The Myth of The Myth of Socialization
As regular readers will know, I started homeschooling because of Covid (like a lot of people, actually!). My kid hated zoom calls and in-person was too risky, so we bought a curriculum and said “what the hell, we’ll do this for a year!”
It has now been three years. My family gets a whole lot of good out of homeschooling! We love that it makes it easy to spend more time outside! We love that we can accommodate neurodivergence more easily than in a large classroom! We love getting to do more hands on activities! We love getting to implement the science of reading! We love doing lots of read alouds! And I, like a whole lot of homeschooling parents, love that I get more quality time with my growing kid, and I get to be there and be part of her learning new things. It’s awesome.
But today we are going to talk about one of the most common questions (and often, criticisms!) of home education. That’s right. We are going to talk about socialization.
We live in a culture where most kids go to school. In most schools, children are grouped by age and taught in large groups. Culturally, that is what we are used to this idea that children have their own communities very separate from the communities of adults. I’d argue this is intensified by the way that children’s media is seen as highly specialized and separate from adult media! And so, in our society, what we are most used to seeing is children in their own world, a world of large groups of kids around their own age and kid specific interests, goals, and work. So, when a lot of people see kids who stay home with their families all day instead of going to a school, they have a question.
“What about socialization?”
Or sometimes, the incredibly rude “but how do they get socialized?”
People can get pretty used to the idea that whatever way they see as normal is the only right way to do things, and there is no denying that people can be very shitty about the socialization question. And it pisses homeschooling parents off to no end. We can get pretty angry about being judged (just like everyone does) and we can get pretty defensive about the idea that we don’t know what we’re doing raising our kids. On top of that, there’s the fact that a whole lot of people ask the socialization question in a way that seems to imply some kind of “gotcha!” It’s like they think we’ve never thought of this before.
Like nah, I’ve been homeschooling my kid for three years, but it’s never once occurred to me that she has social needs as well as academic needs. Whoops!
It also sometimes smacks of something else. Look, I’m going to admit it, homeschooled kids are weird. I know, we’re not supposed to say it, but I’m saying it! In school there’s a lot of pressure to conform, but growing up outside of that pressure, a lot of homeschooled kids develop deep special interests, their own unique senses of style, and have no problem refusing to conform to certain social norms. I remember when I was in high school, there was a boy who had formerly been homeschooled who came to my school. Because he hadn’t gone through the hell that is middle school, he was completely disinterested in learning the social hierarchy of the school, and he (horror of horrors) made friends with kids from different social groups without thinking twice about it. He also wasn’t embarrassed about being a huge nerd, and had mannerisms that I thought were weird. At 15, he made me uncomfortable. Didn’t he know he was doing it wrong? But at 37, I can see how all of the things that looks like deficits to me (a kid desperately trying to fit in while navigating a whole bunch of “be yourself! no, not like that!” messaging from adults) were actually strengths. I love that homeschoolers are weird!
But I think for a lot of adults, they see it the same way I did at 15. These kids don’t act like “normal” kids, and that’s because they haven’t been properly socialized!
So yes, homeschooling parents hate the socialization question, and you can find no end of blog posts and write ups by homeschooling parents about why it’s a nonsense question that shouldn’t be asked, why it’s none of anyone’s business, and why homeschooled kids are actually the most socialized of all children! Take that, naysayers! This isn’t one of those.
Because while I deeply empathize with the annoyance of other home educating parents, I also think that socialization is super important, and that homeschoolers often downplay it more than we should. This is one of those cases where talking to homeschooled kids (and adults who were homeschooled as kids) gives us a deeper understanding than just talking to the adults doing the educating! Parents may say that socialization “isn’t a big deal” and will “just happen naturally!” while the kids talk about how lonely they are. This isn’t the case in every homeschooling family, of course it isn’t, but it is worth considering.
So let’s go through some of the common responses to the socialization question and talk about whether or not they hold water, and some responses to the responses. This is not to say that homeschooling is bad, far from it! But it’s my belief that home educating parents should push past their own defensiveness, and consider deeply whether or not their children’s needs are truly being met.
It’s not that these responses are totally without any merits at all. But I think that we (and I’m talking about home educators here) need to think more deeply about them, and think about the socialization question in a less reactionary way.
1. They have siblings!
It’s true that some siblings love to play with each other and get along great. It’s also true that many siblings don’t get along, and siblings can often be overwhelmed by each other when they are together all the time. If you and your brother have a fight, and you share a room, do all of your lessons together, eat all of your meals together, and are each other’s only playmates, it’s going to get rough. While spending time with family is important, I think for most kids it isn’t enough. Family socializing is a specific kind of socializing. Think about how different it is as an adult to hang out with people who have known you your whole life, versus meeting someone knew. It’s also really different for kids, and if we are talking about developing social skills a bit part of that is learning how to talk to new people, learning how to make friends, etc. You can’t get that from the people you’ve known since you were a baby.
