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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, both direct and indirect, homeschooling has the effect of concentrating a parent’s influence on their children’s lives / brain development / psychology, etc.

Take that, and think about it, before you start. If you have unexamined issues like anger problems, fixations, avoidances, fears - those will have an impact on your child, and a bigger impact if you homeschool your child - purely on the basis of much more time spent together.

If you’re going to do it, i would strongly encourage you to start therapy asap. Because the more of those things you crack open and deal with, the less your child will have to deal with the consequences of them.

The school system has a ton of problems. So does home schooling. There is no magic bullet. Just choices.

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I'd expand that even more broadly to say, if you are going to raise children at all, I would strongly encourage you to start therapy asap.

Some of the best parenting advice I ever got was, before you try to raise a kid, you need to get your own shit together.

I think that in general parents concentrating brainpower on their kids would be a good thing ! And there are few things more enriching for your child (and their school or homeschool community) then getting involved in their education. A lot of research supports that parent involvement in education makes a bigger impact in a child’s education and the health of their school then any other factor.

https://www.modulo.app/learning/parent-engagement

With regards to therapy - wholeheartedly agree. We’ve got to put on those oxygen masks before we assist our kids! A parent who practices self-care, is grounded and calm will be a better parent for sure hands down

> And there are few things more enriching for your child then getting involved in their education

That’s a pleasing statement that seems true, but ignores the millions of ways that parents can be a bad influence. Over pressuring, taking away agency, just being bad study partners, biasing data as it arrives, etc etc etc.

Everyone wants to believe they will be a good parent. But everyone will fuck it up in some way. One of the *good* things about traditional schooling is exposure to a lot of different influences. Bad and good. The bad teaches you to value the good, the good teaches you all the different ways that you can learn.

This is a signal vs. noise issue. Quite simply if you think your values are better than the average (and believe me - you do think this) then it makes sense to inculcate your values into your children as much as possible. A decision to not home educate your children is usually because of other considerations, usually financial, sometimes cultural, etc.

I don't want to minimize your point about mental health though. If you're struggling you have to help yourself before you can pour into your children.

I think there is a big difference between supplementing and replacing. Near total control leaves them sheltered, naive, and probably more rebellious, and of course it's silly to think that you can do a better job across the board than a bunch of professionals.

If you have the time, getting involved in your child's education is probably a huge win. Fill in some gaps you see, correct some biases. Help them get ahead in areas they are doing well in, help them catch up in areas they are not doing so well in. But just because those things are helpful doesn't mean that replacing their education entirely is going to be an improvement.

This is why I have an initial distrust for home schooling parents. Most of the home schooling parents I've personally encountered were members of various manipulative cults. They home-schooled their children because they wanted to control their child's world view as much as possible - make sure they never heard about scientific studies that would challenge their unfounded beliefs or encountered people who believed differently.

If you actually believe that your values and world view are correct, then you shouldn't be worried about your child encountering other world views. As long as you teach your child to think for themself, they should ultimately recognize your values are better.

Personally, I want my child to think I'm a terrible person, because I want them to be better than me. Our ancestors made loads of mistakes, and I want my children to recognize mine.

> If you're struggling you have to help yourself before you can pour into your children.

To be clear I think this applies to people who aren’t struggling, or don’t believe they are struggling. We all have a lifetime of accumulated damage. I hate the “therapy is for people with problems” idea. It’s not about struggling or not, it’s about repeating unhealthy patterns to a next generation - or the swinging pendulum of overcorrecting our parents mistakes. If you have or are going to have kids, please, do at least 6 sessions with a therapist you like. Worst case it does nothing, best case you save your self and your kids a lot of pain.

If you think your values are the only ones your kids should absorb, I think that is a big red flag. <-- This may have been a bit harsh, I invite further response to the below, as I'd like to understand what you mean.

edit: Upon further reflection, I disagree with the premise. I'm a product of the decade and environment I grew up in. Alot of my values probably aren't relevant to growing up today, and the types of experiences kids will be exposed to. Some things I just haven't had exposure to. Kids should be a combination of their parents values and have the opportunity to experience life such that they can develop their own values. My values are very different from that of my parents, and I suspect will be different from that of my children.

