By Joseph K. Woodard

Clear scientific evidence shows that patriarchy — however understood — is deeply embedded in human consciousness, built into a child’s earliest experiences. The evidence emerged with the sexual revolution’s epidemic of fatherless homes and their undeniable pathologies: 300-to-500 percent increases in school drop-outs, criminal violence, teen pregnancies, self-harm, etc., etc.  All this carnage was ignored, however, since the necessary reform — repealing no-fault divorce for families with children — seemed unprogressive or politically impossible.

Stats

Then in 2000, a Swiss national survey clearly demonstrated something about the foundational, psychological reality of male authority. It was likewise ignored by the mainstream media. Since then, outfits like Pew Research have worked around its edges, but given its size, the Swiss results remain the gold standard for understanding male and female influences (aka, ‘authority’) on children’s worldview and emotional maturation.

Given the preponderance of mothers in the forefront of homeschooling (some surveys indicating over 80 percent), this should be of interest to us. As we’ll see, it means both mom and dad have distinct responsibilities in educating their kids. Yet both dad and mom tend toward distinct shortcomings in achieving this most important purpose. Ironically, though patriarchy seems proven, there’s been little real exploration of what it all really means day-to-day. 

The results of the Swiss survey are frankly stunning, refuting the ‘gender fluid’ spirit of our age.

Family advocates have expressed that reality with a business analogy, namely, that the father is the family’s CEO or Chief Executive Officer, while the mother is its COO or Chief Operations Officer.

 But we have to flesh out that difference by considering the question, if the male-female dichotomy is deeply embedded in basic human nature, what human tendencies can obscure it?

The huge Swiss survey (Haug and Warner, Bern: 2000) focused on a family’s transmission of religious observance to its 25-49 year-olds, by parents of different degrees of adherence. The subjects described their own and their parents’ religious observance as “regular,” “irregular,” or “not observant.” Some results were unsurprising:

• With both parents not observant, their children end up 4 percent regulars, 15 percent irregulars, and 80 percent not. 
• If the mom is regular, and the dad is not, their kids end up 2 percent regulars (lower?), 37 percent irregulars, 60 percent not. 

Where things get really interesting is in the top-heavy influence of an observant father: 

• If dad is a regular, and mom regular, 33 percent of their kids are regular observers. 
• If dad is regular, and mom irregular, 38 percent of their kids are regular observers.
• If dad is regular, and mom is not observant, 44 percent of the kids are regular observers.

This says that the father’s influence over their kids’ religious observance increases, as the mother’s observance decreases, if she’s either indifferent or hostile to religion. This influence is seen even more dramatically with the issue of religious conversion. If the mother is first in the family to convert to faith, there’s a 17 percent chance that their child will. If the father is first to convert, dramatically, there’s a 93 percent chance that their child will. 

Three quick points on that: 

1. First, paternal authority can’t be compartmentalized in a religious silo. Religious observance or non-observance are the closest things we have to measurable indexes of anyone’s grand worldview, so any effort to isolate that simply reflects the bias of the not observant. 
2. Second, some church voices deride the ‘93 Percent Myth’ (about conversions) as denying women any place in church leadership, but like a mom’s authority in homeschooling, that’s a nuanced issue. And third, this reality of paternal authority cannot be understood in a post-modern, oppressive power-politics context. 
3. This third point is essential. The fundamental human unit is not the isolated individual, but the reproductive family. No one person has a sexual organ, but each has only half a set, the male half or female half. That reality can’t be compartmentalized, as if we’re our own realities, able to do whatever we want with our bodies. As ensouled bodies, our consciousness, male or female, is designed for the preservation and unity of the family. We possess distinct but complimentary minds and responsibilities — and therefore influences or authorities. 

So the issue is not, who has the authority, but rather, who has which of two kinds of influence. The answer is reflected in the folk wisdom, “If Momma’s not happy, no-one is happy.” It’s also reflected in the commonsense of any devout mom, who knows instinctively that, if she wishes to ignite the faith of her family, she must first kindle a fire under dad.

