Danielle at Merryment and Mayhem asks, “Can you expound more on socializing as a homeschool parent/student? I would like to homeschool and this is my husband’s main argument against it. He thinks there are things that ’school teaches you that your parents can’t teach you’ though he has yet to tell me what exactly these things are (we’re working on this, as we don’t even have kids yet!).”
For starters, Danielle, is your husband’s concern about socializing or socialization? I think that’s at the root of many misconceptions about homeschooling right that, that socializing and socialization are the same thing. They aren’t, however, and they don’t serve the same purpose. Socialization is the process through which a child learns the customs, behaviors, and expectations of certain culture/society. Socializing is getting together for a social/common purpose. It’s an activity, not a process. My children, homeschooled though they may be, have opportunities for socialization and socializing.
As far as socializing go, my children do get to spend time with other children of roughly the same age group. We are involved in the homeschool soccer league and Math Olympiad. We have playdates with other families, homeschooler and otherwise. Patchfire and I have set up a weekly family get-together for Thursday afternoons, now that soccer is over for the season. My children also have friends in the neighborhood (and in my mother’s neighborhood) that they play with several times a week. They get invited to birthday parties. They hang out and play video games with buddies. I don’t keep them in a bubble and they don’t lack the ability to strike up friendships and conversations with peers. I’d say that means they’re reasonably good at socializing.
Socialization is an ongoing process and it’s not a concrete one. There isn’t one way to be socialized. Socialization starts at birth and is developed in the family setting. I certainly can thinks of aspects of popular culture and commonly acceptable social behaviors to which I do not want them socialized, and that is one very strong reason why I choose to homeschool. “Socialization” in an of itself isn’t inherently good or bad, but your culture’s rules and expectations can certainly be good or bad, moral or immoral, and I want to have that additional level of control over the culture into which my child is being socialized. I don’t want my children well-socialized to the bullying culture common in so many public schools. I don’t want them to be a part of the Lord of the Flies behavior common in some peer groups. I don’t see anything wrong with eschewing that particular aspect of socialization.
My children are, however, being socialized in the aspects of decent and polite interaction with others. That isn’t something you get from peers solely or even primarily. It’s modeled by the adults around them. It’s practiced through controlled social interaction. It’s experienced through interactions with intellectual or interest-based peers, rather than age-based. I don’t feel a large group of often poorly-supervised 10-year-olds has a lot to offer Captain Science in the way of the particular brand socialization that I’d like to see him develop. I do think he is being well-socialized into a culture of mixed age-groups, where he spends time with older and younger children, adults, teachers/coaches, family, and social groups assembled based on similarity of interest and personality. I think he’s developing ways of interacting with the world that will do him much better than the pack mentality I have seen evidences in many institutional (public or private) school settings. He’s different socialized, but that’s not a bad thing. He’s very social and he’s able to deal with a wide variety of people, at least as well as any slightly-surly prepubescent kid can be.
The issue of socializing/socialization seems to be a major sticking point for people who are against homeschooling, but I can’t figure out why that is, exactly. Are they really so threatened by the idea of someone being different? Is this the only thing they can specifically come up with to explain their otherwise hard-to-pin-down concerns about homeschooling? Of all the questions I’m asked about homeschooling, “are homeschooled kids socialized” seems to be the one I hear the most. I like this little video. A little heavy-handed (most people aren’t so dense that they can’t eventually understand what we’re talking about re: socialization), but sort of a nice representation of the sheer onslaught of concerns expressed over socialization. Just pretend that this one clueless mom represents ALL clueless people. 
Anyway, the [Smrt] Homeschooler thinks she’s doing a pretty good job with socializing her children and allowing them plenty of opportunities to socialize. I just don’t think they’re exactly the same thing or that my children need to be socialized in the way deemed best by people who don’t live our lives.
Do you have a question for the [Smrt] Homeschooler? Email them to
smrtmama@smrtlernins.com
