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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always been fascinated by Homeschooling and it’s outcomes

How did you feel it affected your ability to learn social skills and have a friend group?

Did your parents teach you or was there some kind of group of place you went to be homeschooled?

My parents did most of the teaching, with private music lessons and weekly co-op meetings (get-togethers with other homeschool families to socialize and swap educational expertise - a parent who's a working chemist might run a chem class one semester, while another parent might do a painting class).

By the time I was in high school, I was mostly teaching myself, going to my parents for help only when I was really stumped by something. For example, I did the equivalent of failing algebra twice, but there was no stigma or "can't math" track - my dad just started sitting down with me in the evenings when he got home from work to teach me, and I got it well enough after that.

Socially, I was a shy, untrusting kid, in retrospect, largely because one of my family's main social circles imploded when I was in about third grade.

That wasn't due to homeschooling per se, though, it was due to relationship dynamics and values conflicts between my parents and others.

We found new circles and I always had friends growing up.

I think I would have had a much tougher time socially and intellectually in a standard school environment. The way my psychology works and the experiences I've heard described by friends who went to public school have long made me grateful for my education.

I also got to have much closer relationships with my parents and siblings than I think most US citizens get to have. Others have commented in this discussion about US school being all-day childcare so both parents can work, but our family spent tons of time together, which I'm also very grateful for.

My wife and I are homeschooling our kids, for what it's worth. Our experiences definitely weren't perfect but we see a lot of value in investing in our kids this way.

It’s not just homeschooled students who never figure out social skills or gain a stable friend group until college.

Sure but there’s a correlation. I don’t know if it’s causative though. The socially awkward kids getting bullied at public school are those that are most likely to get pulled out and homeschooled.

Is there a correlation? The homeschooled kids I knew of weren't pulled out for bullies or any other issues.

Not necessarily bullies but who is a parent likely to pull out of school (ignoring the parents doing it for selfish reasons like religious extremism)? The kid who hates school and has no friends and sulks when it’s time to go or the kid who can’t wait to go and has tons of friends and is involved in school activities?

If someone is doing so badly is school (they get expelled or they cannot handle school, or have special needs and the parents cannot find/ be bothered to send them to a school further away), they may get home-schooled.

Yes, so there might be this cause and effect, but this is not a correlation, i.e. we haven't seen data, they may well be more well rounded individuals being home-schooled because there are more parents who decided home schooling as a way to enhance education.

The kids I knew weren't pulled out of school. They were homeschooled the whole time. It seemed to me that the reasons where mostly quality of education in the public school was poor and cost of private school was too high, as well as a little religious benefit maybe.

Also homeschooling isn't mainstream and is largely populated by parents with extremist religious beliefs that harm their children's development and who choose to homeschool because they are afraid of their child escaping into non coercive social relationships.

These are feelings, not facts.

Homeschooling is not largely populated by people with "extremist" beliefs. Such people are too low in number to be largely populating anything.

5 million parents in the US were officially homeschooling their kids as of the latest Pulse survey (done during COVID pandemic to see changes in families). [1]

There are about 56 million students attending school in the US right now [2]

So about 10% of kids are homeschooled. That's not mainstream but it's not such a small minority to be discounted, nor is it small enough to be largely populated by extremists.

1 https://hslda.org/post/census-data-shows-phenomenal-homescho...

2 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

This isn't true, and it hasn't been true in a long time. I've been involved in the homeschool community in Colorado for a decade, and we are, as far as I can tell, representative of the larger population with regard to religion, politics, and lifestyle, and even race to a good extent. In terms of politics, I'd actually say most of us skew liberal. The past few years we've seen an influx of queer kids, who are either obviously not gender- or sexually conformant, or questioning along those lines. Turns out, homeschool communities can offer an ideal refuge for queer kids, compared to the sheer unrelenting brutality of conventional school.

Depends on the particular community of course, but ours is good for that.

It did for me. Substantially. I had a rough childhood and homeschooling was one component so I don't know how much can be pinned to that one thing. It can be done well but has to be handled with care since isolation is dangerous. If your home situation is bad it will be very bad.

I got all my messed up social interaction from public (elementary) school, and homeschooling is how I met the people who helped me heal a little bit. Find other homeschoolers near you.

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