For basic social skills development for ages ~4-7 it only matters that they are around other children. Ideally this is with a lot of unstructured time. The "quality" of the other 5 year olds doesn't matter, humans are social animals and childhood play with other children is know to be critical in development. Closing schools for a year in much of the US was an unmitigated disaster for childhood development. No other OECD nation did this.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that by age 7 the average quality of peers has diverged significantly between bad schools and good ones. Do you want your children hanging out with defiant, unmotivated children who view school as a jail and run around shooting spitballs, spewing racial slurs, and even bringing weapons to school?

You're totally missing the thrust of the discussion. Being around other children is necessary for normal language acquisition, learning emotional regulation, self-regulation, speech skills, and on and on. Children below a certain age HAVE to be around other children to develop normally. This is well established and has nothing to do with the proper behavior or socioeconomic status of the other children.

> You're totally missing the thrust of the discussion. Being around other children is necessary for normal language acquisition, learning emotional regulation, self-regulation, speech skills, and on and on.

Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults, but must learn them from other children for some reason?

> Are you suggesting that children can't learn these skills from adults

It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this. I'm in no way an expert here, but I've never once seen an expert claim that adult contact substitutes for peer contact in developing these skills.

> It is well established that normal development REQUIRES contact with other children. Any specialist in early childhood development or education will tell you this.

I admit I smell a little bullshit on this as there are a number of red flags here.

What constitutes "normal" is a subjective judgment relative to a culture. More culture-neutral professions use metrics like "health" in medicine, which are far less loaded, ie. if a particular environment leads to self-destructive behaviours, that's an "unhealthy" environment; but there is notion of a "normal" environment or a "normal" lifestyle. Since you seem fairly adamant that this sort of socializing is crucial, you will have to clarify if you meant "healthy development" rather than "normal development", because the former may be of interest but the latter is of no particular interest.

Furthermore, specialists in early childhood development and education would of course be chock full of good advice, but that advice is based on evidence that was also almost certainly studied within a specific cultural context. I'm not at all convinced that such advice constitutes general principles on how any healthy children must be raised.

If you have citations I'd certainly like to read them.

Splitting hairs on "normal" isn't the argument you think it is. There are normal developmental milestones in childhood[1], it's a term of art. For 5year olds it includes things like "Speaks in sentences of 5 or more words, and with all parts of speech", or "shows less aggression". Again, this isn't controversial stuff, ask any pediatrician, or early childhood education specialist. Hell talk to a speech pathologist.

> a specific cultural context

This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.

If you insist that I have to provide citations to convince you of the consensus here are a few. Vocabulary[2]. An article specifically about the effects of school closures[3]. I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?

[1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm

[2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...

None of those studies isolate peer interaction. As such they are a valid indication of the effect of school closures but the event is multivariate and you can draw no conclusions about the peer interaction effects directly. It amounts to "The experts say peer interaction is important so that must be one of the variables at play here" But the actual research some of which I cite in my sibling comment indicates the opposite.

> There are normal developmental milestones in childhood[1], it's a term of art. For 5year olds it includes things like "Speaks in sentences of 5 or more words, and with all parts of speech", or "shows less aggression".

Yes, milestones for western cultures.

> This has very little bearing on things like brain development, or language acquisition. Childhood play is evolved behavior.

Cultural context has little bearing on brain development or language acquisition? Sorry, that's crazy talk. I was raised in a bilingual household, so by any quantitative metric I had twice the language acquisition of all of my peers when entering school, and my nieces and nephews are actually trilingual. Culture has a huge influence on milestones.

"Brain development" is too vague a term to meaningful respond to. Also, "childhood play" doesn't mean "play only among children" it means "play with children". Adults can easily play with children. I do it all of the time.

> I could keep going but I almost can't believe someone here is arguing that peer interaction isn't vitally important for childhood development. Do you actually believe that?

