This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Voxs newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.In one of Sara Doans earliest memories, her mom is asking her to sort laundry. Shes about 6 years old, and as the first child in her conservative Catholic family, shes already stepped into her role as manager of housework. Soon shell be cooking, doing dishes, and homeschooling herself while her mom takes care of her seven siblings and her dad works six-day weeks at his auto-body shop, occasionally popping in for elaborate home-cooked lunches.It was unrelenting drudgery, Doan, now a professor of experience architecture at Michigan State University, says of her childhood.I reached out to Doan because I wanted to understand a group I havent heard as much about in discussions about tradwives and their role in American politics and culture: the kids who grow up in ostensibly trad homes. On social media, tradwife influencers (think Hannah Neeleman, who posts on Instagram as @ballerinafarm, or Kelly Havens Stickle) are engaged in a performance of traditional femininity, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University who studies gender and religion, told me. That performance includes a highly aestheticized vision of motherhood its beautiful, its soft, things are orderly, theres plenty of time to knead the dough and to gather the flowers from outside, Du Mez said. In tradwife content, homeschooling multiple young children while making their meals from scratch looks calm and joyful in fact, creators often present their lifestyle, implicitly or explicitly, as the best, healthiest way to raise kids. The reality, people who grew up or parented under these conditions told me, is more complicated. While high-profile influencers may be performing for an audience (and for potential brand sponsors), many real-life families are living out a less camera-ready version of the lifestyle in conservative Christian circles, Du Mez told me. (Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but more than 3 million kids are homeschooled in the US every year, and about a third of families choose homeschooling for religious reasons.)For some kids in these families, trad life is an upbringing like any other Brianna Bell, a former tradwife whos now a journalist, told me her oldest daughter remembers the trad portion of her childhood as a period when we baked cookies and we did crafts and Daddy worked a lot and you were around all the time. For others, though, growing up trad can mean doing chores and caring for younger siblings instead of playing or learning. And some say their childhood left them unprepared for any life other than becoming a tradwife themselves. You were given one map, Sarah, a former trad kid who asked that her full name not be used, told me, and if that map doesnt work for you, then you have nothing.Its hard to find empirical research on trad families, in part because the term tradwife is relatively new and can have many different meanings. Some conservative Christian stay-at-home moms homeschool their children, and some dont, Du Mez noted, while some Mormon families may ascribe to tradwife-style values but hold very different religious beliefs from evangelicals or Catholics. While some conservative religious families have nine or 10 children, Du Mez said, many have far fewer (the average number of children born per woman in the US is now under two).Meanwhile, many conservative Christian families dont fit the tradwife mold at all, not least because its increasingly difficult for parents to make ends meet on a single income. Still, a lot of conservative Christians nonetheless see a trad setup as an ideal maybe its not for everybody, but kind of the most faithful, Du Mez said.However, a number of ex-tradwives and children of tradwives have begun speaking out about why they left the lifestyle behind. Obviously, those who left may not be a representative sample, but their experiences are diverse. Bell, for example, grew up with a single, working mom but became obsessed with the idea of a particular kind of nuclear family after attending a Baptist church on her own, she told me. She married at 21 and quickly became a stay-at-home mom, raising three children and trying to fit the mold of a sacrificial mother you prioritize your husband and you prioritize your kids and you have to also, above all, prioritize God, she said.Her kids, now 12, 10, and 7, have very positive memories of that time in their lives, Bell told me. But she decided to change her life after reading Christian childrearing books like To Train Up a Child, which advocates beating children with a belt.Everyone around me was saying my children were sinners, and I had to correct the sin in them, Bell told me. I had a really hard time looking at my children as sinners.Deciding not to spank her children, she said, was her first step toward leaving her trad lifestyle behind. In the 2000s and 2010s, three children died after being beaten in manners described in To Train Up a Child. And while no religion or culture has a monopoly on child abuse, homeschooling can isolate kids and make abuse harder to detect, advocates warn.For Doan, meanwhile, homeschooling mostly meant