Homeschool Tier List?

[Khendra]

As some of you know, I followed the Niednagels for a number of years, and gradually came to the shock that they were way more conservative than my family ever was.  TL;DR: I was really into their Brain Types theory, thought they were similar to me and my family at first because they liked sports, were Christian, did homeschooling, and were conservative -- only to realize much later that we were VERY different on a number of issues.

I was raised in kind of a bubble by highly individualistic parents who came to their own theological conclusions that were completely idiosyncratic and not connected strongly to any kind of denomination or existing church structure.  In fact, my family stopped attending church way back in 1993 because they thought they had "special answers" to the "End Times" that other churches at the time weren't providing.  I've since found my upbringing, and my family's highly individualized and unstructured "theology," has made it hard for me to find any kind of group where I fit in, because no one can really relate to or understand what I went through.  So I've tried to find if anyone else can remotely relate to what we did.

Enter the homeschool tier list!

https://my32cents.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/the-5-tiers-of-homeschooling/

I was homeschooled every year prior to college, except for Kindergarten, 4th, and 7th grade.  (Yes, I went to college; my parents had no objection whatsoever to me attending, and in fact encouraged it.)  I seem to recall I was homeschooled initially because my mom thought the reading programs were too easy, and she could teach me at my own pace better than they could.  They didn't really use much structure or many textbooks.  I do recall some Bob Jones materials my mom got when I was a bit older, along with some E.D. Hirsch books my dad got me in 5th and 6th grade (I've since researched Hirsch, and it turns out he's secular).

I'd say we fell under tier 4 homeschooling pretty well -- probably even bordering on 5.  I was homeschooled for most of my early years, but I did play rec league girls basketball from 4th through 8th grade.  I never even HEARD of "Biblical patriarchy" until the Niednagels, when I was already pretty much done with college!  I've mentioned before here how my dad is a very easygoing, live-and-let-live guy; the only time I ever remember gender roles discussed, it was when he and mom had some kind of difference over a supposed "End Times" thing in the Bible, and he used the verse about husbands having the final say.  That was the ONLY time.

There were no dress rules whatsoever that I recall.  I remember my dad was very puzzled when there was uproar over the Super Bowl halftime show with Jennifer Lopez a few years ago.  When I asked him about women's dress, he said people who worried about dress were like people who worried about Elvis' dancing in the 1950s -- he doesn't understand why conservatives complain about how people dress.

There were no dating rules.  Premarital sex was allowed, Dad was fine with me choosing an unbeliever because he believes people can be saved after they die, and he was always puzzled why conservative Christians often weren't okay with the relationship.

I was allowed to watch whatever kind of movies.  I actually got in trouble in Kindergarten in 1990-91 for wanting to show the classroom my Who Framed Roger Rabbit VHS, which was PG-13.  LOL.  I had no blocks to pornography when I was a teen, and used to spend hours looking up pictures of naked guys.  When I confessed it one day to my mom and asked her if she thought it was sinful, she gave the rather relativistic answer of, "Does it seem sinful to you?  Only you can answer that question."

A few final things I was taught: in addition to believing people can be saved after they die, my dad taught that hell wasn't eternal.  In matters of sin, he taught that we shouldn't judge, and so whenever I asked if something was sinful or not, he would always say, "Don't worry about it, don't be so judgmental."  He believes people don't need to go to church and should come to conclusions about the Bible themselves.  To this day, he doesn't attend church often; I got him briefly into Calvary Chapel for awhile, but it's not his thing.  Prior to 1993, we went to WELS, which I'm at again now.  He was fine with the vaccines and masks, has no idea what Critical Race Theory is, and still prefers not to give me much direction on all the social issues of the day because he really is about as live-and-let-live as you can get.

What homeschool tier were you?  I would think I'm one of the few tier 4-5 here, that most are tier 2.  It's just been so weird trying to unpack everything; I'm really coming to the realization at 38 that I was raised in about the most individualistic bubble ever in human history.  My parents really did do their own thing, and people are always baffled at how unusual my upbringing was.

[MamaJunebug]

I wasn’t homeschooled at all. However, I have often wished I could’ve been an autodidact.  
 

I’ve reckoned that it would’ve taken about four semesters in classroom  to be taught all the stuff I couldn’t have parsed out, on my own (Algebra & chemistry).

