This story originally appeared Today's kidsVox newsletter about children. For future editions, please sign up here.
In one of Sarah Doan's earliest memories, her mom asks her to sort the laundry. She is about six years old and as the first child in a conservative Catholic family, she has already stepped into her role as a housekeeper manager.
Soon she cooks, cooks, and homeschools, but her mother takes care of her seven siblings, her dad works in an automated body restaurant for six days, and sometimes jumps into an elaborate home cooking lunch.
“It was relentlessly difficult,” says Doan, now a professor of experience architecture at Michigan State University, about her childhood.
I reached out to Doan. Because I wanted to understand groups that I have never heard of in discussions about the TradeWives and their role in American politics and culture.
On social media, Trad Wife influencers (think Hannah Neeleman who posts on Instagram as @ballerinafarm or Kelly Havens Stickle) are engaged in “traditional femininity performances.” Its performance includes a highly aesthetic vision of motherhood. “It's beautiful, soft, things are orderly. There's plenty of time to knead the dough and collect flowers from outside,” Du Mez said. TradWife content appears to bring calm and joy to multiple young children while cooking meals from scratch. In fact, creators often present lifestyles, implicitly or explicitly, as the healthiest and healthiest way to raise children.
People who grew up or raised children under these conditions, the reality I told me is more complicated. While prominent influencers may be playing for their audiences (and potential brand sponsors), many real-life families live lifestyles in conservative Christian circles that are less camera-ready, Du Mez told me. (Hard counts are difficult to get, but over 3 million children are homeschooled in the United States each year, with about a third of their families choosing to homeschool for religious reasons.)
For some children in these families, trade life grows like everyone else – Brianna Bell, a former pope wife who is now a journalist, said her eldest daughter remembers the “trade” part of her childhood as an era where “we bake cookies, crafts and dad worked a lot, and you were there forever.”
For others, however, nurturing trade means caring for and caring for young siblings instead of play and learning. And some say that their childhood is not prepared for life other than becoming artisans themselves. “You were given one map,” Sara, the former Trad kid who asked not to use her full name, told me, “And if that map doesn't work for you, you're nothing.”
The term “TradWife” is relatively new and can have many different meanings, making it difficult to find empirical studies on trade families. Moms of conservative Christian residents homeschool their children, and some are not, Du Mez noted, but noted that some Mormon families have very different religious beliefs from evangelicals and Catholics, but very different religious beliefs from evangelicals and Catholics. Conservative religious families have nine or ten children, but many are far less (the average number of children per woman in the US is currently under the age of 2), Du Mez said.
On the other hand, many conservative Christian families are increasingly difficult for parents to achieve their goals with a single income. Still, many conservative Christians nevertheless consider a traditional setup to be ideal. “Maybe it's not for everyone, it's like the most loyal person,” Dumez said.
However, many former residents and traditional children began to talk about why they left a lifestyle. Clearly, those who left may not be a representative sample, but their experiences are diverse.
For example, Bell grew up with a working mother, but after attending Baptist churches alone, she said she was “famous” with ideas about a certain type of nuclear family. She got married at the age of 21 and soon became a home mother, raising three children, and attempting to fit the mold of a “sacrificial mother.”
Her children, now 12, 10 and 7 years old, have “very positive” memories of the time in their lives, Bell told me. However, after reading books like Christian Children, she decided to change her life. To train childrenit advocates for children to be with belts.
“Everyone around me said that my children were sinners, and I had to correct the sin within them,” Bell told me. “I had a really hard time seeing my children as sinners.”
Deciding not to slap her children is her first step towards leaving her trade lifestyle behind.
Three children died in the 2000s and 2010s after being beaten. To train children. And while religion and culture do not monopolize child abuse, homeschooling can quarantine children and make it difficult to detect abuse, proponents warn.
For Doan, on the other hand, homeschooling mainly meant teaching yourself. One of the last lessons Doan had with his mother was the fifth grade science movement on the colour of the rainbow, she recalled. After that, “The new baby my mother had was more important than my education.”
An early avid reader, Doan was able to connect his education with the help of a local library, but “chemistry was terrible” and “mathematics was virtually impossible” (typically homeschooled children traditionally feel less mathematics and science classes, less college preparation and less college preparation than school students).
When she wasn't reading, Doan was cooking, cleaning, or grocery shopping. “Even for lunch, when my dad was there, we were hoping we had to have vegetables, potatoes and meat,” she said. Garlic and onions were banned because their father didn't like it.
Trad living isn't just about home-based maternity and homemade food. The core doctrine for many conservative Christian families living this way is that God commands them to “submit to the authority of their husbands.”
For Enitzer Templeton, that meant spending hours cooking complicated meals for her husband, including homemade bread.
“You're not really the mother you want to be,” she said. “You don't really love your kids the way you like. You're really upset with these rules your husband set for you, these rules that your religion set for you.”
Templeton, who has four children, said she began thinking about divorce after realising the effects her lifestyle could have on her daughter.
Today, she and her ex-husband share custody of their children, and Templeton tries to emphasize that they don't need to have children if they don't want it. “I'm just trying to make them see and understand that there are endless options in the world,” she said.
It's not a lesson Sarah grew up in a conservative evangelical community. When the girl grew up, she was expected to become a mom at home. The Trad Wife lifestyle “requires women to completely free their lives and to know all kinds of autonomy and responsibility to know themselves, or to know their place because their place is already prescribed for you,” she said.
Sarah chose to work, travel and have no children, but she found herself recreating the dynamics of her upbringing in her life. “It takes time to revoke the self-renunciation that was taught to you from such a young age,” she said.
For Doan, “It's hard to know what you want for dinner,” she told me. “Because I don't want anything.”
Families leading all sorts of trade lifestyles are in the minority in the United States, but they are now attracting a lot of attention as Trump and his administration praise families with many children, criticize children-free people, and support further restrictions on reproductive rights.
“In a historic moment where there is an attack on feminism and an attack on women's rights,” TradWife content attempts to send a message that “this is not forced.” “In fact, women are freed to live their best lives.”
But Doan has a different message today for children who grew up in trading homes. “I'll hold you firmly with anything that makes you human,” she said. “You're worth it and when you can leave, it's much better.”
The prime minister of New York City's schools, the nation's largest school district, has issued a statement reaffirming the district's support for LGBTQ+ students after President Trump issued an executive order targeting trans kids' experiences in schools.
Some hospitals are reopening gender-affirming care for young people after they threatened to have been blocked by a federal judge by an executive order that threatened to withdraw federal funds from hospitals that provide such care.
The Idaho bill, which eliminates all the largest uterus to adult ratios in parenting facilities, is a supporter who is concerned about the quality and safety of early education programs.
My older child enjoys the Amulet Graphic Novel series. (Warning: There are some family tragedy and dangers. I'll admit that I skipped some parts while reading at bedtime.)
In response to my essay on Arnold Robel last week Owls at homereader Dennis Racio writes that even at age 53, he still returns to books from time to time.
“What do you think is interesting? Owls at home It's a strange way to say there are no other “people” in the story other than the owl,” says Recio. “He is all involved in the world of “interior” himself, and he has some connection to nature – the snow (guest) or the moon that follows his house – I'll be with you But that's what happens in this book. ”
I have also seen the Trump administration cuts to national parks. I'd love to hear from you about your experiences on these protected lands. Have you made a meaningful trip to a national park as a child? Have you taken the children of your life to one of the parks? You can contact the National Park (or other) stories at [email protected].