I’m raising an only child, and sometimes she tells me that she wishes we had had more kids. One thing that I remind her of is that even though I grew up with a sister, and at times we were quite close, we also had really different interests and spent a lot of time apart. I actually felt lonely a lot of the time! So the idea that just having siblings takes care of a kid’s social needs has always struck me as odd. Can it help? Sure! But it’s not the only thing.
It’s also worth noting that sibling relationships can and do go wrong at times. When that happens, having friends to talk to can be a huge help for kids.
2. Socializing with only the kids the same age as them is unnatural and school kids are the weird ones! My kids get more well rounded socialization by interacting with a wider range of humans, including kids of different ages and more adults!
This one is one of my favorite and least favorite answers, and that’s because I somewhat agree with it. Hanging out with homeschooled kids, I have noticed that they are really comfortable playing with kids of a pretty wide variety of ages. They figure out how to work together a lot of the time, and it’s not infrequent to see kids ranging from 12 to 7 all playing happily together. In contrast, when I was growing up with a sister only 2.5 years older than me, those 2.5 years seemed like a massive gulf. She had her friends, I had my friends. We certainly couldn’t share friends. Last summer, when my kid went to day camp, she reported that she thought it was weird that a lot of the kids were hung up on only playing with kids within a year or so of their age, or only playing with kids of the same gender. She was like “why? that doesn’t make any sense!”
But, and this is a big but, wide age gaps can have downsides. In mixed age groups, the older kids tend to dominate and the younger kids don’t get much choice or say in what goes on. In extreme cases, I’ve seen this turn into violent bullying. It may look like all the kids playing nicely together to the adults, but in actuality it’s a situation where all the younger kids have learned to defer to the oldest no matter what, or they’ll get hurt. Not only as it that a pretty negative experience for the younger kids, it means that the older kids aren’t get experience having to compromise and work with others, and the younger kids aren’t getting experience making decisions. Sorting kids by age group is far from perfect, but it can level the playing field a little bit.
Additionally, kids need to learn to socialize with peers just as much as they need to learn to socialize with adults. I’ve hurt from adults who were homeschooled that their parents were proud of how comfortable they were talking to adults, but then they went off to college and realized they knew how to talk with their professors, but had no idea how to talk to other 18 year olds. Again, that may be an extreme case, but it’s certainly something we should be keeping in the back of our minds.
There is also another reality we need to talk about. Humans live in a ton of different social systems all over the globe. There is no one “natural” social system for us! But because socializing mainly with peers around the same age is the norm for most children in our culture, it is what feels normal in our culture. Because homeschooling isn’t the norm, when our kids grow up, most of their friends will have gone to school. And those friends who went to school will have shared experiences that our homeschooled kids won’t have. And that might make them feel left out, it might make them feel awkward, it might feel bad! At the end of the day, socializing is about meeting a kid’s social needs now, and about preparing them to be members of society when they grow up. And to some degree, in any society, the more they have in common with their peers, the more prepared they are. That’s not necessarily a reason to never homeschool, but it is a reason not to pretend that our choice doesn’t have the potential to impact our kids in this way. Homeschooling isn’t any more “natural” than public school or private school or anything else!
3. Kids in school actually get less socializing time because they’re told that they are “there to learn, not to talk” and recess isn’t long enough!
Kids talk in school. Kids make friends in school. Most schools include at least some small group time or group projects. And while I’ll agree that the shrinking of recess is a problem, I don’t know of any schools that have no recess at all. Plus, doing something together is a social experience kind of no matter what! The idea that because the school day isn’t just an extended playdate kids aren’t getting worthwhile social interaction while there is just ridiculous.
4. Kids really only need one good friend, maybe two! We only assume kids need a ton of friends because we put kids in big groups!
According to whom?
Wanna know something funny? We don’t actually know how much sleep humans need. It doesn’t appear to be consistent! Some people need a lot of sleep, other people do well with much much less. The same thing goes for calories and most nutrients. The recommendations we have are at best averages, and are often based on arbitrary ideals. Individuals are different and need different things.
