Why We Homeschool (Part 3 of 762): Socialization

There's a conversation that homeschool parents have ALL the time. It frequently happens in a grocery store, at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. It goes:

Store person: "No school today?"

Me (or kids): "We homeschool."

Store person: "Oh, good for you. (It almost always starts with 'good for you.') I would have loved to have done that, but I just really wanted my kids to be/my kids needed to be socialized."

Oh, if I had a dollar...

By the time we decided to homeschool, the idea of my kids being lonely and weird because of our choice was already a non-issue. I knew so many homeschool kids, and they all knew each other, and they were together ALL the time. These were not kids who were starved for a social life. Our poor little unsocialized homeschooled kids are in dance with dozens of kids, P.E. with about 100, on soccer and basketball teams, in art classes, and history clubs. You should see the list of things we turn down.

And let me tell you - these poor little lonely, weird homeschoolers are some of the most amazing kids you will ever meet. They will look you in the eye, they will knock each other down over the opportunity to serve one another, they will smile and laugh and kiss you goodbye before they get out of the car, even when they're twelve.

I knew kids. I liked kids. I liked kids being with other kids. I had been a kid myself, and I liked being with other kids. But I learned something from my piano students.

Once upon a time, before we populated our Oz with our own munchkins, I was a piano teacher. It was my very great responsibility to introduce a select group of youngsters to the gift of music, and I loved it. I loved my students. All of them. I must have won some kind of piano teacher lottery, because every one of the kids who sat at my piano was really special...and about half of them were homeschooled.

Kids are kids, so I can't claim that all of my kids loved practicing. My studio also wasn't known for their ability to be hyper-focused or really even dedicated students, but they were great kids.

And all my sweet students, when they were on their own, were respectful and hard working. (I really did have an incredible batch of families). But when I got the kids together in a group, something weird happened.

My sweet homeschool kids would stay respectful and hard working. They would actively and instinctively help me - passing out papers, cleaning up messes, volunteering to go first. My sweet school kids - well - they started acting like regular kids. Competing for attention with each other, trying to be the funniest, the loudest, no one wanting to lead, all just wanting to follow. When it came to interacting with me, they would clam up (don't say the wrong thing in front of a group!), and when it came to interacting with each other, I swear they regressed about three years.

It wasn't a scientific study by any means, but it did present me with at least one clear picture that I would hold on to. If my kids were going to be "socialized," then I wanted them socializing with kids who understood that respect for adults and each other was right. If my kids were home with me and accustomed to getting one-on-one attention from an adult an awful lot of the time (I was going to say ALL the time, but who are we kidding?), then wouldn't that replace part of the need for peer approval that is so often destructive?

It's a generalization and a cycle, I know. Kids who don't care at all for peer approval stand a pretty good chance of being the weird kids, and I had to be okay with that. It puts the burden on us to be the standard of cool, but you know what? I think we're doing okay. And my friends who homeschool, they're pretty cool too, so their kids are pretty cool.

Bottom line: kids are kids. Good kids are generally a product of good parents, and they can be found in schools and at home. So the question of socialization maybe has less to do with the how, but with the who.