But I am my own person, and that is so liberating. I have an equal relationship with my husband, and he is my best friend. I have never laid a hand to my daughter, and she is happy, healthy, well adjusted, curious, creative, and the joy of my life. Because life goes on.

We’re much happier in our area secular homeschooling group, and (as of recently) attending our local Unitarian Universalist church where, surprise surprise!, we’ve encountered some of the same faces we’ve been seeing at the secular co-op.

Anyhow, I wanted to add that just as QF/P parents tend to do what they do out of a misguided love, so do many other kinds of parents that we in the Western world see as abusive. My ten-year-old and I were recently reading about the practice of female circumcision, and we learned that some parents who don’t like the practice still feel they need to do it because uncircumcised girls are so stigmatized in their society.

We learned of one woman whose parents resorted to doing the mildest form of the procedure on her because they disagreed with it but felt they’d be ruining her life if they left her genitals alone. She grew up to found a special school where girls in her area can go if they choose not to be circumcised, and she didn’t circumcise her own daughters at all.

Dd was, like, why don’t these families just move rather than hurt their daughters?! And I had to explain that not everyone has the means or ability to move. I imagine that some Chinese parents probably didn’t want to bind their little girls’ feet and did so for reasons similar to those of the QF/P and female circumcision group: they felt their daughters had to be crippled in order to have decent lives in the crippled society they were going to have to live in.

I’m not an expert. I speak as someone who was raised in an anti-authoritarian household, where I have been allowed to pretty much make my own decisions, and deal with my own consequences since I was twelve. in order to avoid some of the nastier consequences, I generally ask my parents for advice on what I should do, but when we disagree, my life is mine. I made choices my parents disagreed with, but because my *parents* don’t have the attitude problem so many modern *parents* seem to have, the issue of “rebellion” never came up.

TL;DR : authoritarian parenting is the cause, not the result, of teenage rebellion. it’s hard to break rules that have a reasonable ammount of bend in them.

I was a Pearl momma too…and, yes, I had baby booty camp and had no terrible twos—and all the parental smugness that went with it. I thought I was serving the Lord, but what I was really doing was failing to allow my beloved children the right to begin to go through a *God-designed* process of individuation.

I am so glad I woke up from that lie and began to allow my children the freedom to be human beings.

“What we really should be afraid of is her silence. That compliant 25-year-old looks and sounds like an adult, but she has a 12-year-old soul. Like the tiny feet of Chinese girls crushed and tightly bound in rags by well-intentioned parents to prevent their healthy growth, that child may be the victim of a sort of a ‘soul-binding’. ”

I feel so understood this morning!

My mother “crushed and bound” my soul…not for religious reason–but the outcome was exactly as you describe–and yes, it played a huge part in leading me straight to “QF/Patriarchal/Fundamentalist methodology in my marriage and parenting.

The silence: It’s actually SHOCK masquerading as humility.