In my retrofit daydreams, I then would’ve gone to college to learn about economics and politics as I started an apprenticeship in journalism. 
 

A zillion thanks, @Khendra, for providing a topic where I can finally write this down!!  
 

Parts of your upbringing sound downright glorious - make up your own mind; does it seem right to you?, - and so far removed from my folks’ ways!  (They were loving people but highly opinionated.)? 

 

Did you ever interact personally with homeschoolers of the Niednagel persuasion? If so, how did those go?  Not just the Niednagels, but other lower-tier families. What are your plans - as far as you want to share them! - for your own child’s education? 
 

Thank you again for your story and for the tiers article.  I’ve met admirably able homeschoolers and have serious problems with how substandard homeschooling is jeopardizing everyone’s chance to take that option. 

[Khendra]

1 minute ago, MamaJunebug said:

I wasn’t homeschooled at all. However, I have often wished I could’ve been an autodidact.  
 

I’ve reckoned that it would’ve taken about four semesters in classroom  to be taught all the stuff I couldn’t have parsed out, on my own (Algebra & chemistry).

In my retrofit daydreams, I then would’ve gone to college to learn about economics and politics as I started an apprenticeship in journalism. 
 

A zillion thanks, @Khendra, for providing a topic where I can finally write this down!!  
 

Parts of your upbringing sound downright glorious - make up your own mind; does it seem right to you?, - and so far removed from my folks’ ways!  (They were loving people but highly opinionated.)? 

 

Did you ever interact personally with homeschoolers of the Niednagel persuasion? If so, how did those go?  Not just the Niednagels, but other lower-tier families. What are your plans - as far as you want to share them! - for your own child’s education? 
 

Thank you again for your story and for the tiers article.  I’ve met admirably able homeschoolers and have serious problems with how substandard homeschooling is jeopardizing everyone’s chance to take that option. 

Thanks as always MamaJune!

I never really interacted much with homeschoolers similar to the Niednagels, and especially never offline.  I think all my interactions with them online segued in some way with my pre-existing connection to the Niednagels.  It took many years of reading their materials, researching Calvinism (which I basically knew nothing about until I met them), the patriarchy movement, etc. before I realized what I'd dug myself into.  Such an identity crisis from my mid 20s into my mid 30s!  But I think I'm finally mostly over it now.

Husband and I are tentatively planning to at least initially homeschool our little guy because he has phenylketonuria, a very rare metabolic disorder, and 85% of foods are too high in protein for him to eat without risk of brain damage -- would be a major headache to inspect the foods he's eating at school, explain his condition, etc., so until the little guy is old enough to know and advocate for himself, we figure it's best to keep him here at home until he can handle his condition on his own.  I've looked into various curricula, and it seems Time 4 Learning is well-regarded, so we may start with that one.

I do want him to grow up in less of a bubble than I did, so he's already included in a local library program which reads to young children every week.  Husband is also OK with me taking him to church because he knows that Lutherans are less annoying than other evangelicals.  Our son will be allowed to decide what to do with the faith as he gets older.  He'll become aware that Mommy and Daddy believe differently, learn why, and not be forced into belief one way or the other.

As son gets older, husband and I also want to encourage STEM types of studies and jobs.  We don't ever want son to become an aimless incel or Nazi or anything horrible like that, so we'll encourage meaningful and helpful vocations like computer programming, being a doctor, studying climate, etc.  It took him and me awhile to find our footing, and since we'll be kind of old when son is entering college, we hope he will be more proactive in finding something useful to do. 

[noseybutt]

Thanks for posting this!

I forwarded the link to my adult children. They have insight into our family’s homeschooling experiences that I enjoy hearing, even when it may be hard to hear at first.

This is my perspective as a parent, a perspective that exists alongside that of the children and not one I wish to supersede. I think families vary on:

(1) Uniqueness and extremism of beliefs. As in, how far outside of the mainstream are the parental religious, political, child rearing beliefs.

(2) Control and isolation. How much control do the parents exert over the children in order to indoctrinate with beliefs? (Often correlated with control between the parents, usually husband to wife.) I have seen hippy homeschoolers with very unusual beliefs but very chill on their children’s adoption of said beliefs.

(3) Affection and attention. How much positive interactions are there within the family? Is there neglect? Is structure of the day appropriate to what the child needs?

(4) Quality of educational experiences. Some curriculum is awful. Some parents are patient teachers who either have formal education or plenty of self education. Some parents are simply neither educated nor curious.

