Homeschooled mid-life adult here (graduated high school in 2001)

Socialization is an issue because, depending on the size of the community you interacted with and how integrated your parents let you be with the rest of America, many of us who were more sheltered are literally from a different culture that people who live in the same country. I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.

I sometimes tell people I grew up the in the same geography as you, but not the same place.

> I have worked long and hard to be able to socialize with people from ‘Regular’ America, and I still, nearly 20 years after I graduated high school, and more easily socialize with people from a Midwestern conservative homeschooled background.

You're not missing anything.

Maybe it would help us all if coastal elites were able to socialize with people from "regular" America though.

There is no "regular America". It's a big diverse country. We only think that "coastal elites" aren't part of "real America" because the effect of the Electoral College in the 2016 election is fresh in our minds. Change a few historical decisions about state lines and we'd be talking about how the election of Hillary Clinton proves that middle America is out of touch with real Americans from California and New York.

I tend to think it's a good thing when people from one part of the US are able to socialize with other people in different situations. Insularity is a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in today.

This. I think acting like an adult is construed by other children as a lack of social skills, when it is actually great preparation for the 80-90% of their lives when they won't be children anymore. As adults, we remember all the "weird" homeschooled kids we knew as kids. But look around your office and see if you can identify someone as homeschooled (as opposed to any other, regular old kind of weird).

We're in the very early stages of homeschooling our kids and all we've noticed is that kids on the playground who go to school are surprisingly mean (obviously not most of them, but on average). Thanks to the internet, our kids aren't missing out on pop culture, but they're also not taking their social cues from the coolest 7 year old. Seems like a win-win.

Not sure I agree.

The kids I knew weren’t “acting like adults” in college - they were off.

Didn’t know how to hold a conversation, they were uncomfortable, and had a hard time with social cues and basic listening/including people in conversation.

If I had to speculate I’d guess they had a harder time modeling other people’s mental states along with just generally knowing less what to do - which I think comes from having less peer social exposure to learn from. This creates a feedback loop of social anxiety which can be limiting.

Part of the reason it may be hard to distinguish homeschooled people in the workplace is because they’re largely not there.

It’s hard enough to develop comfortable social skills even with siblings and a lot of exposure. I’d be worried that removing your kids from an environment where they’d get a lot of exposure makes this even harder for them in the long run.

Anecdote for anecdote, all of the homeschoolers I knew when I was younger (N of about 5 or 6) who I thought were fatally weird turned into perfectly normal adults and I'm ashamed to have been so judgmental.

As for homeschooled people in the workplace, my hunch is that there are more than you think there are, and you don't notice because they look like regular adults, but I have no proof! I happen to know a few professionals who were homeschooled, but I never would have known without having had a conversation about our kids and mentioning homeschooling.

That's cool - I'd hope that's generally the case. This could also be more evidence that it is an exposure issue and it takes longer for them to catch up.

I'd be curious to ask adults that were homeschooled if they would want to do the same for their kids.

I'd wonder even if it's the common case they end up perfectly normal adults if it's hard for them prior to that.

I think I'd be nervous about being able to do it effectively for my own kids (both for the social and academic reasons).

That doesn't mean I don't think it's a solvable problem and there is probably a way to create a community of people to do this well, but that might just end up looking like a secular private school.

Don’t have immediate plans to homeschool our children (4 and less than a year). We have found that the 4 year old does much better with outside authority than with us, plus he is a highly social creature who will benefit from the relationships at school, we think. He has done great at preschool, although no plan survives contact with the battlefield. Plus, my wife, while an educator, has no real desire to homeschool, and my career is the more lucrative one so I am likely to be the primary wage earner for now. We are open to homeschool if circumstances seem to dictate it.

Anecdote of 1. I have many friends who were homeschooled who homeschool their kids, and many who refuse to.

Also anecdotal but I was the first child of young parents with no siblings, cousins, or children of parents' friends around for a lot of my life. When other kids did come along in our social circle they were much younger so I spent a lot of time socializing with the adults instead. I had to consciously context-switch my behavior to a huuuuuuge degree whenever I spent time with my friends at school and such because acting the way I did in a lot of my life outside school just didn't work. Nobody would have understood how to relate to me. I've always been very social and never had any anxiety around it but I still had to put in some work to act normally around other kids/teenagers after spending so much time with adults. And I went to a normal public school and did a zillion activities with other kids!