Meh... teachers can do all those things as well.

Now do this for the influence of the state's pathologies on public schoolkids.

Im focusing on the problems with homeschooling because I believe that if you’re considering homeschooling, you are probably well aware of those pathologies. You probably have lived experience of them, since odds are you went to school.

The other reason is I don’t have direct experience of the pathologies of the school system - so if someone is going to speak about them it shouldn’t be me.

>Now do this for the influence of the state's pathologies on public schoolkids.

Such as?

Zero-tolerance policies could be one example.

What's a "zero-tolerance" policy? I've only ever heard this term used in the context of guns on school campuses. Does it have some other meaning?

Suppose you are a kid who's getting bullied by a larger kid. Every day the kid takes your stuff and messes with it or something. You (maybe) complain to the teacher, but really you're scared that if the teacher leaks that you complained, the kid will beat you.

So eventually you grow tired of it, you've worked out a bit, and now you beat the kid up. Now... you get suspended/expelled, instead of the bully. That's a zero-tolerance policy.

My wife's cousin was suspended for a few weeks for standing up to her bully. My in-laws and her family decided to reward her and she got two weeks of a fun family vacation. But the school was trying to punish her, and if her parents and grandparents weren't more sensible, perhaps they would have succeeded.

How much can a parent even affect their children? I remember studies of adopted children showing it was little.

Edit: this[0] is not the study but shows something similar

> Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, adopted children become more like their biological parents, and to the same degree as children and parents in control families

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.199...

This is one of those places in science where you can defend almost any arbitrary combination of nature vs. nuture not just with a paper here and a paper there, but with a slew of papers supporting your chosen position. It's just there's a slew of papers supporting all the other positions, too.

At this point, about all I'd say based on the science is that it clearly isn't 0% or 100% of either, but the data to make any grand pronouncements based on science beyond that in any direction just isn't solid enough. I'd be comfortable saying "it's more complicated" but I'm not convinced enough of any particular summary of the "more complicated" to bank on it.

Be extremely careful believing in the "it's mostly genetics, nurture is a minor factor" stuff. Most of these studies have surprisingly bad (or at least naive) methodologies, of the "we don't know what we don't know (but people like Taleb do)" kind (!).

See e.g. this study: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39725 (and that's for height, which is vastly lower-dimensional than emotional health or IQ)

Or an easier to read article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-turmoil-over-predicting-t...

Can also see this thread: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1163435285193076737 and this tweet: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1476173796323246082. Nature-über-alles studies rely on relatively basic misunderstandings of the required math.

Of course if you want to read studies by biologists too, there's quite a few addressing the problems with twin studies (especially with high-dimensional outcomes like intelligence and emotional health). But to be clear, the problem with the nature-matters-a-lot studies isn't a biology problem; it's a math problem.

And the wider problem is that the "mostly nature not nurture" idea disincentivizes conscientious, careful parenting (since "it doesn't matter in the long run anyway").

I know a lot of people that are super heavily influenced by traumas inflicted by their parents. Homeschooling someone is a lot different then your average lifestyle (that possibly wasn't that different between the adopted families)

Are they less so traumatized by their parents when they go to school ?

Sure.

Along with respite, school gave me access to countless alternatives perspectives, influences, and people that would become part of my coping strategies.

I’m absolutely certain that home schooling is great for certain parents and certain children, but some kids are better off not being around their parents quite so much.

That’s a pretty deeply unquantifiable thing. How do you measure trauma at the scale we’re talking about? Self reporting will only reflect the trauma people are aware of, and mental health diagnosis are basically just self reporting one-step removed.

As far as I know we’re stuck in anecdote and personal opinion territory, until we have a better way of quantifying the kind of low-level trauma of a non-abusive-but-still-damaging childhood.

The studies are mixed!

Twin studies show that nurture has little impact on personality or IQ, excepting things like serious abuse.

