allowing him two weeks of paid time to look for another position reads a bit differently for me.  The details of his position are missing, but most sales positions have a combination of salary and commissions as income.  For a skilled salesperson, the ability to earn commissions greatly increases their income; for an average to middling salesperson, the total income is around average for a person of their educational level.  A poor salesperson has little income - and is a financial burden to their company if they are not making enough sales to cover their salary.  Presumably, his manager was under pressure to keep sales up and costs down.  If a weak salesperson came to her and offered to quit, covering two weeks salary to encourage them to find another job is a winning proposition for the company.

The last oddity that I've noticed about the Maxwell family is that many of their financial and in-kind benefactors over the years have not been described as saved Christians.  The simple fact that his manager was a woman contradicts CP/QF teachings that all women should live at home under their parents until marriage and then raise a flock of little ones at home.  With the exception of Titus 2 Ministries and portions of Christopher Maxwell's photography business, the Maxwells work in secular industries.  One foray into online technology education that was geared toward helping home schooled, Christian students study for technology certifications failed miserably; combining test prep with an exhortation of how exactly to be saved would send most potential clients running. 

Economics is one of the structural issues that I am not sure how CP/QF society is going to manage.  Adherents are asked to separate themselves from non-believers except for when they are converting them so that leads to businesses that serve other CP/QF members.  The problem is that CP/QF theology rejects most advanced forms of education while advocating very large families which greatly limits the amount of money available for commerce.  I don't see how that's going to work out - but human creativity is endless.

Homeschooling Badly: We don't give grades in our school!

Sorry I'm running a bit late this week.  The baby is working on erupting two or three top incisors, the wild swings in temperature/pressure are wreaking havoc with my migraines and I keep breaking out in eczema patches.  Plus, it's January so the wonderful break I had for nearly of month of no doctor's visits for the baby is over.

I've been upfront about the fact that I am a traditionally schooled pre K - 12 graduate who jumped into a traditional college and then went back to the trenches of 9-12 education as a teacher.  From that perspective, I'm going to lay out why parent-teachers need to figure out a way to give coherent and comprehensive grades to their students by the end of elementary school at the latest.

I'm going to expound on two reasons that home-schooling parents opt-out of grading their kids for conscious or unconscious reasons.   Grading is a tricky task that requires a lot of practice.  Teachers have to create grading criteria - and that's not as simple as it seems.   The easiest set-up I can think of would be a text-book based system like the Maxwell Family uses.  Even there, the parent-teacher has to make some choices.  Do the classwork assignments count toward the final grade?  How about quizzes?  Are different categories of assignments weighted differently?  Grading independent study or project-based learning courses is even harder.   What does an "A" assignment look like in creative writing or paleontology or mandolin lessons compared to a "B" or a "C"?

The first issue can be overcome when parent-teachers learn how to pre-determine what each grade category looks like for each course.  I don't have a good solution for the second issue because grading your own child accurately is so much harder than grading a random student.  When I taught, I felt bad when a student failed my class - but I also had at least 80 other students who had passed that exact same class so student failures didn't feel like a personal reflection on my teaching. By comparison, when my son has a slight delay in his gross motor, fine motor or speech skills, I feel like I've failed somehow as a parent.  The feeling passes quickly - but the feeling alone is an intense enough experience that I know that Jack's better off having an unrelated professional determine his "Ages and Stages" skill level.  Even with my teaching experience, I would be tempted to justify passing him in skills - mainly by giving him points for other skills - to avoid feeling bad.

Why do we grade students?  Grading students describes their performance against an age-appropriate standard, helps students learn how much procrastination they can get away with, and gives students practice with managing emotional responses to negative outcomes.

In a traditional school, students are surrounded by peers within a few years of age of them.  Students generally get a feel for how they compare to their peers within each subject simply by comparing how much effort it takes and by seeing what grades other students get.  When a student transferred into our school from another district, students were pretty accurate in their personal assessment of their skills in language arts, science, math and social studies.  Students who transferred in from home schooling were a more mixed bag.  Some students were very aware of which areas they had received little or no instruction in; other students believed that they were above average in a subject - but after testing and placement in a class it became clear that the student was working at markedly below grade level.    Why is this important?  Throughout life, people need to be able to assess their strengths and weaknesses compared to other people in their lives.  As a teacher, I was middling-to-average at dealing with chronically angry students while above average in working with severely anxious students.  When I had a chronically angry student, I would get support and tips from the teacher across the hall who was great with that student group - and I'd give her support and tips when dealing with anxious students.

