I say that because I'm a homeschooled child who is now an adult. From my immersion and circle of friends who were also homeschooled, these are my takeaways:
Parents are untrustworthy proxies for their children's experiences. If you surveyed parents, they would all say that they kept their child socialized through homeschool groups. If you surveyed the children, they would strongly disagree. The point made in the ask HN "and have witnessed it to be very social" is the same one every homeschooling parent I've ever met makes, and pretty much every homeschooling child disagrees with. (And I've met a lot of homeschooling parents!)
An astonishing number of homeschooled acquaintances I know have estranged themselves from their parents, and would cite their decision to homeschool as a factor in that decision (> 50%, n=~25.) Of the 5 children in my family, 4 cite homeschooling as a lingering negative that affects their social relationships to this day. 3 have forgiven my parents for it. The others still limit contact with them. (Siblings are all around their 30s.)
Children who are still school aged are incredibly unwilling to insinuate that homeschooling doesn't work for fear of the consequences. If you see your parents devote their time to homeschooling you and are constantly saying stuff like "You'd think that homeschooling isn't social, but look! We found 5 other weird families that our children only pretend to like because they're desperate for a peer group, and they get along OK!" you would also be hesitant to say to your parents that they approach they've dedicated their life to makes you lonely.
This is a decision, that, if you mess it up, you really mess it up. Be cautious interpreting a study that only asks parents their opinions, given by a consultant with a self-admitted homeschooling bias.
This statement came up on Reddit last week, arguing that teaching has become glorified babysitting and the bullying and social maladjustment from schools is demanding alternatives:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rjl8fo/im_a_teach...
Here's one anecdote:
This is my first year teaching. My wife and I work at the same school. It literally drove her to a mental breakdown 8 days after our wedding. She’s turned in her notice.
This year, I have been hit 2x by students, had my credit and debit card stolen (by students), been told to go fuck myself (ok, this is all by students), been spit at, called a bitch, etc. Half my students don’t bother turning in anything at all, and a record 10/80 of my students were suspended in ONE WEEK because they were fighting. I have had a student bring a gun to school, one student bring drugs with the intent to distribute, and one student have premeditated and intentional sex in a bathroom, who upon getting caught tried to claim it was rape (this was disproven due to her confessing things via text and to multiple students, we actually believed her at first).
I teach middle school. This isn’t normal. I love when I get to teach, but this year makes me hate my job. I know I should stick it out since I enjoy teaching, but how the hell do I keep doing this?
As far as social skills go there’s no substitute for going through the wringer that is school. You deal with so much on a daily basis - forming new friendships, maintaining old ones, crushes, rejection, doing stupid things you’ll regret forever, personal social triumphs…
It’s all a bit much, but in a culture where almost everyone has done it the few that didn’t stand out.
"I run a company that helps families interested in designing their child's education as a replacement or supplement to traditional school."
As someone who had a very diverse primary education including 6 years of homeschooling, I can tell you OP here is very on the money. Without going anonymous I won't go into much further anecdote, but I can tell they actually experienced the lifestyle.
Maybe there are some "well adjusted and normal" home school groups out there, but I never encountered one. When you talk to these parents you will only get the social proof they want to hear - the parents are absolutely having positive social experiences. Perhaps delusionally so. Especially the types of folks drawn to home schooling to begin with.
I'm not saying it can't be done - but that blocker should be big because it's often simply talked around and the parents saying their kids were well-socialized often are saying it only from their perspective. I too, have seen much more estrangement from parents from my home schooled vs. other friends and it's not remotely close.
I think it's primarily a form of self-selection. Perhaps the pool of parents selecting to homeschool after COVID has changed considerably since prior to it, but I'm skeptical. It takes an exceedingly exceptional and dedicated parent (and probably child) for this to work out in the end. There are anecdotes out there, but they typically to be of the "very upper class" kind where a kid is exposed to university level educators at a very young age.
You must, regardless of the hurdles, find a way to survey children or graduated children. When parents find out that their child was not socialized, despite their strong belief to the contrary, they will be left with children who no longer wish to be around them.
You can easily design a study to steer people to homeschooling, by only asking the parents. They have too much invested in being alternative education experts and it's hard to admit that you played around and messed up with how you schooled your children. If homeschooling turn out ok, the upside is that a child will have a maybe slightly better educational experience. If homeschooling turns out to not be ok, the downside is that you will permanently damage parent-child relationships.
You're playing with fire by even attempting this study, the way you have it set up right now.
