Judge Not, Lest Your Kids Make Sure You're Judged

A very personal look back on a moment God used to refine me.

I had my first baby in 1997. A year later, Vision Forum was founded. If you’re not of a certain age, the name might mean nothing to you. But if you know, you know.

On the surface, Vision Forum was a very good thing. First of all, they had a really cool resource catalog. In addition to a library of books and CDs (all published in house, if I remember correctly), there were toys. Amazing toys. The kind of toys that kids exposed to good stories wanted to play with— real hatchets, dolls in historical dress, that sort of thing.

The books and CDs that I mentioned were by and large marketed to the parents, and again, on the surface, they were a refreshing alternative to much of what the world seemed to be saying about marriage and families and parenting. Vision Forum wasn’t the first to market a specific brand of patriarchal Christian conservatism, but in homeschool circles, they were the biggest for many, many years. The backbone of these materials all hinged on one central theme, and it was not subtle: The world was going to hell in a handbasket, but if Christian parents committed themselves to providing a home devoid of the world’s failings, then they would live lives that would launch them into perfection.

Spurred on by the growth of the Vision Forum message, groups began springing up all around the country. It was inescapable if you were homeschooling in the late 2000s. Blogs. Books. Conferences. It was everywhere.

I know all of this because I lived it. And when I say I lived it, I mean I wrote a blog, I read the books, I went to the conferences, I bought the CDs. While I never went to the extremes that some did, I was still pretty sure that the leaders of the “movement” were right. It was my job (well, primarily my husband’s, but trust me, the wives were often the biggest converts) to keep my kids from being tainted by the world. I took this duty very seriously, banning books, boycotting movies, avoiding families who seemed to be “edgy.”

And somehow, my kids still sinned.

Oh, when they were small, they were perfectly compliant. (On the surface, at least.) They knew to flee when a kid on the playground whipped out a stack of Pokemon cards. They looked away when we went into stores with displays that celebrated evil and death in October. They couldn’t wait for their turn to attend the church’s “The Princess and the Kiss,” or, “The Squire and the Scroll,” purity balls.

I was a good mom! I was doing it right! All those who were failing around me? Well, if only they’d do it the right way! The way I was doing it. It was so easy.

And then one of my kids hit a co-op teacher with a clipboard.

In this child’s defense, apparently there was some roughhousing in the class and other tomfoolery that made this kid think it would go over as a joke. But oh, boy. The other mothers judged… and hit me with a laundry list of things this particular child had done and said over a long period of time that most certainly were not the promised fruit of the formula.

This was eye-opening. I’m not going to lie— I was utterly humiliated. I spent two days feeling nauseous and crying. And then the sense of betrayal set in.

I had known these mothers for years. We had been raising our kids together. We all sat at the knees of the same teachers. We agreed on parenting philosophies. We ate in one another’s homes, hosted playdates so regularly our kids basically thought of one another as cousins. Yet these mothers said nothing to me about the alarming behavior one of my children had been displaying when I wasn’t around. Why not?

That’s when I realized that they had been judging me.

These friends knew my heart. They heard my words. They prayed with me. But when my kid started falling out of step, they didn’t bring it to my attention because when you’re primed to judge, you don’t step into that hurting space— you just critique and distance yourself lest you be soiled.

In retrospect, I saw all the signs of that distancing. I had been on the outskirts for months, but I was also completely overwhelmed with days spent in therapies and doctor’s appointments for a son with extreme special needs. I had missed out, but I thought it was just a season caused by my own stress level and chaos. Not because people didn’t want my family’s obvious sin infecting their homes.

This was the start of my journey to rejecting what I now call “The Formula.” The Formula is anything advertised as guaranteeing results in parenting. Although I would have claimed to have been following Jesus the whole time I was striving to meet the external expectations put forth by Vision Forum and their adherents, I wasn’t. There is no grace in any Formula. That’s because the only guarantee comes from the Cross. Anything else is counterfeit.

Would you like to hear the next stages of my journey to Biblical, grace-based parenting? If so, drop a like or comment. I’m happy to share if it helps anyone else reject the lies of The Formula!

In Christ,

Heather