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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you had a rough experience. I'm sorry about that. That said, for a lot of families homeschooling had changed by the late 90s and early 2000s. I was homeschooled around that time with my siblings, as were my wife and her family. We all still have great relationships with our parents, and our homeschool experiences were very far from the stereotypes.

We participated in many different co-ops. We took every AP class offered at the local high school. We're all functional adults with normal social lives.

It's obviously hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone, but I thought it's worth sharing mine.

Strained relationships with adult children suck, but they're not a given when homeschooling, nor does sending your kids to public school necessarily save your relationship with your kids.

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12/13 of the circle of homeschooling families that made up our socialization group in the 90s/00s have gone no contact with their parents now. Congrats on your success, it’s not the norm.

Not the norm within your social group, which was presumably mutually selected by your respective parents. That suggests that these families are not 13 independent data points, but rather a group of 13 families that all had similar predispositions and evolved along similar lines. I'd like to see the stats overall before coming to a conclusion about what the norm is.

Big no true homeschooler energy going on in your comments.

I don't mean it that way at all.

OP took their anecdote and generalized it very broadly [0]. I shared my own anecdotes, explicitly acknowledging that it's "hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone". OP responded saying that their anecdote is actually a collection of 13 anecdotes. I countered that 13 tightly related and completely non-random anecdotes do not turn into a usable stat.

Nowhere did I mean to imply OP's experience isn't a true homeschooling experience, just that it's not necessarily as representative as they believe it is and that more information is needed before generalizing either of our experiences is fair.

[0] "it hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing"

People stop talking to their parents because the relationship isn't good, not because they didn't get to take a turn being shit on in public school.

You don't see how the choice to voluntarily socially isolate your kid might strain your relationship with them?

The "your choice to homeschool me harmed me" is point of contention and literally the conflict in some cases.

If your idea of homeschooling is to sequester a child away from all human contact to try and indoctrinate them in some crazy belief, maybe. Plenty of homeschooled kids have homeschool play groups, athletics lessons and other non-compulsory classes which they're free to leave at any time if they don't like their peer group.

"your choice to homeschool me harmed me" doesnt have to mean the social skills alone. I never progressed in some academic areas as much as I would have liked until college/after college because my parents were not great teachers in those areas.

Did they know they were not good teachers in those areas? I'm sure they didnt. Did I know that at the time? Nope. Would public school have taught me that same subject better? Who knows but my peers seemed to generally have a better understand of it than I did.

yada yada road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I heard this “but we have homeschool play groups! It’s different!” in the 2000s from every single one of the parents for whom homeschool was a disaster. It’s funny hearing it fresh here.

I suspect this has more to do with your social circle, which given the density of homeschoolers is probably either hyper-religious, doomsday preppers or some other dysfunctional subculture, and I'm not surprised those children would grow up to hate their parents.

To be fair though, I'd imagine an hour or two a week of socialization is still quite insufficient. On the flip side, 10+ hours a day of socialization is unquestionably unnecessary, and forcing your kids to become conformists or get beat up/bullied/etc (which is the reality in public schools unless you live in a really rich neighborhood) in order to get a little more socialization time isn't a good tradeoff. There are a lot of non-school activities children can engage in to get peer socialization where the type of bullshit that occurs in public school doesn't fly, due to the adults that run those activities losing customers and having their livelihood threatened if they let kids be little cunts, unlike public schools.

Nope! My parents were secular parents avoiding a struggling inner-city public school system, hoping to have their children take advanced mathematics courses. Same with the rest of the group.

So I heard the same refrain from you that I heard from my parents and their peers, decades later from someone I don’t know, and your takeaway is that we must be in very different circumstances? Bud, you’re almost certainly reusing the same homeschooling materials and curriculum help my own parents did.

So if they weren't religious nutters why did you all go no-contact? Abuse is the only reason I've commonly heard for no-contact, with addiction and religious expulsion uncommon but present, were 12/13 of these families abusive or addicted? I'm just struggling to understand the relationship between the facts you've stated and the outcomes you've stated, I feel like I'm missing a lot of steps here. For reference, I am also no-contact and most of my friends are no-contact, most due to abuse, but we weren't homeschooled.

You've got a little bit of a self-selection bias going there. Your socialization group is no more likely to be the norm than the person you replied to.

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