The Effects of Over-Sheltering on a Child

by Katie Olson-Schmidt

The experience of an over-sheltered child: note―these accounts are all fictional (though based on true experiences and events), and should not be taken lightly. This is basically to show you what could (…did) happen to an over-sheltered, Christian, home-schooled child.

My name is Amy. I’m fifteen years old and messed up…not really though. See, I come from a family where the definition of a “hopeless case” is when your child listens to the Dave Matthews Band or takes one shot of vodka in their life. I was raised in such a way that by the time I was thirteen, I still didn’t know what the mysterious “F word” was. I, utilizing my own free-will (after being brainwashed by many a families in the church), choose to only wear ankle length skirts or dresses and long-sleeved blouses always, even during the hottest times of the summer. No one ever sat me down and explained what was “right” or “wrong;” I had simply been so sheltered that I had led myself to believe any deviation in action from how it was in my family or church was ungodly and a mortal sin.

For my freshman year of high school, my parents opted for me to attend classes at a local Christian high school instead of the usual home schooling. Throughout the year, I made many friends; many of these friends would have fit into the category of which I now know as “preppie,” and most of these friends were juniors or seniors. As I became better friends with these people, they began to ask me which grade I was in (mind you, as I was attending only two morning classes, most people there did not know what grade level I was at); I lied and told them I was sixteen and a sophomore when in reality I had just turned fourteen and should have been an old eighth grader or a young freshman. This was a mistake that I would live to regret throughout the rest of my high school years.

As the school year came to a close, I began to realize just how much I had changed. My music tastes had switched from hymns and accapella psalms to George Strait and others famed in country music circles. I had changed from a sweet, naive, innocent, home schooling girl to a honky-tonk “boot-scootin’ ” redneck girl in a little under a year. The change was not only evident to me, but also to my parents. They had taken for granted that I knew right from wrong (in their opinion) and in which style of dress would I please the Lord most with, while in fact I had formed these viewpoints on my own without my parents’ guidance or knowledge. In my mind (although not in my parents’), it only made sense that I would be able to dismiss ideologies and systems of thinking that I had chosen on my own whenever I chose to no longer regard them with high esteem. This thinking led way to a very miserable summer during which I was cut off from all contact with people outside of our family and our church as punishment for becoming more attached to another family than to my own.

By the end of the summer, I had just about had it. My parents wanted to send me to the same Christian school for senior year (mind you, I was only fourteen and wouldn’t be fifteen until the end of September). I protested and asked to be home schooled again―anything but to go and live out my “senior year” while I was fourteen/fifteen! My parents didn’t want me lying around the house doing nothing; they didn’t like how I had become a “country girl.” My jeans (though high on the waist) were always too tight and my shirts were too…modern looking. I had dyed my hair auburn (from dishwater blonde) and was trying to straighten my tight curls all the time. My parents thought a Christian school would be just what I needed to save me from this surefire path to hell.

So I went, complete with my new Abercrombie and Fitch and American Eagle wardrobe (you gotta dress for success!). At first I was really shy; lots of my friends had graduated and the ones I had left were always so caught up in their own melodramas that they never even seemed to notice me. The only person I knew really well was a girl from our church, Bethany, who I had known since I was three. She too believed that I was sixteen now turning seventeen in a few weeks. She introduced me to some of her friends, and for the first month or so of school I hung around with them. After a while, though, I got tired of being unnoticed scum; I wanted to be popular and happy, but I barely knew anyone well enough to start friendships.

One night, after a football game, I needed a ride home. I asked around until I found a guy I knew semi-well who lived near me, Robert. Robert and his girlfriend Annie also were taking another friend, Les, home with them. On the way home, we talked about everything dumb we’d ever done in our lives. I never did any drugs in my life (except for a little DXM), and I hadn’t been to my grandfather’s house (where I would drink vodka when I was younger) in quite a while. Only recently had I taken two shots of vodka (while I was in the process of dumping out a bottle of it believing that it was seemingly “evil”) that weren’t from my grandfather’s stash of homemade stuff. When Les asked me if I ever drank, I replied, “Not really, but I have tried a couple shots of vodka once”. Les then replied, “Yah, well I like to drink. Not for social reasons or anything like some others might say; I just like getting drunk.” Here I was, a seemingly good kid to my parents and most of the people at my school; did I really want to risk it all by telling this guy I hardly knew how I used to drink all the time?

