What Is Childhood?

How do homeschooling parents understand who children are and what childhood is, and how do these understandings impact their decision to homeschool? This chapter examines two different critiques of gender and sexuality in American public schools that arose both in the author’s interviews with parents and in the homeschooling conferences she attended. First, some parents critique schools as overly sexual spaces that are a threat to the sexual innocence of children and see homeschooling as a way of protecting their children. Second, some parents argue that schools promote a narrow understanding of gender and sexuality that is heterosexual and traditionally gendered, and this understanding ends up constraining, and even hurting, children. The author argues that these two critiques correspond to two competing ideologies of childhood: one that views children as “in process,” or as developing toward selfhood, and the other that views children as already selves, capable of exercising agency and autonomy. These two ideologies of childhood result in different homeschooling practices, highlighting how the homeschooling experience can be very different for children depending on their parents’ ideological standpoint.