Mom and Dad’s Roles

Mom is the cradle of baby’s conscious awareness. Given our potential for speech, we enter the world like kangaroos, developmentally incomplete, so we can first learn the distinct, local language outside the womb. Newborns are neurologically hard-wired to fix our gaze on our mom’s smiling face, with a focal range of just the distance from her breast to her eyes. Her shining face is crucial. From the shining face come speech sounds, teaching us to filter speech-sounds from noise-sounds, so thus nurtured, later as adults, we’re able to understand conversations in heavy traffic. Babies deprived of that face-to-face stimulus (such as hundreds of Romanian orphans in the 1990s) grow up forever speechless, suffering neurologically crippled frontal lobes. 

So what is Mom’s authority as Chief Operating Officer? As newborns, nursed and soothed by her already familiar scent and voice, we’re welcomed into a world that welcomes us, responding to our needs delightfully. In mutual wonder, like two parallel mirrors, Mom pulls us into the world, mirroring us as a self in relation to another. This communication is beyond conceptual speech, in the modality of feeling or spirit, like the world expressed in music.

This maternal welcome builds our sense of security and confident agency, the trust that life is good, and the world responsive to our needs and purposes.

Deprived of this welcome, by (say) infant daycare, we end up with our current plague of woke attachment disorders, meaninglessness and despair. 

At that stage, Dad’s authority as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is less visible. Dad, too, possesses the hard-wired stimuli of two eyes and a mouth — but unrelated to suckling. Yet the mom emits powerful pheromones signaling her security and contentment with the dad’s presence. So, as a stimulus, the father is further assurance of a welcoming world.

Into childhood, however, kids take as their models of human interaction, not mom’s nor dad’s behavior toward themselves, but rather mom’s and dad’s interactions with each other. So, in the context of later child development, the Swiss survey indicates that mom informs the heart of the family (its character), while dad informs its head. That means the reason of the world, the ways of Nature, and the reality to which a family itself must confidently adapt, to flourish.

What this means for a homeschooling culture, we’ll see shortly. First we need to ask, if the male-female complementarity and natural family are so deeply embedded in human nature, how is it possible we can mess it up? To flourish, healthy families need a supportive society. Otherwise, men’s and women’s family attachment is deformed by their distinct tendencies. 

Hilariously, a Canadian public intellectual (remaining nameless) has promoted the domestic order of the pre-European Iroquois, touting the fact that women elders actually ran their villages. This, he implied, was the natural harmony of Noble Savages, worthy of imitation by modern governments by promoting caring women into positions of authority. He ignored the fact that women elders ruled their villages, because the men were off doing ‘men things,’ hunting and fishing, and contemptuous of ‘women’s work,’ gardening and child-rearing. Men may want to rule their hunting bands, but they have little or no natural inclination to rule the family.

Ideologically blinkered, that intellectual refused to see that female elders’ rule over the clan’s two-dozen young mothers, their daughters-in-law, could not be consensual. Young wives had no husbands there to shield them from the caprice of their grandmothers-in-law. Unconstrained by a higher duty to wife and child, men are abroad in the world, and leaving ‘queen mothers’ in the arbitrary dominion over the home — and if that includes daughters-in-law, so much the better.

When family ties are loosened, men turn outward, and women turn inward. So the Bible’s injunction that men “leave their mothers and fathers, and cling to their wives” was radical and liberating. It allows men and women to live paired in their natural and rewarding — but challenging — complementarity. This is relevant to understanding a homeschooling culture. 

True Patriarchy

True patriarchy was the singular, truly progressive achievement of Judeo-Christian civilization. It got the men to cut back on hunting and fishing, to come home and protect their wives and kids from their mothers. Even more, it enjoined fathers to love their infants. Native fathers submerged their newborns in cold creek water, so only the toughest survived. Pagan men abandoned unwanted kids on roadsides. Defiantly, Christianity asserted that every baby is precious, even those that live only a few days, and fathers were commanded to love them.   

How do our unnatural distinctions corrupt our natural complementarity? Conservative women now argue, if patriarchal families were simply selfish male power, feminists would’ve been crushed as soon as they opened their mouths. Traditionalists argue, and the Swiss survey confirms, that feminism must have been the unintended collusion of female and male vices, contrary to our natural complementarity and family unity.     

How Things Have Changed

Christian society grew up in ‘mustard seed’ family farms and cottage industries. With the coming of industrialization, however, men were once again off full-time, hunting and fishing. Suburban housewives found the new nuclear family gave insufficient scope to their managerial skills. But their boredom and loneliness was interpreted by their husbands after their own, male predilection for getting out into the world. Throw into the mix the Pill, no-fault divorce, and bureaucratic socialism, and women going out to work; the family dissolves in a corporate economy.

