Home-Schooling and Social Development (mentally, mom, husband, college)

[reds37win]

So, this thread emerged as a result of another thread in another forum where the OP clearly showed signs of delayed social development. It started me thinking about where there are so many threads being opened by people with obvious developmental issues as they reach their late teens, twenties and beyond.

Home schooling has really taken off in the past 10-15 years. Could there be a correlation between home-schooling and delayed social development?

A close friend of mine home-schools her daughter, but I can't really use her as an example because she is autistic, albeit highly functional. I would attribute that to her lack of social growth as much as any other reason.

So, I need input from others who have either home-schooled their kids or knows someone who was home-schooled.

How would you rate their social development?

[oh-eve]

I lived next to a widow who was homeschooling her three kids. The youngest one (girl) seemed okay. They were 9, 12, and 15.


They mostly all played together. The 15 year old still cried when he had to do "homework" and he still believed in Santa Clause but his mom said "it gets more difficult every year." She came over to my house to wrap and hide Christmas presents.


The 15 year old still played with swords in the back yard and his only exposure to women was that he hid pictures of women in bikinis (torn out of magazines) in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house. The 9 year old slept in the same bed as her mom.


Mom (very intelligent but delusional) was overwhelmed with the three kids and said she cannot wait until they move out and go to college but prepared neither of her kids for a life without her.


Once a month they met other homeschool families to play soccer. The girl had one friend but the other two had no friends. All three stuck together like glue.


Not healthy. I wonder if the two older ones will turn into addicts or if they stay with mommy forever. I don't see either of them having a normal life once they are adults.

[mordant]

I homeschooled my daughter from 4th thru 8th grade and my son from preschool to 4th.

My daughter is more social than I am, very appropriately assertive concerning things like finding work and establishing friendships, and I would rate her a couple notches higher than average in "social development". My son is a compete turd socially but I attribute that to diagnosed personality disorder; I don't think his public education did anything to improve on that either, nor would I expect a different outcome if he's been conventionally educated from the get-go.

My daughter, now in her late 30s, home schools her own children. She's returning one of them to public school as he enters 9th grade, and that's a combination of it being more difficult to do a good job of home schooling beyond that point, and the fact that he's a difficult child and she's just burnt out. She has discovered what I did, and this is why, if I knew then what I knew now, I wouldn't have home schooled my children at all: the roles of parent and teacher really don't mix that well for the most part. Kids get you coming and going in the manipulation department there.

There are so many ways to do a good (and bad) job of home schooling that I think it would be a mistake to attribute some general societal trend to the uptick in home schooling's popularity. Below the middle school level particularly, it's not exactly rocket science to tutor your children, and takes far less hours per day than the inherently inefficient delivery mechanisms of the classroom. In conventional schools, kids spend most of their day going from class to class, standing in line, being managed -- and if they're bright, marking time while the other kids in the class soak up most of the teacher's efforts -- and relatively little time actually being taught things. And many basic things can be better taught in context of every day life than in some contrived classroom setting.

Social needs can be met in a variety of ways. Home schooling is seldom 100% done in the parent's home. There are teaching cooperatives, where parents with particular skills and strengths teach other people's kids specialized things. There are field trips, and increasingly, the ability to be involved in conventional schools selectively. My grandson for instance was part of a robotics team at the local middle school, and they won national awards for their work. So it is wrong to think that home schooling is inherently insular and necessarily skips over important group learning experiences.

My grandsons are independently tested annually even though their state of residence doesn't require it. My daughter has enough horse sense to know she needs on objective reality check. They always test out to meet or exceed commonly accepted educational standards.

It's also not true that homeschooling is mostly the province of fundamentalist religious wingnuts seeking to enforce an intellectual ghetto for their children, free of godless evolution and the like. My daughter and her husband are atheists and work with other atheist / agnostic / religiously unaffiliated homeschooling parents, even though they live in the Bible Belt. Her motivations are more along the lines of educational quality, communication of values, and helping her older son with some OCD and ADD issues that local schools had very substandard support for.

I was an evangelical back when I homeschooled my children (I am an unbeliever now myself) and my reasons were partly religious at the time, but my kids both hit the ground running when I returned them to public school and ran into no brick walls at all, and needed no remedial tutoring, and made plenty of friends (even my son) and seemed to participate quite normally in the social life of school.

Now to the question of delayed social development and its actual common causes.

I would say that helicopter parenting is far more widespread than homeschooling, and I would look to trends like that for why children are self-absorbed and/or socially stunted or inappropriate. Also, "socially inappropriate" is a subjective term that changes from generation to generation. My stepchildren were NOT homeschooled but they were about 10 years younger than my biological children and I regard them as socially stunted anyway. Why? Well, ironically, one of the reasons people homeschool their children is that they want to have more influence over their development. When you think about it, the main influence for a conventionally schooled child in terms of where they spend the vast majority of their time, is their peers, and secondarily, their teachers. Particularly from about middle school on and especially if they are in any sort of advanced classes, your children come home stressed out and overloaded with homework and you're lucky if they are mentally and emotionally present even for dinner. It was not uncommon for my stepchildren to hit the books as soon as they got home, and continue to study until 1 or 2 am most days, and their parents were not flogging this, it was strictly competitive pressures. Both of them strike me as socially naive and unrealistic and in the case of one of them, downright late blooming by several years, compared to my own children and to myself and my peers in high school and post-secondary education.

