Homeschooling Complexities for Adopted Children with Rae (Adoptee Reclaimed) - Ep 160

Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson. I'm an adoptive mom of a smart, musical, and athletic 20-year-old son, Joey, who is figuring out how to launch as an adult. I'm walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. I'm

also a certified coach, helping primarily adoptive parents. Joey and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and we want to help the general public understand adoption's complexities better, too. So listeners, do you know any homeschooling families, maybe your family homeschools? Have you ever thought about the impact of homeschooling specifically on adopted children? Today's guest is Ray. who you might know from her social media handle, Adoptee

Reclaimed. She's an adoptee who lives in Guam, but who grew up in Colorado Springs in a conservative family. She was homeschooled all the way from kindergarten through high school and has some things to say about how homeschooling was for her and how homeschooling can lead to isolation for adoptees if we as a community aren't careful. So welcome to Unraveling Adoption, Rae. I'm

Yeah, thank you for reaching out and I do follow your posts on Instagram and I really appreciate all of your content and I always like to elevate adoptee voices and I thought this was an interesting topic. We have homeschooling in my family and I have worked with a lot of homeschoolers as a music teacher and I think it's an important piece that no one really ever puts together with adoption. So happy to smush those two together. We're like peanut butter and chocolate over here. Definitely,

definitely. Very good. All right. So why don't you start off with just give us a lowdown on what happened to you when you were Yeah. So I was adopted from foster care right around my third birthday. And I grew up with biological children in the home. I was homeschooled right off the bat. I've never actually set foot in a traditional school for my education all

12 years. And I had a kind of weird experience being adopted in the sense that I looked a lot like my family, but I knew and it was very obvious that I did not fit with them. Okay. And I tried really hard to make that work. It just wasn't working. So I was kind of going along with the path that I figured they would like until I finally hit college and I was going down a path that was not something I wanted. and decided I needed to step back, change my entire life course and

figure out how I had ended up there in the first place. And that's what brought me to learning about adoption trauma and realizing how much that had affected me. Oh, okay. So all the way through high school, you kind of just went along with the program because you had no control authority.

Yeah, well, that happens to a lot of people. They're like, OK, I'm in a different scene now. I'm in a different environment now. Things look a little different. And then you start questioning. So that sounds like what happened to you. Interesting. Absolutely. I went to a religious college. I think there was a fear that because there was a lot of difficulty in my adoptive home, if I didn't go to a religious college, I worried I wasn't going to get support for my education past high school.

And having been homeschooled my entire life experience and religion being kind of one of the core themes of that homeschooling experience, it seemed like the kind of only the safe stepping stone out. And in retrospect, I think I would have changed my choice, but I'm sure lots of people would. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It is what it is. It worked out. I got a degree in communications and religious studies. Oh, OK. Yeah. So a lot of people homeschool either for

religious reasons or anti-religious reasons. They either are, you know, kind of afraid of what the world will teach their kids. So they keep them separated or they're afraid of religious people and want to keep their kids a I have. I have. I've also seen a couple of folks in the middle who are just trying to make it work for kids who have kind of special needs. Yes. There's all different kinds of reasons for entering homeschooling,

Yeah. And so you literally did not spend one day in I had spent some time in a classroom through a college bridge program in high school, but no traditional schooling, none of your basic subjects. I never had like a cohort of classmates that I grew up with. I was kind of just out there by myself with one of the siblings in the home, getting homeschooled by Okay, did you love it? Did you hate it? Did you beg to go to school?

Or did you just go, I guess this is what happens to kids and you didn't know

When I was very young, I thought this is just the way that we were going to do it. I had no other frame of reference. So I was like, cool, this is great. And it was I would say in the early years, especially it's a really great opportunity because you know, my mom did a fantastic job trying to make sure that we got to kind of explore our interests and get out of the house sometimes and go to the duck pond, things like that, that were really

nice. But as I got older, and I would say I hit middle school, I started to really feel that isolation set in. And I was also starting to feel how different I was from the rest of my family. It's really very hard to have your parent be your teacher and your teacher be your principal and never having an any switch up of personas to interact with. It was just getting incredibly, I would say, claustrophobic emotionally in the

house. It was really hard. It was affecting my education. I was having what I now know were trauma responses to trying to learn because there seemed to be so much riding on doing a math problem because it was my mother's approval, as well as my teacher's approval, as well as my principal who was maybe going to punish me for not doing the right, you know, so it was just incredibly difficult. I think my learning started to suffer, my relationship with my parents started

to really suffer, and I wanted to go to a real school. At that point, I understood that there was a difference, and I was asking. I was asking if I could go to a different type of education system, and I think it was just something that my mom had