The last thing I want to say is that in my years of homeschooling I have encountered healthy families and dysfunctional families. There can be addiction, other serious mental illness, abuse, etc in the home. 

And that is the challenge. A family that sends their kid to school and community activities—that kid has a break from potential dysfunction. Even for a kid coming from a healthy home—it’s a way to experience the outside world and form an identity. 

@Khendra Kudos to you for thinking through these issues. 

 

 

[Hane]

@Khendra, an anecdote about PKU:

Fifty years ago, when I was in college, I had a classmate who told me she was a PKU baby. She said that she’d had to follow a really restrictive diet until she was eight or so, then positive things started happening with her metabolism.

Several years later, I was chatting with a pediatrician who had gone to the same college. I mentioned the girl born with PKU, and said that it hadn’t affected her brain function at all. I also said, “And she was really beautiful—“

”And blonde and blue-eyed?” he said.

”How did you know? Did you meet her, too?”

”PKU kids all are,” he said.

Is this true of your child, or was he just generalizing based on kids he’d met in his practice?

[Khendra]

9 hours ago, Hane said:

@Khendra, an anecdote about PKU:

Fifty years ago, when I was in college, I had a classmate who told me she was a PKU baby. She said that she’d had to follow a really restrictive diet until she was eight or so, then positive things started happening with her metabolism.

Several years later, I was chatting with a pediatrician who had gone to the same college. I mentioned the girl born with PKU, and said that it hadn’t affected her brain function at all. I also said, “And she was really beautiful—“

”And blonde and blue-eyed?” he said.

”How did you know? Did you meet her, too?”

”PKU kids all are,” he said.

Is this true of your child, or was he just generalizing based on kids he’d met in his practice?

Not all are blond and blue. Mine has reddish hair so far, and gray/green eyes.

I do know that, especially among severe untreated cases, lightening of the eyes and hair can occur because phenylalanine is involved in melanin production:

https://www.drugs.com/health-guide/phenylketonuria-pku.html

[Hane]

Thanks, @Khendra. In my part of the world, which I call Brunette Central, reddish hair and gray/green eyes virtually qualify as blonde and blue!

[haroldtheyrefundies]

I think my family would be considered a tier 3 homeschooling family. Granted, I wasn't homeschooled all the way through. I was in public school 4th through 8th grade, and was homeschooled in my early elementary years and all of my high school years. We used homeschool curriculum like Abeka and Switched On SchoolHouse when I was a kid. In high school, I used a secular online high school program. We were definitely more strict when I was younger. We weren't allowed to watch/read Harry Potter, watch Nickelodeon, but Star Wars/Star Trek/ Lord of the Rings were allowed. Tim Burton movies weren't allowed. Our family was into classic rock and that was okay as long as we didn't tell anyone at Church about it. I didn't watch my first R rated movie until I was 17. We didn't really talk about social issues like abortion or gay rights much. We stopped going to church when I was around 5. Courtship models weren't discussed. Higher education was encouraged, especially by our grandparents. Dress wasn't really an issue. I had a hart time making friends when I was a kid but they may have just been the tism. Our family started homeschooling due to health reasons, and since we lived in the Bible Belt, we found ourselves around Duggar like families often. We were fundie adject if anything. 

[theotherelise]

So we only homeschooled in my family for two years. My brother was in 4th and 5th grades, sister was 2nd and 3rd. I really only did it for the second year which would have been kindergarten. Before and after the homeschooling time, we all went to a private christian school for the rest of elementary and middle school then to public high school.

I would say we were Tier 4 for the most part. 

• Interaction: We took some arts/enrichment courses (1-2 each fall and spring) at an educational center that catered to homeschool kids in our community. We played sports both through the local catholic school leagues and in other leagues, we did scouts, we went to a megachurch with friends that went to a wide variety of schools.
• Family Structure: My parents were pretty much exactly as described here. Dad worked as engineer and Mom worked part time or as a substitute teacher off and on in between being primarily at home. They both went to college and never put any pressure about what roles boys or girls should take on and encouraged us all to achieve where we excelled.
• Mode of Dress: At this time in our lives, none of us was super into clothes, so I don't remember any specific guidelines, but we certainly all dressed modestly. My mom had and has very short hair and wore pants. 
• Relationships: We were all young during our homeschool time, but my parents maintained a rule that we couldn't date until we were seniors in high school. They didn't really enforce that though, so idk. No one asked me out until then, so it worked lol.
• Media: My parents didn't listen to secular music for the entirety of the 1980s and a bit after. So around the time we homeschooled (1993-1995), we really only listened to Christian music and oldies. But my mom started to listen to some country music, my dad started listening to some jazz, and we also had some Jim Croce and Don McClean sneak in. By the time my brother was in high school, we could listen to whatever we wanted. My parents were also really strangely open to us watching any movie and never had rules on that. I also was always allowed to read whatever I wanted. WWW wasn't a thing yet.

