The idea that you should interact so much with your peers is kind of strange to be honest. Is it really healthy for kids to interact regularly with their peers? I'd argue it's much better for children to interact with adults. Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with. And depending on the era, a fair amount of absenteeism when it comes to actual parenting. So having peers of your age was both common, historically encouraged (stories of childhood friends abound), and important in establishing your place inside your community.
That being said, they were exposed to more adults on a daily basis, and integrated more into the life of adults. Particularly, they were exposed to the daily lives of adults at work. Which I think is a large part of helping to influence a child’s growth.
Childhood as we know it now is also a modern concept — the switch from childhood to adult was more child > young adult who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, rather than our modern child > adolescent > young adult path. (Edit because I hit submit too early). Childhood as also being an experience of being sequestered from the outside world is also modern.
> They’d also have a fair amount of siblings and cousins, the children of hired help, and entire village’s worth of other children to interact with.
There's no reason to think that what we did historically is somehow better. We've made many changes for very good reasons - apropos to our conversation, universal schooling and literacy - and I hope to keep moving forward!
If we mean it as evidence of how we evolved, then working on farms certainly isn't it. We evolved as nomadic hunter-gatherers, over ~200,000 years as homo sapiens, and over millions of years as our homo ancestors (I believe our line separated from chimps about 7 million years ago). Farming is a recent hack!
Although it seems to have stopped mattering once I got to the "adult" world, where whether one is 30 or 80, there is a fairly standard template for treating and dealing with people.
It was a relief to stop being in a stratified age driven hierarchy.
I am also terrible at code switching (I fit in better in the college classes while homeschooled than I ever did in public school, for whatever that is worth). And always have been. And I don't see it as a problem, since the implication that it's beneficial in a given context implies that context isn't diverse or inclusive, and thus I want out of it, not to conform to it.
Youth examples:
- You may swear in conversations with peers, but you should not in conversations with people higher in the hierarchy.
- When people ask "how are you?", they are not genuinely asking in most cases. It is just a greeting. But there are exceptions like your grandmother and a teacher you have not seen in years, but are close to.
Adult examples:
- You can tell a rich person about your great vacation, but not a poor person. If you have a high paying job, you are expected to be happy when talking to a person who earns less than you do.
- Random men (I am also a man) will find it completely appropriate to start a conversation with you discussing the body parts of a nearby woman. It has happened enough times that otherwise successful people view it as an appropriate way to start a conversation on a train. Pretty sure they do not do that with non-peers/women as it is pretty creepy.
- For a more comic take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms0yk9kqVM. Basically the war should not be mentioned by a Brit to a German, but you can mention the war to another Brit.
For an extreme example, note how you raise the pitch of your voice, and use very simple language when talking to a toddler.
I'll admit to bias because of the homeschoolers I've met, who seemed much more relaxed and able to be forthcoming in discussions, rather than 'act'.
Having a handful of solid adult role models is key, but a lot of social skills are learned by trial and error, and it’s way more helpful when you’re learning those alongside others who are also figuring it out, that’s also how new ideas and new cultural zeitgeists are created, by challenging old concepts and not having the baggage of the old way of doing things.
Obviously there’s pitfalls with taking all your social cues from hormone riddled peers, but it’s a trial I think everyone needs to go through to prepare them on how to socialize with the world at large.
But the modern education system was created for the exact opposite. To limit family bonding in favor of allegiance to the state and teach them enough to be drones for the factory/work force/military. Children are resources to be processed by the state via their factory-like schools into products to be consumed by corporations, government, etc.
When the word "resource" gets thrown around at companies and they obviously mean a human being, it peeves me. I will never use that word when referring to a person. When I'm involved in a conversation where someone uses it, I always ask for clarity that they mean a person, employee, contractor, candidate, etc.
I know it's just a word, but calling people resources makes it seem like they are nothing more than something to be expended and used. And maybe that is the case, but I don't think it should be encouraged and perpetuated.
It's Bob. You mean Bob. You want to change the project Bob is on. Have we talked to Bob about it?
I always see takes like this but it just strikes me as a Conspiracy theory. We can easily get to the modern US education system via poorly thought out incentives and incompetence. You don't need malicious actors to get there. I would be curious if you had evidence to support a claim like this?
To the downvoters: Do you honestly believe there is a Cabal in the US Government who sit in a room and say "Yes we must crush gifted students and make sure our education system is terrible so we have more drones for the factory/work force/military??
Of course intent matters which is why we make distinctions between things like Manslaughter and Murder, and OP was explicitly stating that this system was very much intentionally built to have the outcomes they described.
I see that claim often, but never any evidence of it. I do see a lot of evidence of imposing political and/or religious views on the students. Everybody wants to shape the students into their own image. Hence all the fights over the curriculum.
Obviously, every kid has different needs and every parent has limits on how much they can be present during school hours but putting kids in traditional public school doesn't have to be a passive experience of surrender to the state.
Unless you want to say that this isn't skilled work and it can be done by anyone with no training. In this case: why do you think that?
You're either ignoring history, or assume that people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way... Sure kids can learn from each other, and in a healthy way, but the structures that we have in place to foster that (universal public school) are fairly new in the grand scheme of things...
I think the phrase "[the kid has] stunted social and emotional intelligence" hides a lot of nuance. The more useful rephrasing might be: "this person's ability to relate to people and navigate complex social interactions, particularly in the culture in which they were raised, is below average".
The important takeaway is what matters most is your ability to handle social interactions with peers.
> people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way
"Emotionally damaged" is a very culturally relative term. If you transported people from 150 years ago to the present day many would be considered "emotionally damaged" by modern standards even though they were functional people in their own time. This is because social intelligence is measured against a person's lived context.
Coming back to homeschool - many home schooled kids have not had the same level of socialization as their peers in schools. That lack of socialization causes a negative feedback loop where more socialized kids don't want to interact with the homeschooled kids leading to the homeschooled kid being even more under socialized. The window of opportunity to effectively intervene when this process starts is short and when parents fail to act I have seen it cause decades of suffering for their kids.
1. The current age of your child 2. How much less socialization they're getting than their peers 3. Their natural proclivities towards socialization
Socialization starts becoming important around ages 2-3. Points 2 and 3 being equal, the size of window expands as children age. Isolating your child about 6 months between 3.5 and 4 could cause a potentially permanent setback if not actively addressed. By age 12 a year of isolation is probably around the limit before rapid action is necessary.
A major caveat to these guidelines is they don't really apply during COVID. While the reduced socialization for children is probably not good for them, lots of children are being under socialized and so your child can likely still find peers at similar socialization levels to interact with and not fall into the feedback cycle.
The average honors students have grown up the happiest by far. They got great jobs, cheated on exams, got drunk on weekends. Personally, I should have studied less I think and been a little more dishonest like them.
All this bullshit over education - what a waste.
Tiger parents excel at raising miserable soulless kids. It's no wonder they grow up angry, resentful, or just fail out and become the black sheep of the family.
Tired of reading articles like this and the corresponding threads.
Oh yes. Social skills are vitally important. You have to learn those by doing.
> Historically, kids would learn to work on the farm, attend church, etc and they'd see other children, but most of the time they'd be learning from adults how to act and strive for.
I don't think that's even true. I think historically kids were told to go away/be quiet until they were old enough to be productive.
I also think that we're producing better socialized kids these days.
And historically, kids were cared for in quite large variety of setting. And quite a lot of those were not romantic at all.
Infrequent contact with other kids can open the door to social anxiety and awkwardness as they grow. Not to mention, it's cruel. Kids are social beings too and they don't get their rocks off listening to adults talk down to them.
This is hugely missing nowadays.