Now, the homeschooling movement is clearly bucking this trend, and nothing here is meant as criticism of what clearly works. But we can be more intentional and happier if we recognize how our male and female qualities cooperate in educating kids. If education were just a transmission of information — the head — we might think Dad should run the process. But it’s not. Education is primarily modelling curiosity, confidence, and wonder for children — the heart — nurturing a real appetite for learning.

So, particularly in the early grades, Mom is the proper agent for developing their children’s intellectual characters. Dad may be simply too objective and results oriented.

However, it’s crucial that Dad, the ‘foreign minister,’ validate Mom’s efforts as essential for their kids later flourishing in the world. His available time may be subject to his work situation, but Dad must not treat homeschooling as the woman’s work. Simple curiosity about what the kids are learning takes little time and boosts his kids’ enthusiasm. Even better would be Dad reading to the kids in the evening. This can’t be a chore, but rather an opportunity for modelling enjoyment of truly wise and amusing children’s literature such as Wind in the Willows, Roald Dahl books, Eagle of the Ninth, Robert Louis Stevenson books, and The Hobbit. It can be infinitely more entertaining and little more effort than zoning out in front of a television.

How Mom’s and Dad’s Handle Stress

If Dad’s temptation is turning outward after a hard day at work, Mom’s temptation may be an inward turning, bossiness. If not affirmed by Dad in her efforts, Mom may feel a pressure to get it right. With reading and arithmetic, kids learn only through correcting a succession of errors (like baseball players, striking out three times out of four). Mom’s advantage should be her amused exploration of her kids’ errors. If she’s deprived of Dad’s objectivity, however, she may feel that her kids’ developing skills are all up to her, and become impatient with their progress. She may even start treating necessary intellectual errors as moral failings (anecdotes suggest), reflecting on her kids’ character. This will dampen their appetite for learning.

More commonly, Mom slips into the opposite error, Momma Bear protectiveness toward her kids’ shortcomings. Kids must accept that there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing anything. In the end — as the Swiss survey proves — kids naturally expect Dad to explain the way of the world. This includes the skills they’re expected to master, if they and their future families can flourish out in the world. Dad may not be involved in the day-to-day lessons, but in a supper-table roundup, he can nurture this expectation with three parts praise and one part criticism. And Mom must resist the temptation to shield her cubs from Poppa Bear’s objectivity. 

In fact, kids teach themselves with what theorists call mimesis or imitation. “The children of carpenters become carpenters by carpentering,” says Aristotle, and most importantly, the children of readers become readers by reading.

Increasingly, these days, there are two kinds of kids in the world: readers and phone addicts. The differences are crucial: between a 23-second attention span or an 8-second attention span; between living comfortably in the vast heritage of Western Civilization or being constantly panicked by the latest media catastrophe.

Homeschooling is in the vanguard in reforming the broader culture. And demography is destiny. Prior to socialism, young mothers took charge of independent charities — schools, hospitals, and shelters, natural outlets for their domestic instincts. Then, over the last century, state social services swamped their efforts with tax revenues. Bloated bureaucracies today, however, are increasingly inhumane and harming kids. So, with the approximately 8–12 percent of couples raising larger families, mothers are increasingly occupied with homeschooling, homeschool co-ops, and reading groups. Further, internet work-at-home is a renaissance of ‘cottage industries’ for both Mom and Dad. This may prove decisive for the wider culture within the next three generations.

Joseph K. Woodard earned a BA at University of Alberta (Pol Phil), MA’s at Dalhousie and St. John’s (Great Books), Greek and Latin diplomas at Berkeley, and a PhD at Claremont. He invested fifteen years as an academic (Bethany, Brock), fifteen as a journalist (Alberta Report, Calgary Herald), and eleven as a tribunal judge (Citizenship Canada). He has helped his wife, Kathy, raise ten children with homeschooling and parent-run school start-ups, and always taught adjunct at independent high schools and colleges. He writes for websites like The Imaginative Conservative and Public Discourse, serves as director of research for the Canadian Centre for Home Education, and moderates Great Books seminars online with Angelicum Academy.