> I’ve heard this narrative before but have yet to see it in real life. All the homeschooled kids I’ve met were years ahead of their peers in every respect, especially in social development. They carry themselves like adults

I don't think you're contradicting fossuser's narrative. Being correctly socialized (evaluated as an adult) is being maladjusted (evaluated as a student). By this theory, homeschooled kids are well equipped to interact with the world, but unsuited to interact with college students.

I was homeschooled until sophomore year of high school. While there were certainly some benefits and I don't totally resent my upbringing, I do feel like I've had to work extra hard to develop my social skills. I know dozens of other homeschooled kids and I would say that the vast majority of them ended up having major social deficiencies.

I don't regret being homeschooled through elementary school as it gave me plenty of opportunity to explore areas that I was interested in, only mildly regret missing middle school since many of my friends consider it a miserable time of their lives, but I absolutely regret missing freshman year of high school.

I would very highly recommend that any parents thinking about homeschooling their kids very thoroughly consider their choices. So many of the parents I knew taught their kids at home out of fear and ended up negatively impacting their children's lives dramatically.

> They carry themselves like adults and interact with adults as a peer at 16 or even younger.

This is exactly the problem. They can relate to adults but not to their teenage peers. I'd bet they feel terribly uncomfortable at social events with only kids their age present.

You're absolutely right. I was homeschooled K-12 and grew up hearing praise because I was good at "carrying myself like an adult" and socializing with adults, but I had no idea how to make friends or socialize with PEERS. Homeschool kids don't have the opportunity to have "cringe" moments that other posters here seem to regret and feel are unimportant to kids (or should avoided altogether) because they're often admonished to act like small adults.

Which, I'm guessing, just leads to cringe moments as adults? Sounds like you've turned it around nicely though! Do you feel like you caught up eventually?

It can lead to cringe moments as an adult, but more crucially I think it leads to fear of cringe moments, so you never really get the chance to fail, look like a goober, and reorient and try again. It also makes it easier to constantly judge other people for social slip ups or for not having a perfectly predictable personality.

I think I've mostly caught up. I moved to NYC for college, which was sort of my socialization boot camp. I learned how to start and maintain relationships VERY quickly. If you don't learn to like (or at least tolerate) just about any kind of human, the city can become very lonely and difficult.

A very stubborn part of my brain still judges Very Extroverted people and, weirdly, athletes. I'm working on it.

Thanks for asking!

I'm not sure that's very important. I cringe at a lot of my behavior as a teenager, and I was very good at being social. I mean, I'm still good at being social, but I had to unlearn a lot of the behavior that made me good at being social in school.

But imagine you didn't do any of those things and therefore weren't as social in high school. Would you be as well-adjusted as an adult? Or would you have felt isolated in ways that affected your development and left you worse off in adulthood? All the teenage cringe is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it's awful in retrospect.

I don't think I agree with that. I'm a big fan of Sasse's "the Vanishing American Adult." He points out that what you call "teenage cringe" is a fairly modern construct. For most of human history, teenagers were integrated into the adult world, not set apart and left to their own devices in the modern context of "school." It's a malign symptom, not a necessary developmental stage.

Yeah, I tend to think the world would be a better place if we made more room for young people in the adult world. I think kids are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for and I think setting them apart, as you say, erodes their ability to participate in the world and makes us want to set them even further apart. If we treated them like whole people who can do things, I think they would start acting like whole people who can do things, much, much earlier.

I totally agree with you on this. Kids can take on more responsibility than they're given today - see any generation that came of age before the last 15-20 years. It would benefit many of them enormously to do so (jobs, babysitting, driving, etc). I just think it's too easy as an adult to look back on your teenage years and project your current level of social and emotional development onto your younger self or teenagers in general.

Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.

Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment

The need to be a "jackass", "party"... in college and high school seems uniquely American (probably a couple other 1st world countries as well). Not only have we extended adolescence nearly indefinitely, we've invented a desperate need for people to embrace self-destructive behavior to better match pre-adult societal expectations. The 20th Century did a real number on people's personal and social philosophy. It's going to take generations to shake off "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll" as the primary motivator.

All of this is to say, that just because school better aligns an individual's behavior with that of their expected peer group, it doesn't mean that's a good thing.