I think I agree with the parent comment when I say that homeschooling seems to be looking for pennies of potential academic advantage in front of the steamroller of serious maladjustment.
This also gave me a “growth mindset” at an early age. I realized in ~9th grade that I had no idea how to hold a conversation with someone, which forced me to view my social skills as something dynamic which could be improved. People are now very surprised to hear I was homeschooled, so I think my efforts to improve my communication skills have born fruit.
I can only speculate on how much the rest of my current personality was influenced by that experience; either directly, or from secondary effects like reading a lot (in place of socializing) at an early age.
If anyone is seriously considering homeschooling and wants to hear a contrary opinion, please feel free to send me an email :)
I had a great upbringing but if you asked my older sister it was terrible and of course our parents are too blame.
For the subjects she studies at home, she's been able to go at her own, faster pace and do in-depth projects, like writing an 80,000 word novel for English, which made learning both fun and meaningful. At the end of last year she already had five APs, all with 5, and she recently sat for the SAT and got a 1570. I think every child is different, but for mine, homeschool has simply been incredibly good for her, and loneliness wasn't a big factor.
One of our concerns would be the diminished interaction with kids her age but then we thought about our own high school experiences and realized she probably wouldn't be missing anything. I had a great time at university but high school? That was just a nightmare.
For some of us, public school is the steamroller.
Thanks for listening to and taking care of your daughter like this.
I believe in homeschooling and that it should be offered as an alternative, especially where children can take some subjects at school. This gets them social exposure but allows them to pick and choose their social involvement level.
Further, it works best when it is 1) each year elected by the child, 2) the child is a natural autodidact and has good self-starting and organizational skills, and 3) there is someone dedicated to nurturing this. There's no one-size-fits-all and this is true nowhere more than in education.
* Parents with multiple children don't necessarily have them all in the same school/homeschool situation.
* One child might be lonely and another child not.
Others have mentioned the problem of grouping children together into the same sentiment, so I won't comment on that. But I feel this survey suffers from some priming and conformity bias issues.
The survey is very "soft" in the sense of asking opinion questions, which can vary wildly with the respondent's mood, time of day, time of year (just had Christmas together as a family and everything's good), etc etc. A single survey at a point in time has basically no value, which is why I generally disregard surveys I see in the media. Surveys really get most of their value through asking the same questions repeatedly at different points in time so you can "average out" a lot of that bias. But in order to have results with any legitimacy, you almost need to split each question that you actually want to ask out into several different questions, some of which have numbers attached to them.
For example, the question "Does your child/children have friends (not including members of their immediate household)?":
A parent is more inclined to affirm their biases and assuage any guilt they might have over their child's loneliness than to help you get accurate survey data. It also depends on what a parent considers a friend versus what the child might consider a friend (someone to hang out with vs someone they feel a real connection with and are comfortable sharing things with, for example). I'm guessing you'd get very different answers if you asked the child the same question.
I can't imagine a parent is very willing to say their child has no friends at all, but you might split the "core" question out into multiple different questions - "how many close friends does your child have," "how many acquaintances," etc, with answers in different brackets (1 or fewer, etc). And then ask the general sentiment question after. The advantage of this is that you actually have something to compare across time. If you only have sentiment questions, it's almost impossible to know what the respondent has in mind for a "friend" when they answer the question.
I have the same feedback for the "How often does your child or children complain of feeling lonely or not having enough friends?" question. Different personalities will complain more or less, but that doesn't indicate how lonely a child actually feels.
A minor point, but without randomizing the question order or randomly flipping the answer options (ordering from negative sentiment to positive sentiment instead of positive to negative), you're very prone to influencing answers by "leading" the respondent to certain answers. You'd be surprised how much of a difference this makes.
Writing good surveys is very difficult, but you might pull up a list of common survey biases and run each question through the list. My 2c.
The first is that when you're asking emotionally charged questions (as anything involving kids' happiness is), it can be a good idea to find ways to make it feel "okay" for someone to give a socially unacceptable answer. One common way is to apply some pressure for not telling the truth. For example, you could start by asking "does your child have any close friends," and then follow it up with, "if your answer was yes, how many close friends do they have?" It's sort of like being caught in a lie in real life - once people start asking follow-up questions, the pressure of keeping up the lie builds. In a survey, no one is watching you, so if you can find a way to make the sub-conscious pressure of not being totally truthful higher than the pressure of admitting something difficult, people are more inclined to revert their choices and give the truth. But this doesn't always work.
The second part is to look at some popular survey makers' websites where they take common questions and re-word them in better ways. For example, https://www.medallia.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/resources/Me...