The conversation only escalated from that point. Les asked me if I had ever tried weed, and of course I told him I had not. We were about five minutes away from my house when he asked me if I wanted to try some right then and there. “No,” I told him, “my dad would be able to tell and he’d be really pissed off if he found out.” I left it at that, and that answer seemed to satisfy him. Once I got home, I went straight to bed.; all I did was lie there thinking that (God-forbid!) our school had people in it that drank and smoked weed. It disappointed me on the one hand, while on the other it was somewhat comforting to know that I wasn’t stuck with a totally legalistic group of people either. Here were people that claimed to be Christians and yet still did this stuff―it was a weird idea for me to comprehend.

Shortly after this incident, there was a junior/senior cookout/campfire coming up. A girl I barely knew, Sherry, offered to take me back to her house, to the cookout, and than back to my house later on all for the sake of developing a friendship with me. Throughout the rest of the evening, Sherry told me all about everyone at the school. I was shocked (and yet not really) at the very messed up lives of many of the students. The only catch: most of them had left their “wild side” behind over the previous summer. Now they were all back for their junior and senior years acting all “God-changed-my-life-and-now-I’m-better-than-anyone-else-here” type of thing. Sherry too had been one of those “good girls gone bad,” gone good. She was a junior and thought too that I was (now) seventeen and should have been part of the junior class. After the cookout ended, she went off with some other friends and I went home with Peter and Annie and Les…again. After that experience, I began to match people’s faces with their life stories and stuff. I now began to wonder if everything I’d grown up believing was really true, or if there was more to life than being perfect, never dating, getting married, having kids, and growing old in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

During this time (the school year), I got a job as a hospital volunteer. Now, ninety-nine percent of these kids were goodie-goodies who had never said a swear word in their life. Somehow, though, I got to talking with one of the guys there, Jason. It turned out that he was the black sheep of the volunteer community and was more than happy to hook me up with some people if I so decided to abandon my Judeo-Christian roots. For a while, my life was back to normal. I sat with Annie and Sherry and Les at lunch, and I kept a lot of what was going on in my life to myself. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of my life, what I really was ashamed of was my age and how I had lied about that. Not wanting to tell anyone what was really going on in my life, I began telling them stuff in offhanded ways. Instead of saying, “Guess what, yesterday I snuck out of my house to go to a party. I got really drunk and my boyfriend had to take me out and sober me up before taking me home.” I would say, “I snuck out of my house yesterday and went in the barn to take a couple shots (of vodka). I was getting pretty tipsy, so I came back inside before anyone noticed.” Or, if the person wasn’t my friend at all, I would say nothing about my life.

Throughout the remainder of the school year, I did basically everything I could get my hands on. Actually, despite how I loved to get drunk, my weight loss throughout the school year (twenty pounds) made me unable to hold my liquor very well, so I really didn’t drink all that much. Weed was the one thing that brought me solace when I felt down about everything else. I never let on to anyone how bad I felt at home. All my family knew was that I went from listening to George Strait and Alan Jackson to Pink Floyd and the Doors. My parents thought that I didn’t spend enough time with the family, so they tried putting more and more restrictions on me. What they never realized was that had it not been for al of those restrictions, or even threats of them, I would have never felt the need to escape from my messed up reality anyway.

The last two months of the school year were when things really began to go downhill for me. As the year had progressed, I had made many friends in and out of school. Towards the end of the school year, however, I left a lot of those friends and school activities in pursuit of my old friend, Bethany, from church. The girls she hung around with were not the ones with the best reputations around the school. Perhaps she was drawn to that aspect of them, or perhaps she felt her need for friends overrode her need for good friends. For whatever the reason, she hung around them, and I hung around her. Little by little I began sharing various aspects of my life with them; never trusting anyone with the whole truth for fear that someone I didn’t want knowing would find out.