Grading helps students learn time-management skills.  For traditionally schooled students, the number of subjects they take in a day increases markedly from early elementary through junior high.  As the number of classes scale upward, the students learn how to deal with conflicts like a project due the day after a math exam.  Students learn the benefits of planning ahead and working at a pace that works for them.  On the flip side, students learn about the drawbacks of finishing a paper at 2AM and being exhausted the next day.  Chronic procrastination makes it much more difficult for students to earn "A" grades; few students can complete a high-school level project at the level of required difficulty if they don't start the project until the night before.

Finally, grading helps students learn how to manage the disappointment that comes from a poor grade - which I'll define as any grade lower than the one they wanted to get.   That feeling of disappointment is intense and students learn how to release that emotion and continue moving towards a goal.  After all, the vast majority of jobs involve periodic reviews by supervisors and some reviews include times where the supervisor gives the person a lower review than the person thought they were going to get.  That sucks - but knowing how to manage negative feelings helps the person to move away from the feelings and into planning on how to improve their performance.

Homeschooling Badly: Grade levels? We don't DO that!

I stumbled across a home schooling blog called the Hmmmschooling Mom that I really enjoy.  Amy's posts show the type of level-headed thinking skills that benefit teachers of all stripes. 

The first post I read dealt with why homeschooling parents should know what grade level their kids would be in if they were still in public schools - and why they need to stop acting aggrieved when anyone asks.  Amy argues that grade level is a simple method of grouping children by age and ability level - and not a sideways attack on home schooling methodology.

I agree with that.  It's  also a safe question to ask kids who you have just met that allows for a short conversation about what they are doing at school.

Taking her idea one step farther, home schooling parents need to know at roughly what grade level each of their kids are working at in math, language arts, speech and social skills for pre-K through 2nd grade, for math, language arts, science, and social studies for 3rd-8th grade, and for math, language arts, science, social studies, physical education and foreign language in 9th-12th. 

Before someone tells me about how they don't measure their kid's progress against artificially contrived benchmarks again, let me explain the two major reasons these pieces of information is important.

First - this information makes moving back into the traditional education system much more simple for the student.  Hopefully, the student will be returning to traditional education as an adult in the collegiate system where having a detailed, accurate transcript will saves the student a great deal of time and money.  I've also had more than one student who returned to a public high school with no educational records from their homeschooling period because of their home schooling parent died, suffered a major disability or separated from the family.   When a student is dealing with a major stress event at home, having to test into or out of classes is a crap-shoot. 

Second - parents who have taken over the academic education of their students are morally obligated to assess when their kids need more support.  A kid who is working within the range of one year behind to two years ahead of their grade level most likely doesn't need outside support.  (Another way to think of this is that in the average 2nd grade class room most kids will be reading at 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade levels - and the teacher can probably deal with a 4th grade reading level easily.  Or that I often had 9th graders who could read at 12th-college levels - but I only had two kids who had maxed out the lexile levels at post-graduate.)  Students who are far behind - or far advanced - bring a different set of challenges that tax experienced teachers.  How do you find books that cover reasonably age-appropriate themes without being at the wrong reading level?  How do you teach a kid to read who is dyslexic or math to a kid with discalculia? 