There's probably a lot of pride and just like, no, this is how we're doing it. This is what our family does. But you weren't a super rebellious kid that said, I refuse to do this. You just There were definitely times where desperation pushed and adoption trauma pushed me to feel like I wasn't being heard or seen. And the environment that I was being required to work under was increasingly restrictive as I think my mom tried to get some control over me. And I got increasingly rebellious

That's a vicious cycle. Now, I know that some kids, maybe this is more recent, but some kids go to like homeschool schools where a couple of days a week, you know, the neighborhood science person teaches all the kids science, or there's these little homeschool classes. Did you have any of that? Or was it literally all just your mom? We had sprinkles of it. There were definitely resources like that available, and I couldn't quite tell you why we weren't more deeply

committed to some of them. We went to a non-denominational one at a church that was pretty good, but we only went to a few, and once my older sibling was in high school, they didn't really have as many class offerings, and I

think it was a time sink to try and take just me. And we had another main core group that my mom was very heavily involved in, but it was a very, very insular community of very fundamentalist religion people, largely people with big, big families, very different economic class of people who I think just weren't paying to go to the nicer places. And it was okay. We had a bit of a cohort in that regard, but a lot of those kids, frankly, had social problems. had learning disabilities that weren't

being really directly addressed. And so I was, I would argue, one of the more able-bodied children in that cohort. And I ended up taking on the burden of kind of playing hostess for everyone else and trying to accommodate some of these other kids that were, you know, not figuring out how to do self-care or, you know, were probably in sort of not great family situations. You could kind of tell, but their family was also their educator. And

And this is where the problem arises, as far as I understand, is the isolation that can happen with homeschooling. And it's completely legal to do this, just to take your kids out of the whole system. And then no one's checking on you. Is that what your experience

Definitely. I think that was part of the stress, especially as I approached my middle school years, was no one was there to see if my mom and I weren't getting along and she was getting really frustrated and her parenting style turned really authoritarian and it was really negatively impacting me. there was no real interruption

to say, hey, you know what, maybe this isn't the way she learns. Maybe she needs a different style, or maybe she needs a different teacher, or maybe she needs, you know, there was not a lot of second opinions. And if there were opinions, they came from the bias of my mom's perspective, which was that I was the problem. that I clearly had reactive attachment disorder or something. It was what she probably thought it was. And in retrospect, I

don't think that was it at all. I think I was just in an incredibly claustrophobic environment and needed more than one person managing and controlling every aspect of my day from wake up to fall Yeah, yeah. Well, and if a kid goes to school, there's mandatory reporters everywhere. Not that that is always a foolproof system either. Or say you don't like a teacher. Well, you probably only have them for one

of the hours and then the rest of the time you get to be with other people. At home school, especially the way your mom did it, it sounds like you had one classroom, one teacher. And that was it. That was

Yes, it was that way for a much. And by the time I hit high school, I think she started to realize her limitations. I think she was also pretty exhausted by the system she'd set up. I bet. And she discovered this really great program that let me do some college bridge. And that was a godsend for sure. But it was also difficult because she only wanted me to go to classes, obviously, that were extracurricular. So I was doing like keeping technology and like, you know,

graphic design, like all these things. And I was a 14 year old in a community college. room full of adults. And that was really terrifying for me. I knew that I was very out of place. It was a very new program at the time. And I was just really uncomfortable. And I think I just put my head down. I churned out my assignments, but I wasn't enjoying the experience. I wasn't making friends. I wasn't talking to anyone. I wasn't staying in

the break areas. It was go to class, get out, go to class, get out. And it wasn't a break from that isolation that I had been dealing with. Now, can you talk a bit about this intersection between homeschooling and adoption? How are adopted kids particularly affected