Of course, when you start sleeping around and always coming to school stoned, you don’t really have to say anything for people to know what’s going on in your life. Coming from the sort of family I did, it didn’t take much for them to wonder if everything was all right in my life; I reassured them that everything was fine. In reality (in my mind), everything really was fine. I was happy as could be, the school year was almost out, and I was making money selling smokes to little junior high kids for way more than what they were worth (they had to get them somehow!). The wall really started to tumble down when I had some people over for a study group. Yah, I know I got really wasted―that’s why I don’t remember anything about the night and can say with a clean conscious that I fell asleep and have no clue what happened. The truth, I later found out, is that I was wasted while everyone else was sober, I did something with a guy (no one would tell me what), I was puking all over, and God-knows what was going on elsewhere throughout my house while I slept. Of course, everyone reassured me that nothing “really bad” had taken place.

When my father returned from Europe the following week, he expressed dismay toward me in my decision to have an all-night, coed study group at my house. He was even more upset when he found half a dozen beer bottles in our backyard. I reassured him I knew nothing of them or their origin, while in fact I should have known that there would be people drinking and smoking at my house. Shortly after this, a friend of mine asked if I could keep some smokes and liquor at my house for him. I agreed to do this for a small price. Two days before school let out, my parents discovered the hidden loot at my house, yet when I confronted them about it in an offhanded way, they denied it. It wasn’t until three weeks after school let out that they told me about finding the stuff in my room.

Now, enough said about all of that. I don’t really trust anyone anymore; someone who knew me too well cracked and told my parents all sorts of shit about me and my life that I never ever should have talked about. At least none of the people I hung around knew the real me. Unfortunately, most of my friends are going off to college in a few weeks, and many others I have lost contact with since school let out (over a month ago). I’m finally taking driver’s ed. (even though I used to drive friends’ cars all the time); I’ll be sixteen in another two months and then I’ll be getting my license. My parents got all worried when some mystery friend of mine (the kind that makes you not need enemies!) told them a bunch of stuff about me. Since I lost my cell phone right after school let out, I also lost half of my friends’ phone numbers―including all of my hook-ups.

Now, I’m living a pretty miserable life at my lonely house with no friends. The only think I have now is a carton of smokes and a couple grand in cash. I’ve pretty much given my parents the impression that I’m starting a new life―one where everything and everyone from my school is going to stay as a memory in my past and nothing more. I had to quite my job at the hospital, but that was because Jason left and it was no fun anymore. I’m trying to get a job at Jewel now, and maybe I’ll make some friends there. My parents don’t really care who I’m gonna end up hanging around with, they just want to meet the people this time. See, my parents even hated the goodie-goodies that I hung out with and thought they were bad people―all because most of them they never met during my entire time being friends with them.

Okay, now I know I’m starting to sound crazy, but here’s the basic point of this all: if parents want their kids to be “good” or whatnot, they should 1) never assume that just because the kid isn’t doing something doesn’t mean they think it’s bad, 2) friends do play a role in the choices kids make, but even if the kid has all goodie-goodie friends, if a kid really wants to do something (deemed by society as) “bad,” than they’re gonna do it whether anyone else they know is doing it or not, and 3) if a parent knows a kid is doing something and the parent totally disagrees with whatever the kid is doing, always remember to look ahead to the future. If your kid is seventeen and a half and your twelve year old says they saw their older sibling smoking, don’t throw a fit about it and ground the kid for life; they’re gonna be able to do it legally in six months anyway. Insisting it be done outside the house away from the younger kids would be a better alternative to having your kid hate you and have both your life and theirs be miserable for the next six months only to have them leave you and never visit you once during the next ten years.

Sheltering kids might be okay for some people, but for me it only opened the door to questions that I found answers to in drugs and rock ‘n roll. I’ve got two and a half more years left at home, and although I’d like to enjoy this time, I’m gonna need to be a little more careful in who knows what about me, should I decide to do anything wild again in the future. Drugs do not ruin anyone and neither does rock music; people who are stupid to begin with may get a little stupider, but people who have a good head on their shoulders will mostly be able to pass themselves off as normal.

If anyone has any further questions on this piece of writing or something related to it, you can rant on to [email protected]