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As a homeschooled kid: Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estrang

As a homeschooled kid: Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estranged from their adult children. 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.

lolinder 3y ago
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.
- gemstones 3y ago
  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.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    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.
    - deprecative 3y ago
      Big no true homeschooler energy going on in your comments.
      - lolinder 3y ago
        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"
    - gemstones 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - CuriouslyC 3y ago
        When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid and they need to get over it.
        andrepd 3y ago
        The school system has many problems. That doesn't mean that homeschooling isn't 10x worse.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    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.
    - watwut 3y ago
      The "your choice to homeschool me harmed me" is point of contention and literally the conflict in some cases.
      - CuriouslyC 3y ago
        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.
        gemstones 3y ago
        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.
        CuriouslyC 3y ago
        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.
  - ameister14 3y ago
    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.
opportune 3y ago
Can’t both statements be true? If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even without the resources we have on the internet now to make it easier or the ability to use the internet to organize with other homeschooling parents, anecdotally a lot of either super-weirdo parents or hippy granola parents (more in unschooling)). Now with the internet and WFH homeschooling is possible for many more parents than just those that don’t work fulltime and want to teach their kids full time, and it’s easier to create curricula, and easier to network and schedule things with other parents. I do think there is probably a general problem of some pathologically bad parenting traits self-selecting much more than “normal” parents to homeschool: parents with control freak/micromanagement issues they subject their kids to, socially anxious parents who want to spend all their time at home with their family, parents with fringe/paranoid/extreme beliefs, having some kind of weird attachment or smothering issues they subject their kids to. Which isn’t a problem with homeschooling per se as much as it is selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.
- user3939382 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - brabarossa 3y ago
    >trying to convince children that they’re a different gender What a ridiculous thing to say. Nobody does that.
    - user3939382 3y ago
      If only that were true.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    Yep GP, we can clearly see that homeschooling has changed a lot.
throw787653378 3y ago
Throwaway for sensitive topic. I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about. My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe. The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time. Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video. Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters. The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique. To the OP: I beg you, please don't do this. You will probably regret it for most of the rest of your life, and if you don't your kids will.
treis 3y ago
Why are they estranged?

lolinder 3y ago

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.

gemstones 3y ago
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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  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.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    Big no true homeschooler energy going on in your comments.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      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"
  - gemstones 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid and they need to get over it.
      - andrepd 3y ago
        The school system has many problems. That doesn't mean that homeschooling isn't 10x worse.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  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.
  - watwut 3y ago
    The "your choice to homeschool me harmed me" is point of contention and literally the conflict in some cases.
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      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.
      - gemstones 3y ago
        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.
        CuriouslyC 3y ago
        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.
- ameister14 3y ago
  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.

opportune 3y ago

Can’t both statements be true? If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even without the resources we have on the internet now to make it easier or the ability to use the internet to organize with other homeschooling parents, anecdotally a lot of either super-weirdo parents or hippy granola parents (more in unschooling)). Now with the internet and WFH homeschooling is possible for many more parents than just those that don’t work fulltime and want to teach their kids full time, and it’s easier to create curricula, and easier to network and schedule things with other parents. I do think there is probably a general problem of some pathologically bad parenting traits self-selecting much more than “normal” parents to homeschool: parents with control freak/micromanagement issues they subject their kids to, socially anxious parents who want to spend all their time at home with their family, parents with fringe/paranoid/extreme beliefs, having some kind of weird attachment or smothering issues they subject their kids to. Which isn’t a problem with homeschooling per se as much as it is selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.

user3939382 3y ago
[flagged]
- brabarossa 3y ago
  >trying to convince children that they’re a different gender What a ridiculous thing to say. Nobody does that.
  - user3939382 3y ago
    If only that were true.
- andrepd 3y ago
  Yep GP, we can clearly see that homeschooling has changed a lot.

throw787653378 3y ago

Throwaway for sensitive topic. I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about. My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe. The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time. Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video. Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters. The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique. To the OP: I beg you, please don't do this. You will probably regret it for most of the rest of your life, and if you don't your kids will.

treis 3y ago

Why are they estranged?