I will say our Christian school was far more charismatic and conservative on most of these things. That was where I felt pressured about Kissing Dating Goodbye and saving kissing for wedding day or whatever. As far as curriculum, I don't know for sure what we used. Definitely nothing video based and I'm pretty sure my mom picked and chose the things she thought were best and most rigorous or fit our learning needs. I was taught to read when I was 5 and was doing addition and subtraction already when I went to first grade at 6 years old. My mom also had us take annual standardized tests at a local private school and fastidiously tracked our mastery. 

At some point during this time frame, someone in the homeschool community invited my mom to a Gotthard training and she took a look at the materials and decided it wasn't for her. I've always looked back at that bullet dodged moment and been grateful we didn't take a further turn down that rabbit hole!

 

[JMO]

@Khendra I grew up with siblings with PKU. One was my roommate on a high school trip and brought her blender/protien shake with her. Their mom was a teacher and we were in a relatively small town so that might have helped but they attended public school and everyone just knew and accepted their restrictions.  

[PsyD2013]

My foray into homeschool was extremely short lived.  School shut down March 2020 due to Covid.  I attempted to homeschool PsyD Jr, that lasted less than a week.  He gave me a calculus escape room worksheet said that he would be ready to start homeschool once I "escaped".  It took me three days and in the meantime,  he enrolled himself in  on-line anytime/any where classes at the community college (the district picked up the cost) and got a jump start on college.  It was a win-win for both of us- saved me the stress to trying to teach myself the concepts before trying to teach him.  This really made me wonder how fundies or any other homeschooling parents manage when their kids are smarter than they are?  

[Hane]

@PsyD2013, my grandson is acing high school chemistry and his teacher gave him a nice note. My daughter wrote to the teacher, “This accomplishment is all his doing—his dad and I couldn’t help him with STEM subjects if our lives depended on it!”

[Khendra]

5 hours ago, JMO said:

@Khendra I grew up with siblings with PKU. One was my roommate on a high school trip and brought her blender/protien shake with her. Their mom was a teacher and we were in a relatively small town so that might have helped but they attended public school and everyone just knew and accepted their restrictions.  

Good to know!

I'm in Springfield, MO -- one of the larger cities in MO.  I did just enroll the little in Missouri's Parents as Teachers program, which helps new families navigate the early years to help prepare littles for education and development.  A specialist comes monthly to see how the little one is developing (milestones etc) and then develops an individualized program from there.  Just had first visit at the end of last month, and the lady who's assigned to little guy seems to think he's on a good track.  I made her aware of his PKU diagnosis and what it entails.  So if husband and I do decide on the public school route, we have a connection with the school system who's aware of it already.  We'll see how it goes from there

1 hour ago, PsyD2013 said:

My foray into homeschool was extremely short lived.  School shut down March 2020 due to Covid.  I attempted to homeschool PsyD Jr, that lasted less than a week.  He gave me a calculus escape room worksheet said that he would be ready to start homeschool once I "escaped".  It took me three days and in the meantime,  he enrolled himself in  on-line anytime/any where classes at the community college (the district picked up the cost) and got a jump start on college.  It was a win-win for both of us- saved me the stress to trying to teach myself the concepts before trying to teach him.  This really made me wonder how fundies or any other homeschooling parents manage when their kids are smarter than they are?  

LOL.  Things have definitely changed in the last decade or two.  As an elder Millennial, my generation was the last one to have a relatively simple analog existence.  I know things will be different for my son, so husband and I are already weighing all the options.  Who knows what the milieu will be like even 15 years from now?  One thing we agree on is not to raise our little fellow in the Left Behind doomsday kind of existence that my folks unfortunately got caught up in in the mid 1990s thanks to those books and Trinity Broadcasting Network (the Niednagels, meanwhile, were strict preterists/postmillennialists -- I'll take Lutheran amillenialism over either of those views nowadays!)

