Our older daughter is getting confirmed in our church this coming Sunday. She and two other young people in our church have been attending confirmation classes for two years, so this is something of a Big Deal.

So, naturally, the thought of a pretty and appropriate new dress came to mind.

My parents are in town staying through the end of June, and they decided to take Older Daughter...(ominous drum roll)...shopping.

Putting aside the fact that both my girls hate shopping (they get that from me), they came home empty-handed. According to my mother, they went to seven or eight stores, including Sears, Penny's, and a host of smaller places, and found -- nothing.

It's not that there weren't any dresses, of course. It's that the dresses they found were patently unsuited to a church function. In other words, immodest. Lots of short skirts and spaghetti straps, according to my daughter. Even the saleswomen at the stores, she reports, admitted they had nothing suitable for church wear.

"It's funny," she mused later on. "I've seen pictures from when Grandma was a young woman, and all the dresses make women look - I don't know - elegant somehow. Gracious."

Contrast that with today, when all the dresses seem to make women look tarty. At least, all the dresses they found in regular retail stores.

"It's like the fashions for 14 to 18 year olds are now meant for 8 to 12 year olds," Older Daughter commented last night. "And fashions for girls my age are too adult."

Fortunately she has a dress (picked up at a thrift store) which is suitable to wear next Sunday, but I'll still take her shopping this week - at thrift stores. While we exclusively shop in thrift stores anyway, increasingly we're realizing that it's the only place we CAN shop if I want to keep my daughters from looking like tarts. At least thrift stores are not slaves to "fashion."

Occasionally some non-comprehending troglodyte will question us as to why we homeschool. The implication, of course, is that we're raising a couple of stunted misfits who will never amount to anything.

For us the reasons we homeschool have never been about religious instruction or academic superiority or anything like that (though of course those are serious considerations). No, from the first, the primary reason we've chosen to homeschool is because of...socialization.

Which is pretty funny when you think about it, because that's the Numero Uno argument the public school defenders always bring up. "What about socialization?" they'll bleat, as if socialization were the sole and exclusive reason children attend school in the first place.

Just this morning I read a news article about the use of inhalants by 12-year-olds. Twelve! My youngest daughter will be twelve in two months!

"When their kids turn 12," says the CNN article, "parents are concerned about peers pressuring them to smoke cigarettes, drink and use drugs, but it turns out 12-year-olds are doing something else: getting high on inhalants.

"A new national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report finds that they're using inhalants more than marijuana, hallucinogens and cocaine combined.

"Some young people are sniffing -- inhaling -- a wide variety of products to get high. Inhalants are legal, cheap and everywhere. They can easily be found in most homes: spray paint, shoe polish, glue, air fresheners, hair spray, nail polish, gasoline, aerosols, computer cleaners, even the refrigerant from air conditioners."

So...does it still strike you as abnormal that we prefer to keep our daughters away from this kind of "socialization"?

Schools today are so damned obsessed with sex, political correctness, and academic mediocrity that I question how anyone could, in good conscience, subject their innocent children to this kind of sludge. The emphasis on children today is to grow up too fast. That's why such outfits as Ambercrombie and Fitch have clothing suitable for "prosti-tots."

But why? Why must children grow up so fast? Why must their innate innocence be stripped away so rapidly? My "tween" daughter is mature for her age (I'll specify that's mental maturity) but she retains an air of sweetness, wholesomeness and (dare I say it) childishness I find wonderful. And why shouldn't she act like a child? She IS one.

She also shows remarkable discernment about young people her age. It's become something of a standing joke with both our daughters. We'll pass a teenage boy who looks, well, like a typical teenage boy...and one or the other daughter will whisper, "Hey mom! Is that the kind of boy you want me dating?" I consider this superb practice for when they really are dating.