I think when you are an adoptee, there's immediately some extra strain between you and your family bond. And it takes a little extra effort to build that, to kind of protect it. And when you're being educated full-time all 12 years of your education by the people who adopted you, and we talk a lot as adoptees about the power dynamic between adoptive parents and adoptees and the natural dynamic between a parent and a child and all of those things, it

really heightens that. I think extremely heightens that. and there's so much more pressure to fit because you aren't, and I'm sure you get this in a regular school system too, is a pressure to fit, but there is a diversity there, inherent, and if you get a dozen kids to put them in a class, there's gonna be some

diversity, right? There's gonna be different types of kids, there's gonna be different interests and personalities, and so you as the adoptee feel a little bit dreaming, as I've never really experienced this, but I imagine you would feel a little bit safer to be your own person a little bit, but when you are raised in a family and you are homeschooled by that same person and they have a very specific view of what religion should look like for you

and for your gender and what education looks like with that. And you're trying to match all of those things. I think as the adoptee in that situation, the pressure to conform and the intensity of the discordance in the bond between you and your family is just amplified. And that can make it much, much harder to feel like you have a safe caretaker to feel like you have permission to explore truly who you want to be instead. And

this is what I did from, I think, middle school on. I completely abandoned things that were actually interesting to me and just totally tried to reorganize my personality interests towards the things that my mom and my family seemed to think were the thing to

Yeah, I really liked outdoor things and dirty kind of sports. I was always very like, let's climb trees and scrape up things. And I also had a deep curiosity in building things. I really wanted architecture kits from the kids' magazines and stuff. And those were always just deeply discordant with my parents' understanding of what I would want as a fourth, fifth, sixth grader. and it didn't match what their kids had wanted either.

So they just sort of dismissed and dismissed. And I realized, okay, that's not working. But what is working, my mom thinks religion is really important. So when she asked if I wanted to get involved in this really niche religious group, like a girls' catechism group, I was like, yeah, absolutely. And I threw my, I mean, truly threw myself in it, even though I wasn't genuinely that interested in it. to begin with.

So there's a couple of examples like that where I really put 110% of myself into an activity that I was only like 10% interested in because I wanted to match my mom's expectation of That's exhausting. And I, I can understand that. I'm going to guess that an adoptee wouldn't feel like they could advocate for themselves really very much because literally you might lose your family. Like, and that's always at

the root of an adoptee is like, Oh my God, they're going to give me away too. But you really can't, who are you going to go tell if this is going South or if it's not meeting your needs, you have no one to tell. So you had to just deal with it. Ugh. That

I've had interaction with a handful of other adults occasionally. I mean, more than once a week, I would see other adults, but it's in such a specific and such an insular environment, right? As a child, and especially if you're raised with just basic stranger danger, you're not going to go up and tell someone who you only see once a week for like 20 minutes that you're feeling like something's going wrong in your home or you're feeling stressed

or you're feeling this. I would add, I didn't even, because I was in such an insular homeschool environment, I didn't even have the words for it. I remember distinctly, I didn't learn the word stress until I was 14 years old. And I can guarantee you I was very

stressed well before the age of 14. But there's just odd little gaps of I would say basic social knowledge like emotional language that I genuinely had no exposure to because I was in a homeschool environment and I didn't know stress was a word until I was 14 because it just didn't come up. So it definitely can be tricky if it's not For sure, for sure. Wow. And when you got to college, did you find some more of those holes

I found several holes. I was deathly scared of taking any math or science related subjects. That's actually why I picked the career field I did because I had such a hard time in my adoptive home learning those subjects. and it got to a point where things were just not going well between my mom and I. She kind of threw in the towel, I would say, and just gave up on those subjects with me until right before I graduated, I got a middle school version of chemistry handed to

me real quick to look through and stuff. Again, she was doing the best she could with the circumstances she had, but also there were significant gaps. To this day, every now and again, I'll be like, oh yeah, I never learned that. I never learned statistics. I never learned real chemistry beyond the fourth grade level. I never learned anatomy. It's just things that I'm like, okay, I definitely missed some of that. I missed a tremendous amount of culture, too.

Even at a very religious college, a private religious college that I went to, where it draws in a certain crowd. I genuinely had almost no friends all the way through college because I couldn't figure out how to talk to people because they wanted to talk about music, they wanted to talk about sports. I didn't know anything about either of those things. They wanted to talk about TV shows. Well, TV was banned growing up, so

