Homeschooling and the Freedom to be Uncool

That better be a Stanley cup you’re sipping from!

While driving one morning, I heard the radio host play a TikTok video. 

A distraught mother explained how her nine-year-old daughter came home from school in tears. Turns out the mean girls didn’t approve of her cup.

“Cup?,” I thought. “Kids are bringing cups to school?”

As many of you probably already know, it wasn’t just a cup it was a Stanley cup.

It has little or nothing to do with hockey. It’s just a reusable water bottle—sometimes called a tumbler and officially it’s a “quencher"—but it’s also the latest must-have product according to social media influencers and celebs. ​​

The hashtag #stanleytumbler has attracted nearly seven billion views on TikTok. And if you happen to encounter a post-workout Olivia Rodrigo, don’t be surprised if she’s sporting a Stanley. 

Trouble is our nine-year-old protagonist didn’t bring Olivia Rodrigo’s cup to school. She brought the one mom purchased. At Walmart. 

So uncool! 

So how did mom respond to the weeping child? 

Did she use the episode to talk about consumerism or the dangers of following the crowd? Did she address the bandwagon fallacy or explain what gives humans inherent worth and dignity?

No, mom did none of that.

Instead she bought her daughter the damn Stanley cup.

Fearing Independent Thought

An entertainment executive friend of mine once told me about his days working for one of the biggest studios. He and his team would corral a bunch of kids and conduct focus groups. They’d show the kids a movie poster, tell them about the movie, and ask them what they thought about it. This giant corporation also enforced a rather peculiar rule—no homeschool kids. 

The studio had deemed homeschool kids to be too independent minded. Execs learned that a single homeschool kid could “pollute” an entire focus group. 

Instead of accepting the movie as described, homeschool kids would speak up about problems they had with the story and characters. The other kids would often follow their lead, leading to a frustrating experience for the execs.

How could they learn more about typical consumers if these atypical kids kept stirring up trouble? 

Fueling Fads

My friend knew I would get a kick out of that anecdote because he knows my wife and I homeschool our son.

Our son is the same age as Mama TikTok’s daughter, but he has never urged us to buy him the hot new thing that all the other kids have. From cups to clothes, he’s (so far) shown no interest in any type of brand-name anything.

He went through a phase where he made his own clothes, and by “made” I mean he’d use markers to draw pictures on white T-shirts. He’d wear those T-shirts everywhere. 

He went through a longer phase of wearing costumes as clothes. He’d don the uniforms of many including an astronaut, Roman soldier, and medieval knight. (You should see the grins he got at Albertsons.) 

I’ve noticed a similar disinterest in name-brand fads among the other homeschoolers in our neighborhood.

One of my son’s homeschool friends was teased during a bus ride to a baseball game. Other members of his team chided him for using the “wrong” kind of bat (another Walmart purchase!).