Parents can be lead astray by assuming since a student is "researching" a higher level subject that they are learning the material at a higher grade level than they actually are.  I was volunteering at an agricultural demonstration when a parent overheard that I had taught high school chemistry in the past.  She introduced her fourth grade  public schooled son - who was in no way interested in talking to me - and shared with pride that he loved chemistry and was learning really advanced material on his own like hydrogen bonding.  I asked the kid to tell me about hydrogen bonds and he gave me a partially accurate definition of hydrogen bonding being when hydrogen and oxygen atoms are attracted to each other.  I asked if hydrogen bonding only happens with hydrogen and oxygen.  He said yes.  I smiled and said something like "Ok."  I asked what causes hydrogen bonds.  He shrugged and started digging in the dirt.   I gave him some recommendations for finding a worm (which was his goal) and dug with him for a few minutes.  When he had warmed up a bit, I asked him what his favorite part of an atom was.  He looked massively confused and said "Atoms have parts?".  Meanwhile, his mom had been telling me in great detail how the two of them had watched videos on YouTube that showed how hydrogen bonds formed in water.  I asked her if she knew how that benefited life on earth - and she looked at me if I grew another head. 

Part of teaching high school chemistry is knowing what material a student should be aware of on a topic.  The high school level answers to the questions I asked the kid included:

• Hydrogen bonds occur between molecules that have strongly polar covalent bonds.  Hydrogen and oxygen are common examples - but many of the elements in the same family as oxygen will form hydrogen bonds.
• Hydrogen bonds occur because some atoms share electrons unequally in bonds.  This unequal sharing causes the atom that holds on to the electron longer to act like it has a slight negative charge and the atom that get the electron less to have a slight negative charge.  A hydrogen bond occurs when two molecules are attracted to each other because the slightly negative atom aligns with the slightly positive atom.
• Life on Earth has benefited from hydrogen bonds because hydrogen bonds cause water to freeze into a less dense solid form.  IOW, hydrogen bonds are the reason that ice floats on water; most chemicals have solids that sink to the bottom of the liquid while freezing.  Since ice floats, it acts as an insulator so that bodies of water take much, much longer to freeze solid that an equivalent size body of liquid without hydrogen bonds.  This gives aquatic organisms the ability to survive in the liquid portions of ponds, rivers, lakes and oceans during the winter.

I was happy the kid was learning about chemistry - but he was learning about chemistry at a 4th grade level of understanding.  There's nothing wrong with that at all - except that his mother was assuming that her son was a budding prodigy when he was simply a very normal boy.  (He found two worms - which made my day and his :- ) )|

Every state has a series of standards and benchmarks available for K-12 education in (at least) math, science, social studies and language arts - and many have additional ones for foreign languages, physical education, health, and arts.  Start when your kid is young; the standards are cumulative and the earliest grades tend to have very concrete standards that are pretty easy to understand.  As students grow, the standards get more complicated - but a parent-teacher is only adding one new level per year; that gives them a full year to decipher what next year's courses need to have.

My next post in this theme will be on the home school boogeyman - grading students!

Preparing Single Income Sons: Chapter One

A good sales technique involves leading off with an inspirational story that the potential clients can aspire to using the good or service being sold.  Steven Maxwell starts off "Preparing Sons To Provide for a Single Income Family" with an inspiring story about "Troy".

We have known Troy for many years. As a homeschool student in high school, his first job was as a two-week temporary assistant to the most junior employee in the company. Troy was hired to move heavy archive boxes in the basement. Since this was his first real job, Troy determined to do is best regardless of how menial the tasks. Hauling boxes doesn't sound like an impressive start to a career, does it? However, it was amazing to see how God was working. While doing his work assignments, Troy was diligently learning the archiving system of the company. He also tried to perform each task quickly so he would be available to do other "little" things for his boss. (pg. 13)

Translation: Troy had the grunt-level go-fer position that is the best job that most high school students can aspire to.  Oh, sure, it's been dressed up in nicer terms, but I had roughly the same job as a "bagger" or "utility worker" at a local grocery store.  The job pays minimum wage and consists of doing random menial chores like bagging groceries, collecting carts out of the parking lot, and cleaning the bathrooms.

Troy may have been a Christian home schooled dynamo - but any ambitious teenager would behave the same way.   While I was a bagger,  I volunteered to learn any and all tasks that baggers could do.  I used my strong memory skills to learn where items were in the store so that I could work as the floating bagger who would get replacement items when an item had broken in someone's cart.  Additionally, my bosses knew that I was able to work independently on chores without goofing off.   My work ethic and skills impressed my bosses and I was given more responsibilities like working at sorting returns (which is more complicated than it sounds) and sitting in on job interviews.