Yes, I have seen literally no reason to conclude that children must interact with other children to grow up healthy. As for your citations:

> [1]https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002456.htm

A review of normal biological maturation of homo sapiens (uncontroversial), sprinkled with a plethora of cultural expectations around maturity needed for schooling and other western expectations which neither hold for other cultures, nor are they some kind of mark of a pinnacle of human growth. I could easily see some of these milestones change in the next 20 years as we better grasp what's happening during human maturation.

> [2]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13670050.2020.17...

Its own synopsis says this is a qualitative study. That's little better than an anecdote to pique curiosity for further study. It proves nothing substantial, and certainly not that this child wouldn't have learned even faster if interacting only with adults, who naturally have an even better grasp of language than children.

> [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...

This does not prove your thesis, quite the contrary. Per the abstract, "High school students from low-income neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations after a one-year school closure, whereas children from high-income neighborhoods initially remain unscathed."

In other words, children that have parents with good jobs (or a parent at home), or other adults that are around to supervise and interact with do just fine, it's only children that are left to their own devices that suffer learning loss. Where is the evidence that peer interaction is critical, which is what you claimed?

There is no evidence that the "great equalization" effect of school has to do with peer interaction at all, it's equally compatible with the hypothesis that poorer kids do better in a more supervised environment where they have to act within certain boundaries enforced by adults, which they otherwise wouldn't have with parents that are abusive, neglectful or have to work too much to put food on the table.

There's also considerable evidence that after school programs reduce crime because they spend less unsupervised time with peers, which reduces delinquent behaviour. In other words, the more time children spend with responsible adults the better off they tend to be, and the more unsupervised time they spend with peers, the more delinquent they tend to be.

So in conclusion, I see no strong, causal connection between peer interaction and healthy development. Positive human interactions matter of course (preferably diverse), but not necessarily peer interactions, which is what you are claiming.

Your still going to find basic spoken language acquisition happens at roughly the same rate across cultures. Sure, expectations around learning milestones are subjective but we’re talking about school closures in the US anyway.

You aren’t pointing to any evidence that peer socialization isn’t really important.

You haven't pointed to any evidence that it is important either, and that's what I asked for. The other poster rightly pointed out some citations demonstrating that the evidence for this conclusion is effectively non-existent.

Absent any evidence I have no reason to accept your assertion that children "require" such interactions, particularly since it makes no sense to me. As I said, positive human interactions are clearly essential as the negative effects of isolation are dramatic, but I see no reason why peer interactions specifically are essential and there's no comparably clear, strong signal as with isolation.

Anecdotal evidence only but I and my two brothers were all homeschooled and learned these skills from our parents. There is a great deal opinion among child development experts that is not necessarily backed up by evidence. I would need to see some peer reviewed studies before I would be willing to believe these assertions.

I suspect that the truth is that children need play and interaction to build social skills but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant. The challenge in the pandemic of course is that the parents did not really have capacity to engage in those activities due to their own jobs and Video Conferencing is a very poor substitute. But suggesting that it has to be other children is probably incorrect. It's just a hypothesis on my part though.

> I and my two brothers

I think you're probably underestimating how much you learned this from each other.

> but that whether this involves other children in any specific quantity is irrelevant.

Again, this very much runs contrary to the general consensus about childhood development. If you disagree, then you need to bring some facts and research to the argument.

I have only anecdotal evidence so this is a fair point. However I'll point out that I have not seen the experts provide facts or research either so it appears that they have the same obligation.

In fact a cursory survey of the research I can publicly get access to indicates that parent-child, or teacher-child interactions are considered very essential for moral and social development and there is very little mention that I can find of inter-child interactions as a critical part. Most of the research that I can find highlights the importance of adult-child interactions. If you can point me to some studies that counteract that I'm interested.

I suppose I should provide some links to what I was able to find:

Contra studies on the importance of inter-child interactions: * https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2187-3_...

* https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Child-care-and-childre...

Study indicating that most of the assessment instruments supporting inter-child interactions and their importance is flawed: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001440298305000310