I didn't have a lot of knowledge of contemporary TV shows. When you're like that, people just think you're antisocial when they're making jokes about something that's popular and you can't quite follow. they just think you're antisocial and they sort of move on. Especially in a college environment, things get cliquish really quick and then you're just out. That's pretty much what happened to me as well. I had a very small group of friends and they were all

very much the misfits. I wasn't very close with any of them. I think I didn't even spend one-on-one time with any of them until maybe my senior year of college. It was just kind of like I was in the group and I would kind of come and go. It was different. It was definitely different. And it leaves scars on you as the adoptee thinking, gosh, is something wrong with me even more than just being adopted? Am I not socially competent? Is there something on my face? I don't know

what it is. And you end up pushed into this very lonely place where you're, again, I never fit in with my family, and now I can't seem to fit in with my peers. And now I'm trying to figure out how to fit into a workplace as a young adult. Gosh, is this ever going Yeah. Oh, it sounds like it really kind of stunted your emotional I think it did to an extent, and I raced really

hard to catch up. By the time I was in college, I was reading all of the material I could find, you know, trying to intellectually learn what I had missed, especially. It took quite a massive effort on And I'm not hearing this happen to you, but I imagine it's very possible to have abuse happen in a homeschool situation. And then who are you going to tell? There's no one keeping an eye on you. There's no mandated reporters. Do you know of any statistics or

I have no statistics off the top of my head. I did experience abuse in the homeschool environment. And I know that there were some of my friends who probably didn't have the language to identify it, but behavior, looking back, what I considered just kind of odd behavior or weird behavior was probably a symptom of I'm so sorry. I know of an organization called Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and they are collecting data about abuse that happens in homeschooling and

murder. And I'm also kind of keeping track of adoptees that get murdered for this database that I'm keeping. And a lot of those are homeschooled or they live off the grid or They live in a camper or whatever kind of situation keeps them disengaged from the regular rest of society. And I think it's a little dangerous to do that. It is, yeah. Is there a way to do homeschooling well that doesn't keep people isolated?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's many ways to do homeschooling well. And my mom did homeschooling well in many ways as well. I'll speak to the ways that my homeschooling wasn't done well, maybe. And that will help us see how it's done well for her. Do the opposite. Yeah, I think my homeschooling wasn't done well in the sense that my entire education from literally kindergarten all the way to my senior year of high school

was homeschool. I don't think that's healthy for anyone to be, you know, the same teacher in the same building for the whole 12 years. Like, it's just not great. I don't think you should do homeschooling entirely for the entire education. I also think that it became a problem because my mom got overwhelmed by, I'd say, probably fourth or fifth grade. She had two kids she was trying to homeschool. I was dealing with a lot of stress from the situation and from adoption trauma. My

older brother was in high school. He was getting grumpy about some things, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. And I think she got very overwhelmed. And she didn't take that as a cue to start getting more involved in other options for education. I think the homeschooler also needs to be realistic about what they can handle and what they can actually teach and admit that maybe they don't want to do it all themselves and maybe get a co-op involved more, not

just for the fun things. That's the other thing too, is I think my mom was really determined she was going to teach the fundamentals and no one else was going to teach the fundamentals. She was going to do the math, the science, the history, everything. When we did do other things, it was only for the fun things, which is That makes sense, right? She's not going to teach, I don't know, creative writing.

Fine. So she gives us a creative writing class at a co-op. But I think there's a need to learn the fundamentals for more than just one person because not everyone learns fundamentals the same way. And although Yes,

every education system has its flaws. There's a higher likelihood that getting a different teacher to teach you math, for example, is going to give you a different perspective of how you might need to learn math as a more visual learner, perhaps, or something like that, rather than, in my mom's case, just hammering math down my throat the way she thought people learned math because that's how she would learn math. Right?

And then so I'm the adoptee. I don't learn math that way. I'm struggling with it. She's determined to keep the fundamentals. Right? So if you want to do homeschooling well, be open to letting someone else step in for certain fundamentals, especially fundamentals that your child may seem stressed about or uncomfortable by. Definitely get another person involved so they can bring, first of all, just a different presence and offload

some of that stress, but also a different perspective. Someone that sees alternative ways to teach that materials that

You brought up a good point that affects adoptees, is if I had had my own biological child, they probably would have been a whiz-bang reader like I was, and they probably wouldn't have mind sitting still in my lap like I did. My son, and I suppose this could happen with biological kids too, but for sure with an adopted kid, they're not going to be like you. He was like a little hurricane, just like spinning around. He was a very physical, kinesthetic learner. And I I

did not understand that. And I can imagine, especially since you have older siblings that were biological to your parents, that they just expected you to just do what your brothers did. And when you didn't, that probably made everybody feel bad and feel like they were to blame and all sorts of bad things. But if they had other teachers around, they could have accessed your learning different ways. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Without