teaching herself. One of the last lessons Doan ever did with her mother was a fifth-grade science exercise on the colors of the rainbow, she recalled. After that, whatever new baby my mother was having was more important than my education.An early and avid reader, Doan was able to piece together her own education with the help of the local library, but chemistry was awful and math was virtually impossible (research suggests that homeschooled kids, in general, take fewer math and science classes than traditionally schooled students, and feel less prepared for college).When she wasnt reading, Doan was cooking, cleaning, or grocery shopping there was an expectation that even for lunch, when my dad was there, we had to have a vegetable, a potato, and a meat, she said. Garlic and onions were banned because her father didnt like them.Trad living isnt just about stay-at-home motherhood or home-cooked food a core tenet for many conservative Christian families who live this way is that God commands women to submit to their husbands authority, Du Mez said. For Enitza Templeton, that meant spending hours making complex meals for her husband, including homemade bread hours she couldnt spend with her kids. Youre not really getting to be the mother you want to be, she said. Youre not truly getting to love your children the way you want. Youre really more abiding to these rules that your husband has set up for you, that your religion has set up for you.Templeton, who has four children, told me she started thinking about divorce after realizing the effect her lifestyle could have on her daughters: Im showing them this example of the tradwife life, she thought, and theyre going to follow that.Today, she and her ex-husband share custody of the kids, and Templeton tries to emphasize to them that they dont have to have children if they dont want to. Im just constantly trying to get them to see and understand that the world has endless options for them, she said.Its not a lesson Sarah received growing up in her conservative evangelical community; girls were expected to become stay-at-home moms when they grew up. A tradwife lifestyle requires women to totally vacate their own lives, to relinquish any sort of autonomy or responsibility to know themselves, or to figure out what their place is in the world, because its already prescribed for you, she said.Even though Sarah chose to work, travel, and not have children, shes still found herself recreating the dynamics of her upbringing in her own life. It takes so long to undo that self-abandonment thats taught to you from such a young age, she said.For Doan, its even hard for me to know, like, what do I want for dinner, she told me. Because I was never allowed to want anything.While families leading any sort of trad lifestyle are a minority in the US, theyre getting outsized attention now as Trump and members of his administration valorize families with many children, criticize child-free people, and back further restrictions on reproductive rights. In a historical moment where there is an assault on feminism and assault on womens rights, tradwife content attempts to send the message that this isnt coercive, Du Mez said. Its actually going to liberate women to live their best lives.But Doan has a different message for children growing up in trad homes today. Hold tight to whatever makes you human, she said. You are worthy, and it gets so much better when you can leave.What Im readingThe chancellor of the New York City schools, the nations largest school district, issued a statement this week reaffirming the districts support for LGBTQ+ students, after President Trump issued an executive order targeting trans kids experience in schools.Some hospitals are resuming gender-affirming care for youth after an executive order threatening to withdraw federal funding from hospitals that provide such care was blocked by federal judges.An Idaho bill to eliminate all maximum child-to-adult ratios in child care facilities has advocates concerned about the quality and safety of early education programs.My older kid has been enjoying the Amulet graphic novel series, which is very beautifully illustrated and sort of reminds me of Myst. (Warning: There is some family tragedy and peril, and I will admit I have skipped some parts during bedtime reading.)From my inboxIn response to my essay last week on Arnold Lobels Owl at Home, reader Dennis Recio wrote that he still returns to the book from time to time, even at age 53. I think whats interesting about Owl at Home is the curious way there are no other persons in the story other than the owl, Recio said. He relates to an interior world all by himself and while he has some connection to nature the snow (which is the guest) or the moon, which follows him home there is a real sense of being with yet alone happening in this book.Ive also been watching the Trump administrations cuts to national parks, and Id love to hear from you about your experiences with these protected lands. Did you take a meaningful trip to a national park as a child? Have you taken the kids in your life to one of the parks? You can get in touch with national park (or any other) stories at anna.north@vox.com. See More: