Generation Zero
An open letter to first generation homeschooling parents
Dear First Generation Homeschool Parents,
I am a child of your grand experiment. And there are a few things I really want you to know. But first who are you? You are parents like mine. Parents who started homeschooling right after it became legal in the US. It sounds like a long time ago, but it was only 1980. You are the parents who had scars and wounds from choices you made and choices other people made. You were people who were really sad they had messed up parts of their lives, and wanted something better for your kids. You were people who really loved Jesus. Who didn’t want to raise your kids in the “whatever goes” culture of the 60's that you grew-up in. You were the parents who were brave enough, not just to wish for something different, but to do something different. You broke out on your own, and created a whole new world. A new way of doing things. You took your kids out of school, out of mainstream society, out of Sunday school a lot of times, and on and on. You wanted to create a bubble for us. And you did.
Who are we? We are the oldest kids the homschooling movement has. We were the first generation. The beta run. We didn’t go to first grade with our little back packs and lunch boxes. We didn’t ride the bus. We didn’t have sleepovers with our friends. We made sure no one stole our little brothers and sisters off to children’s church. We know what words and phrases like Generation Joshua, ATI, Vision Forum, Bob Jones, Classical Conversations, courtship, Alpha Omega, and patriarchy mean. We wore shorts and t-shirts over our swimming suites, led the walk to school around our house on the first day of school, had sleepovers with our siblings, told our grandparents all the things we weren’t allowed to do at their house even though that confused them, wore our purity rings, wondered if girls should go to college and should wear skirts all the time, and explained to everyone that homeschooling really was legal and we weren’t weirdos who didn’t know how to talk to people. We graduated, turned out to be well-educated after all, and proved to the world that homeschooling really can work. And if you have been paying any attention to what’s going around the internet, or what has probably happened in your own home, you probably also know we got kinda messed up along the way. Ok, sometimes, we got very messed up.
We have found it really hard to be relevent in our culture. We don’t get a lot of pop culture references, and sometimes, we feel like we missed out on some milestones because of it. But that’s not really that big a deal. What is a big deal is what happened to our hearts. Our view of God. We’ve had kind-of a crisis there. We took what we learned and tried it out in a very real world, and it didn’t always do what it promised. Some of us decided to try building more bubbles to live in. But a lot of us couldn’t stand being in there anymore. We were hurt, we were disillusioned, and we kinda went crazy. We wanted to figure things out for ourselves, find what we believed and it got messy. It wasn’t what you dreamed. What you worked so hard for. I know you feel bad about that. We are raising our kids differently. Doing things you wouldn’t do. Doing things you sometimes don’t agree with. Sometimes, I know that kills you. Makes you wonder what you left undone. But there is something I want to tell you. Something you need to know. You didn’t fail us.
You didn’t fail us. I mean, yeah, some things you told us were not so good. And we got hurt by things you didn’t see coming. You might even still be holding onto beliefs that make us not want to come around much at all in some cases. And we might be holding onto hurt that makes us angry with you. We might even be saying things that are really ugly. Really hurtful. And things might be really broken right now. But I want to say it again.
You didn’t fail us.
My brother says, “if you’re going to fail, fail boldly”. Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” This is you. You dared something really big. Something really amazing. You sacrificed. You took on everyone. You faced rejection, pessimism, anger, misunderstanding, ridicule and a huge fear of the unknown. And you did that for us.
You’re amazing.
You didn’t know where you were going. You didn’t know how the messages you preached would come across to children who didn’t have any of the life context you had. You didn’t know how your intentions would be misunderstood. You didn’t know that you were sometimes overcompensating for your own regrets. You didn’t know that you couldn’t hide us from sin and suffering, because as long as there are people, both are going to hang around. You know all that now. And I know that it hurts you to see that a lot of things haven’t turned out like you hoped. Like you sacrificed for. You clung to the verse that says, “Train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old, he will not depart from it”. I know right about now, you have to be wondering about that. But let me tell you what I see.
I see a generation of people who got two things loud and clear. We know, beyond all doubt, that loving God is the biggest deal there is. And we know that loving your family and putting them first comes right after that. And as we look for God, as we figure out the people we want to be, we are taking those things with us. Ironically, those are the two things that Jesus said it all comes down to anyway: ‘Love God, Love People”. You gave that to us loud and clear. And you gave us some other things too. We know the Bible like nobody’s business. We know how to stick to something, even when it’s hard. We know how to pursue something, even when everyone thinks we are crazy. We know how to keep going, even when we don’t feel like it. We have learned to be brave. We have learned to try new things. We have learned to dream big. We have learned to take risks for things we believe in.
That’s probably why we are scaring the crap out of you. That’s probably why we are doing things with our kids that you aren’t crazy about. That’s probably why we are daring to ask the big questions of life all over again. That’s probably why we are making our faith our own. We are going places you haven’t. Places you never imagined we would go. And we want you to be proud of us. In a lot of cases, I think you are. I see some of you coming to the same conclusions about God that we are. I see many of you growing and expanding right along with us. Letting go of a lot of the legalism and embracing something new. Often it’s because some of the promises didn’t quite pan out for your life either, and you got every bit as hurt as we did. I bet you sometimes wonder why it has taken you longer to get here than it took us. But we got a head start. We got to watch you. Your work is not wasted. Your sacrifices mattered. And I want to say thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for all the nights you sat up, wondering if you were really doing the right thing. Thank you for letting other people think you were crazy. Thank you for sacrificing so many of your other dreams for us. I wish you hadn’t let so many go, but I really appreciate how recklessly you loved us. Thank you for investing your heart and soul in everything that you did. Thank you for giving us the very best that you had. Thank you for being willing to love Jesus with such crazy extreme abandon. Thank you for seeing us, for wanting to know us, wanting to be with us always, wanting to protect us, wanting life to always be good for us. Thank you for caring about the things that we learned, the things that got spoken over our lives. Thank you for caring about who and what influenced us. Thank you for wanting us to be pure, and brave and loving and true. Thank you for wanting us to know and love Jesus more than anything else. Thank you. Just…thank you.
What you did mattered. And we will never be the same. We want to love you. To know you as adults. To share with you the life that we are building. We don’t always know how to do that. We get scared you won’t understand. That you will be angry. That you will be disappointed. And I sometimes think you don’t really know how to hear those things from us. They scare you. Make you feel like we are telling you that you did everything wrong. That we want to be nothing like you. But the truth is, we are just like you. We dare, we dream, we believe. We love boldly and we are fiercly loyal. And those are some of the best things about us. Things that came straight from you.
As you probably already know, we are messing things up too. We are reacting more than we mean to, and teaching our kids things that they will have to undo, making mistakes in belief and judgement that we are still unaware of. I’m sure that is hard to see. But I know that our kids are going to be ok. You taught us that. Lived it out. We are ok because you gave us what was most important. “Love God, Love People”. And that’s the basis of what our kids are getting too.
We can never repay you for what you have done. A lot of us are doing our best to pay it forward to our own kids. Please see us taking the best of what you gave us as the compliment that it is. We love you. We really do. You have been the whole world to us, and we won’t ever forget that. Some of you may never hear anyone else say this, but I want to say it one more time.
You did not fail us.
You’re amazing.
Thank you.