those expectations. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Well, how can we better protect and Check in on our adopted homeschool families and Obviously, interact and engage with them as much as you can. I think several adults in my life probably could tell around middle school and early high school, things weren't right, things weren't going well. And I've even had people come up to me years after I've left that environment and said, you know, I could tell something wasn't going well. Right. Like

you were just really robotic. You were really stressed. I could tell like something was going on. And I always respond to that with just the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like, why didn't you talk to me about it? You know, I think there was this assumption that they had to talk to my parent about it. And of course, my parent, she

sees through a certain lens. She's trying to get a certain goal. And when someone says, hey, you know, your daughter seems a little stressed, she's like, oh, whatever. She's just not sleeping well or whatever. She might think, I wish someone had said something to me. So what I would say is, Protect your adopted friends who are homeschooling by talking to the adoptee directly, not in front of their parent, but just say, hey, are

you feeling OK? Are you feeling a little stressed? Do you feel like you're overwhelmed sometimes? Just give them some of that language that I didn't have. Remember, I didn't even know the word stress until I was 14 because of the way homeschooling raised me. Give them some of the words in case if they apply to them. Don't put words in their mouth, but just show them that these are words that exist. parents or siblings or other people might be doing things to you that aren't nice,

that make you feel bad. Is that happening to you at all? If not, totally fine, but just know if it is, you can always tell someone. I never knew that that was an option for my entire homeschool experience. Also, I would argue at a policy level, I think there do need to be more touch points with group settings. I think homeschoolers say, yeah, we'll get in a group, and they put all of their kids who've never been in a group together in a group, and guess what? They

don't learn group skills very well. The few that do have group skills are desperate to avoid the rest of them, and it's very, very isolating. One of the problems my mom had was that I wasn't comfortable doing group sports, and she, I don't think, really wanted to do group sports anymore after my brothers did theirs, but mandate some group activities. The kid has to spend a minimum number of hours in Right. Forced to engage with other types of people who

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good idea. A little more oversight, I think, would be really helpful. And we're not trusting these parents, but we're kind of not trusting them. We just want to make sure that our children are safe. And yeah, it seems like those touch points seem logical.

Well, what advice would you have to an adoptee who might be isolated either through homeschooling or maybe they live way out in the country or they're a military person that gets shunted from one place to another? What would you have for maybe a 14-year-old adoptee? Yeah, I would say try really hard not to take it upon yourself and remember that the context of the situation in which you find yourself is not about you. You are not the reason that you suck at these subjects if

you're homeschooled and you're having a hard time with the maths problem. You are not the reason that you can't have any friends if you are trying to interact with people and you don't see people very often. It's just you haven't had the chance to develop those skills. If you find yourself isolated in that way, remember that you can row past it. You can acquire those skills later in life. You may always feel that difference. You may always feel a little gap. I'm

waiting to not feel that gap. Maybe it happens 20 years after

you leave school. I don't know, but you will be able to find some people that will fit and you may need to revisit who you want to spend time with because you've been raised to spend time with certain types of people and you may realize that those are not the types of people you want to spend time with and they're not the types of people that are good for you, but be really jealous about your time and your energy and the types of friends that you are willing to pursue so that you

can build those skills and build the social circle and That's really beautiful. And as people grow into adulthood, they get to choose. There's a billion little decisions everyone gets to make to create the identity that they want. But I'm sure if you were homeschooled or isolated in any other way, it takes a little extra effort to do that, to go against all the things that you were raised with. That's very good advice. I really appreciate you coming on here, Rae, and talking about

your experience. This is very enlightening and awakening me

Yeah, thanks for having me, Beth. I really appreciated the conversation. Good, good. If people wanted to get a hold of you, how would they find you? Please follow me on Instagram at Adoptee Reclaimed. I'm also on Facebook, Okay, awesome. So reach out and if they have questions about homeschooling or anything, are you open to that kind of conversation? Absolutely. Oh, for sure. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. Go look up

Ray and while you're on the internet, go find Unraveling Adoption at unravelingadoption.com. On our web page, you'll find information about our new book, Adoption and Suicidality, and you'll find all of our upcoming events, which we have several different wonderful offerings coming up, including our book launch, which is happening tonight. If you're listening to this right when the episode came out, August 26th, 2024. So check that out and also find us on Facebook, Instagram

and YouTube. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Please share this episode with anyone you know who might be homeschooling or might be a homeschooler or formerly homeschooled person. This is an interesting topic. Maybe some teacher types or church people. It's important for the general public to understand these complex issues at these intersections. So please share this episode. And we really appreciate you listening. Ray and I want