His temporary position was extended, and after a couple of months, he replaced his " boss" as archiving manager for the company. Throughout the next year or so, he completely redesigned the archive system from the bottom up. This included designing a new database and tracking system for more than 4,000 boxes of information. (pg. 13)

This paragraph made me curious about the size of the company that Troy worked for.  The company has over 4,000 boxes of archived information - but Troy took over the archives department after only a few months on the job.    Was Troy in charge of turning over the archival documents as they were not needed any more?  Was anyone doing that - or is this 20 years worth of old financial records that are taking up space and being a potential security risk?

Designing a new database and tracking system takes a few hours to a few days of work maximum even in the old days of computer systems that weren't as easy to use as modern programs.  The majority of the time involved in changing over an information retrieval system is coding the archives with the new system.   It's tedious as hell - and assuming that the previous system was accurate - can be done by someone with minimal training for fairly low pay.

This is another area I have some personal experience.  I took over a project for a professor that two undergraduates had worked on for several years.   The undergraduates had had excellent lab skills - but their organizational skills were sadly lacking.   On this single project, there were three separate and contradicting coding systems being used on different plant species, tissues and slides.  Equally exasperating for me was the lack of any kind of organizational system for the pucks of paraffin wax that had the plant specimens.  (There were over 300 wax pucks stashed in moving boxes.)

Sorting out the three existing code system took me around 20 hours total.   Creating a code system that did not add any new contradictions while resolving the old contradictions took about 2 hours total.  Planning the system to store the pucks and slides was less than an hour's work.  Cataloging the slides and plant parts in the paraffin along with assigning a code for relative quality of the slide or remaining part took several weeks of full-time work.

What level of work was Troy doing?  Was he sorting the plant bits or archive boxes into the right area - or was he reviewing the material and determining its value?  The first example is a low-paying job that can easily be replaced; the second is the type of skill that can build a career.

Computers have always interested Troy, and he found himself helping various people in the company with small projects in his spare time. While not an expert in formulas or the financial aspects of spreadsheets, his desire to learn enabled him to create, fix, and modify spreadsheets. Thus he began to be used in the process of the converting the company spreadsheet from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel. After a while he was doing spreadsheet and database consulting full-time. He completely redesigned the company's largest financial spreadsheet (which was made up of 17 inter-working spreadsheets) in a 3-month long development project.

Troy began working for minimum wage, and while still in high school his hourly rate had climbed $25 per hour. Our experience has been similar. I have seen that if a young man is prepared properly, he will excel in the workplace. (pgs. 13-14)

The important bits of a spreadsheet are those formulas that help a company keep track of those financial aspects.   If Troy wasn't able to correctly translate the formulas from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel,  that means he was doing basic data entry.  Anyone who can type can do the data entry between two programs - and nowadays there's probably an online file converter that can do the data entry in a tenth of the time.

 I'm confused by the statement that Troy  "redesigned" an entire company's financial spreadsheet when the same paragraph states that Troy's not an expert in business finance.  He may have successfully changed programs or simplified the design somehow - but I'd be very hesitant redesign an entire system in an area that I know very little about.

So - at about Troy's age - I was in college taking an instrumental chemistry class.  The labs for that class often took a month's worth of lab time (and lots of outside of class time) to complete.  To keep track of the data that we collected required spreadsheet documents that contained 20-30 separate inter-working pages.  The main difference is that the spreadsheet was the final project for Troy; for me, the spreadsheet was a tool used to analyze an experiment and make conclusions.   I bring this up because there is a huge hole in Troy's business plan.  He is extremely vulnerable to being replaced by someone who has Troy's computer skills AND business experience as well.

So ends the parable of Troy.  The next two pages are about how nervous parents are about raising sons and how hard it is to make choices about how to educate their sons - but Maxwell has a lot of answers in this book! 