[Hane]

PKU anecdotes:

My mom had my baby sister in 1965, after a nerve wracking pregnancy (surprise change-of-life baby, exposure to rubella when my middle sister contracted it). She was horrified when she noticed a bandaid on the baby’s heel—the staff had forgotten to tell her about the PKU test that had just been introduced.

When my daughter was a toddler, she told me with great concern that she’d seen a baby on TV being given a “screaming test.” It turned out to be a PKU screening test, and the baby was crying after its heel was pricked.

Our pediatrician told us PKU is so rare he’d never seen a case among his patients, but was eternally grateful that the condition could be diagnosed and treated.

[neuroticcat]

I was not homeschooled but I tried homeschooling our kids - both with coops and the parent programs at the public schools - for some years in elementary with the thought of transitioning at middle school. Early on it was about education - my eldest fell in the margins and classroom instruction left him falling through the cracks. I do think being around other homeschoolers at coops and conferences exposed me to fundamentalist ideas I would never have considered otherwise, so I regret that. I would be curious to know if my kids felt the impact of that - I tried out things like learning character traits or Bible memory verses, but we didn't do a whole lot of religious things and didn't do one prepackaged curricula so I think think we probably avoided some of that - and how they'd rank us on the chart. I think we probably were sometimes 4's-5's. We didn't have hyper-religion in homeschooling, but we also weren't advocating for liberal open-mindedness. 

COVID brought everyone home for two years - we did a hybrid of some homeschooling and some online classes - then my kids didn't want to go back to the regular classroom. I have experience teaching and a master's degree (not in education), but homeschooling through 8th grade is my cutoff. I refuse to homeschool for high school - I think it's so very difficult to do well and it has inescapable impact on things like transcript gaps. My kids opted for online instead with plans for community college for junior/senior year through our state's program. I still feel conflicted about it, but post-COVID them having agency & emotional well being is more important to me than seeing them back in a classroom. 

[SwimmerBoy29]

So I was raised Catholic. I still consider myself a believer but don’t attend church regularly and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gone to church in person since the pandemic (once, Easter of last year). 
 

My parents briefly considered homeschooling us when I was little and my brother had just been born. I don’t know how much this plan got discussed, but it was basically to live out in the country with my dad being the sole provider. I don’t know what factors went into this, but I don’t think religion was one of them (my mom is definitely more conservative than she thinks she is, but she also is very much not the dress and veil to church every Sunday type - she wore jeans to church on Easter- and my dad isn’t religious at all. Might have been just an “I think living in the country and homeschooling could be easier” type of thing.

Anyhow, I can’t see how it would have ended well for us. I was already a super awkward kid to begin with (it took me until I made the varsity swim team in high school to gain any sort of self confidence and even then it didn’t really hit until I made the state team as a sophomore), and I think homeschool probably would have only made things worse(my girlfriend teaches special education at a high school and she’s all but certain that I’m on the spectrum).

We weren’t sheltered much, if at all. The only things I wasn’t allowed were The Golden Compass (my mom claims it was because I was too young but I distinctly remember her saying it was because of the allegory (?) made towards the church) and The Da Vinci Code because I was roughly 9 when I asked to read it. They took a pretty hard stance on the age limits for M games, but I circumvented that at 12 when I discovered that Amazon didn’t have an age verification thing and got GTA 3 for the Xbox. Everything else was fair game. We’re BIG Potterheads. Rip Dragon Challenge and s/o to mom for being the only person in my family to ride it with me.

[Marmion]

Interesting topic of discussion. I would think that my family growing up was probably more so tier 4, but this was also more so due to whatever restrictive code of conduct we had being largely loosely enforced.  I mean, unless any of us were to become pronouncedly rebellious against whatever rules there were, in which case the discipline imposed could become highly heavy handed.  Like if any of us children, including youth, were to go so hog wild as to dye our hair some "unnatural" color , and/or consume music considered to be "satanic' , such as most heavy metal, we would then be closely monitored, and would be effectively grounded for an indefinite period of time.  But as long as we were subtle , and kept up good standing with our parents/ legal guardians , we were largely given a free hand, in terms of both personal activity and media consumption.  If the given stated standards were to have been strictly imposed, to the letter, we would have probably been more so tier 3 .  I feel that tier 2 would be more like those in the Conservative Holiness church that the rest of my household currently attends. But as for my family itself, we were more so along the lines of likes of the Church of the Nazarene , and only left after drums came to be used in congregational worship.  My parents felt that this made the church service seem more like a rock concert. However I was tacitly permitted, though not really encouraged to listen to contemporary Christian music, and some types of pop music.  I think that this tier list illustrates the spectrum that can exist, even among specifically Christian based homeschool families. Of course , not all homeschoolers are Christians, and not all Christians, even fundamentalists, homeschool. Along similar lines, if I may, I will post these two videos, from the YouTube channel Blimey Cow, which includes quizzes to see just how sheltered, or homeschooled, one might have been.    