Two good friends may be plenty for some kids, it would have been for me. But we are not all the same. I find group interactions stressful and function best one on one, and prefer really deep personal connections. I also like a lot of alone time. My kid? She thrives on being in a group, she loves meeting other kids, and she wants to know as many of them as possible! So comforting yourself that your kids needs must be getting met because they have two friends isn’t great. It might be true, but you have to look at your actual kid to know whether it is or not. And it really bothers me when I see homeschool “experts” comforting parents who are saying “my kid says he’s lonely” that they couldn’t possibly need more friends.
5. I’d rather my kid socialize at homeschool meetups where I have some control over who they socialize with, and we can avoid bullying and bad influences!
On the one hand, none of us want our kids to be bullied, and all of us who went to school can think of things and ideas we were exposed to that probably weren’t the best. Sure.
On the other hand, a lot of times this is just thinly veiled racism or another form of bigotry (usually it’s racism, or at least partly racism, though!). One of the more upsetting realities of homeschooling history is that home education in the United States really exploded as a movement right around the same time that schools began to be racially integrated. That is not a coincidence. Many people homeschool because they don’t want their kids exposed to people of different backgrounds, different faiths, etc. As a queer homeschooler, I have to be very careful because a lot of people homeschool because they don’t want their kids to know that people like me exist!
I assume if you are reading my newsletter, you probably aren’t homeschooling to avoid the gays. But it’s worth examining what your prejudices are. I’m a white person, and I know that white culture really encourages us to identify as “not racist” while never examining our attitudes about folks of different races and ethnicities. It’s worth it to look at your meetup group. Does everyone look like you? Does everyone believe the same things you believe? Kids need exposure to people outside of their parents bubble, too! And us parents need to really look at ourselves honestly and ask, “what do I mean when I say ‘bad influences’? who am I including in that, and why?”
Again, there are extreme versions of this kind of isolation. For years I read the blog of a woman who was raised in the quiverfull movement and homeschooled. She was only ever allowed to socialize with kids who’s families believed basically the exact same thing as her parents, including young earth creationism. That kind of isolation is really toxic and damaging, and thankfully it is not what most of us are doing. But we may be doing a less extreme version where our kids are still getting less exposure to different kinds of families, people of different backgrounds, and different ideas.
Also, bullying can happen in any group. There’s no reason to label it as a school problem. I’ve watched it become a problem in homeschooling communities too, and in that environment it’s typically even harder to respond to than in school because there’s no system for it. We may feel like we have more control homeschooling than we would sending our children off to the local school, but there’s still a lot of variables.
6. Socialization is something that happens naturally no matter what, and kids will adapt to whatever their social environment no matter what that is. There’s no reason to think about it or even ask the question, actually!
As parents, it is our job to think about our children’s needs. That includes their academic needs, their physical needs, their emotional needs, all of them! I think asking questions about what our kids need is a good thing pretty much always. I don’t think we can assume that they will get their social needs met just by existing any more than we can assume that they will learn how to read just by existing. Some will, some won’t!
This is also where we really benefit from listening to adults who were homeschooled. Many of them will tell us that no, they did not get their social needs met as children. And they do not feel good about that! When we listen to those experiences we can better take our own kids’ needs seriously.
***
In fall of 2020, socialization wasn’t really on the menu. We were by definition isolated, and since socializing through a screen wasn’t going to meet our kid’s social needs, we had to accept that, at least for a time, those needs were not going to be met. It sucked! The rest of homeschooling turned out to be wonderful for her (and also for me!) and so as we began to socialize more, we kept right on homeschooling, with the philosophy that we would do it for “as long as it worked.”
But especially this school year, I have come to realize that choosing to homeschool means taking on the role not only of teacher for my child, but of social director. It is my job as her parent to put her in situations where she can get her needs met. And as it happens, she has much higher social needs than I do. I’m an introvert who would rather hang out one-on-one when I do spend time with friends! My kid, on the other hand, is an extrovert, and she thrives in groups! And while kids with siblings may get more of their social needs met with family (though still not all), my kid is an only child. So a whole lot of my brain is now devoted to making sure she gets enough social opportunities each week. As an introvert, I actually do have to think about “socialization” in order create a life that meets my kid’s needs!
And there may come a day when her need to be around other kids is greater than the benefits she gets from learning at home with me. And that has to be fine. Because my child is a whole person and all of her needs matter, not just her academic needs.
And so, I bristle a bit when other home educators complain about the “socialization myth.” I cringe when they say that it’s not something homeschoolers should have to think about anymore than anyone else. And while I can understand getting defensive when someone questions your parenting choices or asks how your kids “get socialized,” I think as a community we’d do better to really level with ourselves and each other about this stuff.
Social needs are real. Socialization is part of growing up. The real myth is that ignoring your child’s needs will all magically work out.