The S-Word: My Answer After Two Decades in Education

7 min read

You know the one. You’re at a birthday party, or the grocery store, or Thanksgiving, and someone finds out you homeschool and their face does the thing. Then it comes.

But what about socialization?

I’ve been asked it as a teacher, as a principal, and at least once a week since we started homeschooling. I’ve answered it defensively, I’ve answered it with a smile and a change of subject, and I’ve answered it badly at least once at a family dinner. Here is what I actually think now, after two decades in education and enough years at my own kitchen table to have watched the answer play out.

Where the question comes from

The people asking are almost never being intentionally unkind. They’re picturing what they know: a room of twenty-five kids born within twelve months of each other, and the idea that this is where children learn to be people.

I spent a long time inside those rooms. Here’s what I saw: children being told, most of the day, to stop socializing. Sit down. Face forward. Eyes on your own paper. No talking in the hall. Recess shrinking every year. The social time in a school day is the part the schedule is designed to squeeze out.

So when someone asks me about socialization, I’ve started asking a gentle question back. When’s the last time your workplace sorted everyone by birth year?

Real life is mixed-age. It’s the librarian and the neighbor and the teenager at the farm stand and the toddler at church. Homeschooled kids live in that version of the world all day long.

Proximity is not the same thing

Here’s the piece nobody says out loud. Putting a child in a room with two dozen other children is proximity. It’s closeness. It is a completely different thing from learning how to be with people.

I watched it for years. A child can sit next to the same twenty-four kids from September to June and come out of it having had three real conversations. Another child can spend a Wednesday afternoon running errands with her mother and learn more about how to talk to a grown-up than she learned all semester. Being near people teaches you to be near people. Being with people, in a conversation that goes somewhere, teaches you to be a person.

The classroom offers a lot of the first kind. That’s simply what it is, and I say that as someone who loved her classrooms. Most of what we call socialization actually happens in the margins of a school day, and the margins keep getting thinner.

Every parent is responsible for this. We just get the heat.

I want to say this plainly, because it took me a while to see it. Every parent is responsible for their child’s social life. Every single one. The public school mom drives to birthday parties and signs up for soccer and worries about the friend who’s a bad influence. The private school mom does the same. Homeschool moms do exactly the same thing.

The difference is that we get asked about it. Constantly. As if a school building came with a guarantee attached, and the rest of us are winging it. I promise you, no principal has ever guaranteed a parent that their child would make a friend. I know, because I was the principal.

So if you’ve been carrying that question around like it’s a mark against you, put it down. You are doing the same job every other parent is doing. You’re just doing it on purpose, and in daylight.

What it actually looks like at our house

My kids have classes at our local homeschool learning center, activities, youth group, and endless outings. They know the names of the people at the post office. My oldest has a close friend who is two years younger and another who is an adult woman from our homeschool learning center who shares her love of animals. My middle daughter organized the neighborhood kids into a bakery last summer, with a menu and a manager, and she was the manager.

I’m not raising my kids in a bubble. I’m raising them in a greenhouse — they get the whole world, in the order and the dose that lets them grow strong enough to handle it.

I’m not raising my kids in a bubble. I’m raising them in a greenhouse

Where my kids' social life actually happens, a completely unscientific pie chart: each other, the learning center and youth group, the farm stand and post office, church, an adult friend who loves goats — and 0% in a room of 25 kids born the same year

The relationships that matter most

Here is the part of the answer I believe most, and it’s the part that gets left out entirely.

The most important relationships my children will ever have are the ones under this roof. With each other. With their dad and me. A brother and sister who spend their days together are practicing something a classroom cannot offer: how to share a life with someone you didn’t pick. How to lose an argument and still eat lunch together. How to apologize without a teacher standing over you making you say it.

My oldest reads to her little brother because she wants to, and he adores her for it. My middle daughter has learned to negotiate with a four-year-old, which is harder than negotiating with anyone I ever sat across from in a board meeting. These are the social skills that show up at every dinner table, every job, every marriage they’ll ever have. They are being built every single day, and a school schedule would have taken most of those hours away.

Friends matter. Friends are wonderful. But friends come and go through a childhood, and siblings are forever. I’d rather my children be experts at the forever kind.

What real practice does for a child

I’ve watched something happen with homeschooled kids over the years, mine and other people’s, and I’ve never found a better word for it than confidence.

A child who orders her own food, asks the librarian a question, tells the man at the hardware store what she’s building, and gets a real answer, learns something she can’t learn from a worksheet: talking to people works. Adults answer. The world is friendly when you approach it. Every one of those small exchanges is a little bit of positive reinforcement, and it adds up to a child who looks you in the eye.

That’s the thing people notice about homeschooled kids, and they notice it without knowing what they’re noticing. The eye contact. The easy conversation with a grown-up. The willingness to ask. Those kids didn’t get that from a room of their peers. They got it from a thousand small conversations with the actual world, with a parent close enough to help when one went sideways.

Mandy and two children reaching their hands together on a boardwalk

The honest part

There are homeschooled kids who are lonely. There are kids in classrooms who are lonely. Loneliness is a family problem to solve, and homeschooling doesn’t cause it or cure it. What it does is put the decision in your hands. If your child needs more people, you can go get more people — this week, on purpose, in the form your child actually enjoys.

That’s more than the classroom ever offered me as a mother.

What to say next time

You don’t owe anyone a lecture. Here are the three answers I actually use, depending on who’s asking:

For the curious: “They get more of it than they did in school, honestly — and with all ages, not just kids their own age.”

For the worried relative: “I worried about it too. Then I watched them make friends at the farm stand, at the learning center, at church. They’re fine. Come to the learning center showcase and see for yourself.”

For the third time from the same person: “You’ve asked me three times. That tells me you love them. It’s settled — but I’d love for you to come see.”

Then change the subject to pie.

Here’s to the mixed-age, real-world, wonderfully social life your kids get to live. The S-word never scared me. It just took a while to find the words.

If the socialization question is the one that’s been holding you back, I wrote a whole chapter on it in The Homeschool Bible™ — it’s the book I wish someone had handed me at my own kitchen table. And the Homebuilt Community opens in October, free to join, with moms who’ve answered this question a hundred times. The waitlist is at heymandydavis.com/community.

Keep reading