So ... I think you're misplaced to focus on home schooling exclusively. Consider the test culture that developed in conventional secondary education since the turn of the century*, combined with overcompensation by anxious parents seeking to shelter their children from anything unpleasant.

* This is not to be underestimated. I highly recommend the documentary, Race to Nowhere for a solid overview of this important issue.

[mordant]

Originally Posted by oh-eve

The 9 year old slept in the same bed as her mom.

Yes this co-sleeping thing is increasingly common even outside of home schooling. It is a failure to establish appropriate and healthy boundaries that are needed by both children AND parents.

Beyond co-sleeping there is the practice of nursing children up to 4, 5 or 6 years old and even beyond, as well as the trend of whipping out your engorged breast in full public view whenever your child demands a sip of milk.

These issues are not caused by home schooling, but people who don't understand the importance of developing independence and confidence in their children, progressively throughout childhood, are incidentally attracted to homeschooling because it decreases the social pressure to raise their children in an appropriate manner.

Originally Posted by oh-eve

Mom (very intelligent but delusional) was overwhelmed with the three kids and said she cannot wait until they move out and go to college but prepared neither of her kids for a life without her.

I agree she is probably in for a pretty rude awakening. As, sadly, are her children.

One thing she probably doesn't understand is that in modern technological society it is increasingly difficult to adequately educate a child beyond middle school level, or even from the middle school level. When you are teaching the alphabet and multiplication tables, it really doesn't require a college education to do that. But once they have to start learning computing, calculus, chemistry, biology ... I think you really need specialists in each of those areas. There's a reason that there's a transition from one teacher for all subjects to different ones for different subjects.

She also doesn't understand that letting go is something you do gradually throughout a child's development. It doesn't just magically happen when they turn 18 or something. She's not giving them the experience they need. You are right, her thinking is quite muddled.

The question is: is she like this because of home schooling? I would say that she's home schooling because she's like this. And I know for a fact that home schooling can be done for other reasons. and motivations.

[Metaphysique]

Originally Posted by reds37win

So, this thread emerged as a result of another thread in another forum where the OP clearly showed signs of delayed social development. It started me thinking about where there are so many threads being opened by people with obvious developmental issues as they reach their late teens, twenties and beyond.

Home schooling has really taken off in the past 10-15 years. Could there be a correlation between home-schooling and delayed social development?

There are a lot of factors here, such as:

Reasons for homeschooling -- religious, low performing schools in the area/district, providing specialized instruction/learning, bullying, etc.?
Location/region
Sheltered?
Parents doing the teaching and their own educational and social backgrounds
Personality of the homeschooled students

Let's consider the reality that "homeschooling" can take on different forms and approaches, and is not practiced the same universally. I know a lot of homeschoolers, both when I was hard core religious, and now as an atheist with other atheist/non-religious friends who homeschool. These two homeschooling cultures are vastly different, nevermind that location/region plays a role in the culture and environment these kids are raised/taught in.

For example, my stepmom homeschooled her boys. They're on the spectrum, but that isn't the main reason for why they were homeschooled. My dad and stepmom are super, hard core religious and do not like secular education. They were not about to expose their boys to it. So they homeschooled them in an environment that aligned nicely with their religious ideals and were kept in this bubble throughout the 12 years of schooling (basically only associating with other kids in the church and religious homeschooling community). The curriculum, A Beka in the beginning, was the basis for their education. It's hard to say whether their homeschooling culture/environment is solely responsible for their social awkwardness. The fact that they're on the spectrum contributes to this.

My husband's older sister is also a religious homeschooler. Two of her three kids are... socially awkward. They were also insulated in this religious homeschooling culture. And I have many more friends who fit this description, and having been part of these communities, I have some intimate knowledge of their innerworkings. But even then, "homeschooling" can take on many different forms, and even families who are religious, their approach can be very different, or even not really religious.

I've contemplated homeschooling (private or public virtual learning) my older two kids. I live in an area with a large homeschooling community, and there's a sub-section of non-religious homeschoolers (which we'd be). There are many coops and clubs for homeschoolers and businesses that cater to homeschooling activities and groups. I also live in a metro/large city with many educational options and ways to incorporate social activities into their schooling. If I were to homeschool my older two, they wouldn't struggle socially, because they're well-adapted to many social settings in and outside the home and school, and have many opportunities to socialize with not only peers, but adults as well.

How would you rate their social development?

Are there specifics you're asking about? Like how these kids socialize with others, whether they're shy, timid, awkward, exhibit low EQ? My kids aren't homeschooled, but I've considered it on many occasions. (we'd choose the secular approach)