Why We Didn’t Have Stay-At-Home Daughters

I just finished reading Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away From Christian Patriarchy by Cait West, and I found it to be both sad and unsurprising.

Some people who have observed our family may have assumed we were fans of the stay-at-home daughter idea.  After all, our three girls stayed with us after high school.  Only one went to college directly out of high school (the youngest) and all three lived with us until they recently graduated from college and moved on to their next steps.

But there is a huge difference between your daughters staying with you for a time and requiring them to stay under your authority until you pass them off to a husband. 

In the stay-at-home daughter culture, girls are trained to be homemakers and nothing but homemakers.  Academic work is the bare minimum in most cases, because it is assumed they will marry young and have children, so it is more important to focus on homemaking skills instead of academics they most likely won’t use. (I have another post in mind about homemaking and the mentality of skimping on academics for women, but that is another topic for another day.)

In a stay-at-home daughter family, the girl is discouraged from having any dreams beyond wife and mother.  I have heard girls express dreams about being something or other and watched well-meaning older siblings basically shut the idea down because that’s not what women are supposed to be.  The father’s wishes are supreme in these households; women have no say in many of them about much of anything.  In this particular book, the father even decided that the only thing this young lady could do after high school was teach piano and maybe help some other families homeschool their children.  Everything else was discouraged. 

Our home was different.  We are all very academically inclined people, so my girls were well prepared academically for either college or homemaking.  We homeschooled, it was very possible to do both! (Again, another topic for another day.) For instance, my girls took general science, physical science, biology, chemistry and physics.  I figured that was plenty, so I offered them a senior year in high school free from higher level science.  They all cried and begged for another science class.  That made me very happy, so I was glad to spend the extra money on Anatomy and Physiology, Marine Biology, and Astronomy for them for their last years of school.

College was something we left entirely up to the girls.  Our philosophy was that college isn’t for everyone and that you should only spend the time and money on a degree if what God calls you to do requires it. But we NEVER told our girls that God would only call them into motherhood, so there would be no need for college.  The two older girls pursued some other things at first, hoping to skip the extra classes and expense.  They wrote books, started Etsy shops, taught music, and so on.  We get along well and they have always pitched in around the house, and both got jobs in addition to their side interests (one at the library, the other at a grocery store), so it was fine for them to stay in our home.  When the youngest decided to go to school, she chose a local college within commuting distance, so she stayed until she graduated in order to save money and graduate debt free.  The other two eventually felt called in different directions, and also chose schools close enough to commute to, so at one point we had three girls in three different colleges at the same time. All three graduated debt free with their faith intact.

Reading Cait West’s story, I thought of stay-at-home daughters we have encountered and how different their lives have been from our girls.  Some work outside the home, but mostly at Christian companies.  Their focus is still on finding a husband. Some even have wedding boards on Pinterest even though they have never been on a date. Many of them also seem very listless; after all, life cannot truly begin until they find a husband.  Some, like Jana Duggar, wait well into their 30’s without finding their new authority figure to replace their dads.

I am not a feminist.  I believe my husband is the head of the household. And I believe men and women have different roles in marriage.  But I also see that life consists of seasons, and everyone moves through these seasons in a different way. Being single could be for a short season.  Or it could be for a lifetime.  How sad for a young woman to be 40 years old and still be living with her parents with nothing more in her life than reading missionary biographies, teaching music, and maybe, if she’s lucky, helping a midwife with home births.

God has wired us all differently and given us all different talents and paths. I have seen several young ladies who got college degrees meet their husbands while working in the areas God has gifted them in.  And guess what? Their professional skills complement their husbands’ work perfectly! And they are all helping their husbands as they raise their children.

God is sovereign, and He will use all our training and experience as part of our story.  He is also big enough to bring a husband into a young lady’s life whether or not she stays at home under her father’s authority or goes into a field she is gifted in while she uses her single years to serve God to the best of her ability.

That’s why I see a big difference in being a stay-at-home daughter and simply living at home for a time.  It’s all about authority. My girls knew they could move out and move on whenever they were led to do so. And they also knew that we would be supportive of whatever path God led them on.  We never presumed to speak for God in telling them what they were qualified to do.  And that makes all the difference in the world.

Rift saddened me for a lot of reasons.  But the biggest reason it saddened me is the story I see all too often in our homeschool universe: parents restricting and controlling their children and their futures until their relationships are so fractured they are difficult to repair and faith in God is destroyed because the Word was used to control without any grace whatsoever.

And this is the thing that we as Christians need to be mindful of.  We cannot force our children to believe, and the more we try to force them to live a certain way without allowing them to form their own thoughts, the more likely it is to backfire on us.  It is my prayer that we will all do a better job letting our children become who God wants them to be with our guidance instead of forcing them into a box predetermined at birth simply because we cannot see that God makes us all different.