While I don't share your opinion on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," that's not really what I'm talking about here either. I'm referring to learning how to navigate complex social relationships in a low-stakes environment. It's easy to roll your eyes at high school friend or relationship drama (because it's usually stupid) but you learn a lot about how to treat other people, how not to treat other people, how to expect other people to treat you in this world etc etc. It's a crash course in the complexity of social relationships that will heavily inform how you act in adulthood, like it or not. The context goes from "Susie and Bobby kissed at the dance and I was jealous so then I kissed Bobby and now Susie won't speak to me" to "I'm jealous of Susan's relationship with Bob, but I know that hurting Susan isn't going to solve anything because the problem is my unfulfilling relationship and acting out like that will only cause me to lose a friend." Silly example but I'm tired and I hope you get the idea.

None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids (nerdy/sheltered). When I say "jackass" I'm specifically referring to the guys who were like this in high school, who were invariably the ones in college doing stupid things at parties to impress their new friends and also treating girls like crap because they were suddenly thrown into a social whirlwind they couldn't handle with any level of maturity.

> None of this is stuff you learn by spending your teenage years exclusively with siblings (homeschooled) or chilling out playing video games 24/7 with a couple other quiet kids

To be fair, I don’t think anyone learns much that is important by being socially sheltered like you describe. When I advocate homeschooling, that is not what I mean.

Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another. Healthy homeschooling necessarily involves intentionally finding social outlets for kids and teenagers, which is harder than letting school stand in—but, I would argue—is much easier when the adults in the family are pursuing healthy relationships and social outlets with other adults in various walks of life who are raising kids of their own (and I don’t mean at bars, dance clubs, etc.; there are still some non-kid-hostile places where adults and kids can both socialize with peers and be involved in something they enjoy, like churches, volunteering, fishing, hiking, biking, sports, etc.).

> Sadly, our culture has lost many of the (adult) social constructs that used to bring people together, leaving school as one of the only viable options for kids to be social with one another.

I think you're onto something here, especially because teenagers these days reportedly spend less time with friends than any previous generation. As a 2010 high school grad I always find these stats pretty alarming: http://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-th...

Feels like kids get home from school and immediately get online - they mainly interact with peers through social media and video games, which is totally different from being face to face. That has to be detrimental in some way. Most parents probably work so much they don't have time to have their own hobbies to share with their kids so unless the kids are on sports teams year round they're likely not doing a whole lot of IRL socializing outside of school. I think more kids are being socially sheltered these days, homeschooled or not.

Homeschool kids don't have to be isolated though, and as you say the nerdy kids at regular school are the ones that exhibit this type of behavior (which isn't bad btw, people mature at different rates). I think it's not as difficult to socialize as a homeschooler as you think it is. In fact they're often at a distinct advantage for socialization because they're usually not burdened by hours of homework so have more free time to hang out with their friends. They also can have more unstructured play time during the day if their parents choose to go that route.

Good point about homework, honestly I didn't even consider that angle. The only homeschooled kid I know is my cousin, whose parents homeschooled him because they considered him some kind of special genius (he's smart but no smarter than your average high achieving kid). He's in college now and a nice kid but just feels a bit off. They didn't homeschool either of his siblings and both of them are much better adjusted socially. Tiny sample size and definitely biased but all three grew up with the same parents, same level of extracurricular activities, etc and the only one who's not all there socially is the homeschooled one. Obviously I'm a bit biased though!

These are all great points, thank you!

I don't really mind the embarrassing things, I cringe about the times I acted like a jackass in pursuit of social approval. I was relatively well-behaved as far as it goes, but I still wasn't as compassionate as I should have been and I think I would absolutely have been better off if I had never been tempted to seek status among high schoolers.

The kids I’m referring to had and have great, healthy friendships with peers.

I’d have mentioned it if I had anticipated this response.

A family I know just decided to home school their daughter because the school didn't have adequate support for her disability. (Tourette's)

The home school group will always include more unusual cases that didn't fit the public school mold. So the entire group gets labeled, when we really should just probably avoid stereotypes for that group.

There are just too many vastly different reasons someone could be home schooled. They could be preforming at a higher level than average, or lower. Yes in general they have less access to peers their own age, but I don't know what percent of "poor social skills" is due to lack of social exposure.