Homeschooling a child does not tend to cause social deficiency in that child.

I used to be nice and outgoing, but after going through the hell that was secondary school I became a total introvert. Funny that.

oliverroy, that says nothing about the truth of this claim.

Just because secondary school had that effect on you, says nothing about what homeschooling tends to do.

over here all the homeschooled children I have known have been odd in some way. however, it is MUCH less popular over here and therefore they may have tended to be odd for many other reasons.

But are they "odd" in the negative sense of the word, nic, or just unusual? I make the distinction because I view the first kind of oddness to be much more socially detrimental than the second king.

s/king/kind/

@bignose I was just pointing out the irony. It's not my job to prove claims.

Certainly the lack of home-schooling didn't help me either.

*fist bump* @ kriebly

@rascher ermmm... well, odd. I certainly wouldn't seek them out as adults. but then again there aren't many people I would do that with, me being of a cantankerous, curmudgeobly bent.

Interesting. In my experience, children and young adults who excel homeschooling environments tend to be a bit quirky by nature, but most of the homeschoolers and former homeschoolers I've fun into aren't odd in a way that makes them socially undesirable. I think the added socialization with adults (which adds to and doesn't replace socialization with other children) helps homeschool students function well socially as they grow up.

Full disclosure: I was a homeschool student, and I do consider myself somewhat socially awkward, but I don't think the homeschooling caused or encouraged the awkwardness. On the contrary, I think the knack for adaptability and thinking outside the box which my education instilled in me is largely responsible for my ability to deal with my awkwardness in such a way that it does not significantly affect my day-to-day life. As is, I feel that I can be passably normal when desire or necessity requires normalcy. Had I gone to public (i.e. state run) school, I don't think I'd do anywhere near as well in social interactions.

I really have no data about the effects of homeschooling. I *do* know that a lot of homeschooling champions are explicit in their desire to keep their children dumb, but I could not speak to the degree of success these schemes enjoy.

OTOH, bcat seems a fairly well-adjusted, extremely clever, and quite wise individual, a few religion-induced dysfunctions notwithstanding. He'd be a great poster child for the practice if he did not have to compete for attention with the morons who think that education comes from Satan.

D'A

I think it's difficult to say. I know of no studies. And a child is more likely to be homeschooled if the child is having problems at school, which means that homeschooled kids are already a non-representative subset of the population. The other likely cause of homeschooling is a parental decision. Since this decision is not that common, it means that there is some other environmental factor that is less common in the case of homeschooled kids. So assigning any issues to the homeschooling is very difficult to do, even if there is a tendency toward weirdness in homeschooled kids.

The only person I can think of offhand I knew reasonably well in person who had been homeschooled was quite capable and a lovely person. But that's not any real info other than to show that a child can be homeschooled and do fine.

"A child is more likely to be homeschooled if the child is having problems at school."

Cite?

Sorry, I don't have any citations. It's just that the case I can think of is someone whose parents started homeschooling her because she was having problems at school. She did remarkably well when homeschooled. I know of various people whose intent is to have their kids in school, but if the school isn't working out, then they homeschool. I know of stories of kids with disabilities who have been in school, until their parents ran into problems and decided they could do better. It just seems sensible that some of the kids who are homeschooled are homeschooled because their parents felt they had to in order to help their child. It wasn't their primary choice, but when the school didn't work out, they did the best they could for their kid and found another option.

Some kids are certainly homeschooled because it is their parents' preference, but some parents just do it as plan b.

I suppose it goes the other way around too though. There must be kids whose parents wanted to homeschool them, but when homeschooling didn't work out they put their children into schools. I haven't heard of such, but it must happen. It's possible that happens often enough to have it not be more common for a child to be taken out of school due to problems with the schooling.

