By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.

Ever since she’d pulled me out of school, she had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blonde of its baby color. After reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.

She had me crawl whenever I was at home, which was most of the time. Mom home schooled me between fourth and eighth grades, and even today, as a parent who has come to see plainly how damaging those years were, I know that she believed that her choice was in my best interest.

It was the lack of state oversight or standards that allowed our situation. It was the laws that failed me. Today, as home-schooling numbers continue to surge, similar laws fail to protect millions of kids.

Not once, in the four and a half years I spent at home, did anyone from the state come to assess what sort of education I was receiving, or even just to check on me.

Those who oppose regulation claim that such cases are rare, and they rightfully argue that educational neglect and abuse happen at school as well. But we’ve created a system in which it’s impossible to know how common home-schooling abuse might actually be.