Homeschooling hits record numbers

How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not?

I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.

Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad.

Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.

We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.

I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.

More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?

My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things

Oh I see - I guess I hadn’t thought of homeschooling that way (in a group with extracurriculars).

I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.

Thanks.

Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.

Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)

These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted

> Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences

It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.

Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.

You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?

This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.

We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.

30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.

[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.

Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well.

It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.

I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.

Hopefully they learn how to deal with them instead of picking up their communication style.

Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.

This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.

> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well

Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?

Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.

>(whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)

Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.

> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.

It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.

> I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense?

That largely depends on the parents. Many are _wildly_ unfit for this.

I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.

Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?

It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?

Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?

Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).

Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?

If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.

As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.

> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?

Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.

> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society

Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)

Absolutely agreed. There is likely a much higher proportion of unfit parents vs unfit teachers (though the latter category is a non zero number). There is also an economic element to this scenario. My spouse can stay home with the kids while I go to work, this is not at all common in our modern day and age. There are tremendous sacrifices that a family must make to do this and I think that anyone wanting to homeschool because it will be 'easier' is setting themselves up for hurt. Much like the folks who get into programming because the pay is good... It won't be what you think.