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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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