The chapter wraps up with a bunch of character vignettes based off of people Steve really knows.  Three of them stuck with me:

Larry tried college after high school but then quit. He worked in his parents business for several years until it closed. His income averages $100,000 a year as a self-taught programmer. His wife is home full-time with their large family. They give everything that he earns over their needs to missionaries. (pg. 16-17)

This - without meaning to be - is a mirror to what the average CP/QF student faces - and hopes for.  The percentage of Americans who have earned a bachelor's degree by age 40 has been stagnant at around 33% since the end of World War II.  The change has been that far more women and people of color now receive bachelor's degrees than was the case in the 1950's.  Another change is that far more people start - but never finish - undergraduate degrees. 

Many home school students are well-prepared for college - but many CP/QF students face major educational hurdles as well.  Extreme sheltering of teenagers from "controversial" or "humanist" literature means that these students have far more reading to do to keep pace in English or humanities classes.  All of the CP/QF approved science curricula I have seen are lacking the depth and rigor that is expected of a college-prep science curriculum.   Far too many blogs have very detailed explanations of why their kids don't really need advanced math during high school; that kind of thinking leads to students needing multiple remedial courses in college.

This is the first place that noted something about family businesses; roughly 50% of new businesses close within the first five years.  The Maxwell Family has redesigned their business model once and has one defunct business; that's better than the average business odds since they have at least three working businesses by my count.

I'm very curious about how Larry became a self-taught programmer.  Was it something he studied on the side while in college and working in the family business?  Did he take classes?  Did he use his local library? 

I'm also have lots of questions about Larry's business.  How long did it take Larry to reach a point where he averaged $100,000 per year on programming business?  What's the range of his yearly income?  Is that income net or gross?  $100,000 of income sounds like a lot of money - but my total benefits package when I was a teacher was estimated at $64,000 because of the cost of health insurance for my husband and I.  A large family could easily reach $30,000 a year in health insurance costs alone.

I find the mention of giving their "extra" money to missionaries grating.  There's no reason to go telling the world how a family chooses to give to different non-profits.

Eric had his own graphic design business for 2 years. He loved throwing his heart into making it successful. Unfortunately, he would have starved had he not been living with his parents. His father wanted to teach Eric programming, But Eric only had eyes for graphic design and wasn't interested. (pg. 17)

Pretty sure "Eric" is Steven Maxwell's second son Christopher.  From what I've read on the Maxwell's blog and books, Nathan does everything correctly while Christopher does nothing right.   Nathan transitioned smoothly from home school to a career to a business of his own; Christopher refused to follow the exact same path and hasn't been as successful career wise.  Nathan (and eventually Joseph and John) managed to save up enough money to buy a home within walking distance of Steve and Teri's house in their early to mid-twenties.  Christopher put off buying a house until the geriatric age of 29!  Near as I can tell, the only thing his parents have approved of is his choice of wife who has provided them with about one grand-kid every 18 months since they married.

Steve has an electrical engineering degree. He spent 20 years in good corporate jobs. The last three years of his corporate work, Steve's oldest, homeschooled son, who have not gone to college, earned a significantly larger salary than his father. (pg. 17)

The effect Steve's story is supposed to have on a reader: "Wow!  My kid can out-earn an electrical engineer right out of college if we follow Steve's advice!"

The effect the story had on me the first time I read it: "What the hell happened to Steve's career?  Something went seriously awry for him if his degree-free kid was out earning him..."

In the last post, I laid out what I think happened based on information available online.  Steve Maxwell worked for an aerospace company that lost a major defense contract.  By the time Nathan graduated home school, Maxwell's employer was in a death spiral.   It's completely possible that Steve Maxwell wasn't working full-time by the time that Nathan started working at Western Auto; a part-time compromise would have saved his employer a great deal on salary and benefits while allowing Steve to start his fledgling printing and computer forms business.  With Maxwell's experience and contacts, starting a business in the Kansas City area would have allowed his growing family to avoid another cross-country move.  Being self-employed would also burnish his growing credentials as a leader in the CP/QF movement.  (I can never remember if the Maxwell's are ATI, Vision Forum or independent....)

Well, that's the end of the first chapter.  Next chapter talks about the qualities that determine the earning potential of a job.