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Marmion]

On 3/4/2023 at 1:42 PM, PsyD2013 said:

My foray into homeschool was extremely short lived.  School shut down March 2020 due to Covid.  I attempted to homeschool PsyD Jr, that lasted less than a week.  He gave me a calculus escape room worksheet said that he would be ready to start homeschool once I "escaped".  It took me three days and in the meantime,  he enrolled himself in  on-line anytime/any where classes at the community college (the district picked up the cost) and got a jump start on college.  It was a win-win for both of us- saved me the stress to trying to teach myself the concepts before trying to teach him.  This really made me wonder how fundies or any other homeschooling parents manage when their kids are smarter than they are?  

What happens is that the parents, most notably the mother, will largely have the children, who can read, study their lessons on their own.  It's more so like doing homework, or correspondence school, than a formally structured classroom, or one room school house.  The only time that I might have sought out help from my mom would have been if I had a question. Yet even then, I would have been even more inclined to just research the matter myself . I remember one time, when we were using Alpha Omega Lifepacs , in History, I was able to show , by using an encyclopedia ,how the answer key was wrong.  The answer key , and Lifepac stated that the "Grandfather Clause" gave newly freed slaves the vote, rather than limiting it.  So yeah, in actual practice, for better or worse, we homeschool students are by and large self educated autodidacts more than home taught pupils.  Also, as a result, a number of us homeschooled children might even end up being more inclined than even our parents to fact check what we are told, than to take things at face value, on faith.   And even when it comes to matters of faith, the curriculum might teach one thing, such as five point Calvinism, while the parents adhere to Arminianism , for example. So the children would from an early age have to learn to form their own opinions, independent of what all their parents might raise them to believe to be true.  

[noseybutt]

5 hours ago, Marmion said:

What happens is that the parents, most notably the mother, will largely have the children, who can read, study their lessons on their own.  It's more so like doing homework, or correspondence school, than a formally structured classroom, or one room school house.  The only time that I might have sought out help from my mom would have been if I had a question. Yet even then, I would have been even more inclined to just research the matter myself . I remember one time, when we were using Alpha Omega Lifepacs , in History, I was able to show , by using an encyclopedia ,how the answer key was wrong.  The answer key , and Lifepac stated that the "Grandfather Clause" gave newly freed slaves the vote, rather than limiting it.  So yeah, in actual practice, for better or worse, we homeschool students are by and large self educated autodidacts more than home taught pupils.  Also, as a result, a number of us homeschooled children might even end up being more inclined than even our parents to fact check what we are told, than to take things at face value, on faith.   And even when it comes to matters of faith, the curriculum might teach one thing, such as five point Calvinism, while the parents adhere to Arminianism , for example. So the children would from an early age have to learn to form their own opinions, independent of what all their parents might raise them to believe to be true.  

From what I am seeing among my own kids and their friend group from homeschooling days:  so much this.

The parents took a counter cultural and independent approach to education and now…the kids tend to be independent and self-educating and forging their own path. 😂😂😂

It’s the source of a lot of angst in conservative families. 

[Amanda Flynn]

What a fun topic! lol. Reading that article, I think my family were tier 3 (leaning heavily 2 for a number of years). It's still surreal being out of the movement for the past decade, to come onto this forum and see the names and topics and everything that is brought up. Some of it causes major PTSD and some of it just makes me laugh. I know the Niednagels personally but am not close like I was in my late teens/early twenties so I don't actually know where they stand on most things these days.

I shared many details of my own homeschool and patriarchal upbringing in a podcast interview, if you're interested: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-43-surviving-the-patriarchy-w-amanda-beth-flynn/id1611717099?i=1000595983200