But, they do show huge correlation between parental income and child income.

So it seems nurture can affect life outcomes a lot but not much intrinsic to who you are.

> Twin studies show that nurture has little impact on personality or IQ, excepting things like serious abuse.

I don't know anything about personality, but I do know that for IQ this is an awfully contentious topic, for a multitude of reasons. Whether that's ignoring maternal effects, the implicit assumption of independence between genetics and environment in twins reared apart, or just plain old questioning of how to interpret heritability as a statistic, it's REALLY unclear what to think. You will find serious academics in field with vastly different beliefs.

I spent an inappropriately large amount of time researching this recently, and my conclusion is that it's a lot harder to measure than people think, and that the commonly cited numbers of 0.7-0.8 for heritability should be viewed with a significant deal of skepticism. It might be right, but it's a number that I have very low confidence in. I would also say that even if those numbers are correct, that does imply a very substantial effect due to environment.

What I will say is that you have to more or less ignore the Wikipedia article on the subject. It's too political a topic for Wikipedia to perform well.

Twin adoption studies often show that effects of parenting are present but smaller than effects of genetics. However those don’t typically look at abnormal cases like homeschooling.

Very much this. Effects of current levels of variation in parenting practice ≠ effects of potential variation. Here’s the argument in full: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/no-wait-stop-parents-do-m...

I'd rather have the median homeschool parent influencing students than the median K-8 schoolteacher.

I also don't buy your notion that neuroses are directly transferable by contact. If anything, your kid will probably be so annoyed by them that they'll be exactly the opposite.

While I know some incredible public school teachers, the average homeschool parent I know is going to be much better for their kids than the average public school teacher.

Fortunately if you are homeschooling you can seek out specific teachers to help expand on things and choose those that are excellent. (Many homeschooler start taking community college classes in highschool if there are good options available.)

> average homeschool parent I know is going to be much better for their kids than the average public school teacher

This is a sampling question.

Consider that you may be looking at a bunch of well-educated parents choosing homeschooling over extra income.

I bet they're not choosing to homeschool kids with whom they have a bad relationship, don't understand, can't motivate...

Increasing the sample could produce much different results.

Admittedly salaries for public school teachers are pretty bad. There's no FAANG school with tricky interview questions and starting salaries double of what other schools are paying. I wish there were. Then you might see those 10x teachers choosing "teacher" as their profession.

I would agree that "average parent" is not the same set as "average homeschool parent." If you are saying that the "average homeschool parent I know" is better educated and better off financially than the "average homeschool parent," that is possible, but given the diverse range of homeschool parents I know across the country, probably not as likely as you would think.

I didn’t say directly transferred. Just that they have an effect and it’s usually not a positive one.

While more self-awareness and self-knowledge is always better, I think the main test for this should be "Ainsworth's Strange Situation". It's a test of your child's attachment style is; which is a good reflection of the child's (and your) emotional health.

For homeschoolers, it's probably a good idea to check if your child displays secure attachment first (since insecure attachment in the child is generally caused by the parents, and schooling your child at home might just make it worse).

And on a final note: why the hell don't we systematically test all children for attachment styles? They: a) can be detected very early, b) are much easier to correct when caught early, and c) have vast impacts for the child's whole life. You don't need any equipment except a trained psychologist!

Do we have enough psychologists in the US to systematically test all children? And does insurance cover it?

No you don't; but it would be a worthwhile investment due to the incredibly positive repercussions. See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory#Crime

See also a link between insecure attachment and addiction: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.0072...

This policy would have incredibly positive repercussions throughout society; in that sense, it would be very cheap.

I’ve got nothing against attachment theory - but there is absolutely no amount of attachment theory treatment that can solve the american system. Poverty is baked into the system - it has never existed without it and it can’t exist without it. Poverty will beget harmful upbringings and damaged attachment.

Yes; attachment-disorder screening for children is only a small (but essential) part of a functional system, and can't itself fix more deeply-rooted systemic dysfunctions.

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