Yeah, it happens in the opposite direction as well. Sometimes parents find that homeschooling is too hard, or too expensive, for example. In other cases, a kid might feel that homeschooling just isn't working well for them, for various reasons. And that's perfectly fine. Homeschooling isn't right for every parent and every child. I have no problem with a family transitioning away from homeschooling in part or entirely, provided that they give it a fair chance first.

Personally, I didn't think parents pulling kids out of traditional school and teaching them at home was anywhere near as common as parents choosing to homeschool their kids from the beginning. However, I think the fact that I'm (presumably) closer to the homeschooling community than you are is effecting our differences in perspective. You would likely hear of homeschooling primarily when it's related to traditional school in some way, e.g. when kids make the transition from a transitional to a home-based learning environment. On the other hand, I'm less familiar with traditional school by virtue of not having attended one, so I view homeschooling as something that one just "always does", not a secondary option.

That makes sense. From the stats I can find, they do not make it clear how many parents pull their kids out of schools because of issues in the schools (as opposed to fear of issues). But I think it looks like about 10-15% are probably homeschooled because of issues those kids had or are particularly likely to have with schools.

My point is just that since who is homeschooled is not a representative sample of the population, you cannot judge the merits or demerits of homeschooling just by looking at the results. We don't know what results those people would have had in a traditional school. We need to find a sample that roughly approximates who gets homeschooled. This is always a problem when measuring things in the real world where you get your samples by individuals opting in or opting out; that creates an immediate bias. It;s very hard to actually measure effects rigorously, and it generally is not possible to randomly assign kids to regular schools or homeschooling.

Among other factors, I would expect homeschoolers to have more involved parents who are more motivated to put effort into parenting. That is likely to be beneficial (if the parents are not abusive, unfortunately a desire to isolate children to prevent abuse from being discovered is also a motive to homeschool, and while it's the minority, it is deeply unfortunate) and those children would have better outcomes even if they had been in traditional schools.

I personally have very little of an opinion about homeschooling other than that I think it works in some cases and not in others, and that I have no problem with people doing it so long as they're not so stubborn on insisting on continuing if it does not seem to be working for their child. But I do think sometimes it can work out remarkably well, since you can tailor the pace better to the individual, which is useful.

On a side note, the abuse problem really does bother me. While most homeschooled kids will not be abused, and many kids who go to schools are abused, it is easier for abuse to not get caught the more isolated the victim is, and it is easier to isolate a child if you homeschool the child. This makes homeschooling a way to protect abusers, and I do not like that. I do not blame homeschooling itself though.

I think I would be in favor of one week each year of making homeschooled kids go to a special evaluation where they talk to people about what they've been learning, write stories about what a typical school day is like for them, get taught things about signs of abuse and telling people, and evaluated for whether there seem to be any serious problems in their environment. If not, send them back for more homschooling, if so, evaluate further. I don't think one week each year is much to ask for or would really disrupt families much.

Although what I really want is for everybody to get an annual mental health check up, the same way we encourage physical health check ups. This would help to give abused kids a better chance of getting noticed, but it'd also help to spot other problems. How many people have a child commit suicide and say they didn't realize how depressed the person was? (Gee, your teen is moody, not exactly the best warning sign.) How many cases have I read about a parent killing his/her own children because they couldn't take it any more, and I think, if only someone had intervened before it got to this point. I think it'd be good for all people to have someone check for problems before they become huge. But it's hard to do in a culture that stigmatizes receiving mental health care. Fortunately, the stigma is decreasing.

Public school and homeschooling can both cause this, or they might not. It depends.

Indeed, that's true. There are definitely some cases where it can be a bad thing. That said, I still think homeschooling is not a negative thing in general, and I still recommend that parents (and their school-age children) give it serious consideration.

I was both homeschooled and public schooled, and I am 100% socially deficient. :D Mostly, this has nothing to do with schooling, though I did a little better socially while homeschooled because the kids I interacted with were from the same subculture as myself.

I was public schooled for my whole life and "never liked the shit from day one".