“Homeschooling hurts kids socially”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Homeschooling done right turns out kids who are better with people, not worse. Richard Medlin's peer-reviewed review in the Peabody Journal of Education found homeschooled kids generally have good social skills and solid friendships. School is thirty kids born the same year, in one room, learning manners from each other. Where else in life does that happen? A homeschooled kid spends the day with siblings, adults, co-ops and neighbors, so he can look a grown man in the eye and hold a conversation. You'll say some families isolate their kids. Some do, and plenty of kids are lonely in a crowded hallway. Let me ask you this: do you want a kid who can survive a cafeteria, or one who can talk to anybody? If you can homeschool, do it. Socialization isn't a bus ride. It's a family that shows up.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

The research doesn't show homeschoolers lagging socially. It finds them doing as well as or better than kids in school.
Richard G. Medlin's 2013 review in the Peabody Journal of Education concluded that homeschooled children generally have good social skills and quality friendships, and that they take part in the daily routines of their communities.
Real life is mixed-age. A kid who spends his day with siblings, neighbors, co-ops, church and adults is practicing for the world he'll actually live in.
Parents, not the state, have the right to direct how their kids are raised, and the Supreme Court has said so for a hundred years.
In Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, the Supreme Court struck down an Oregon law requiring public school attendance and wrote that the child is not the mere creature of the state.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Most homeschool studies rely on volunteer families, so the research may overrepresent the most engaged homes and miss the isolated ones.

Nate: The studies do lean on volunteer families. That cuts against you too, because nobody has evidence that homeschooling as such damages kids socially. You don't put millions of good families under suspicion because a few bad ones exist. By that standard we'd have closed the public schools decades ago.

What he grants the other side

The research leans on volunteer families, so the data isn't perfect.

The lines

“Socialization isn't a bus ride. It's a family that shows up.”
“The real world isn't sorted by birth year.”

Sources

Richard G. Medlin, Peabody Journal of Education, Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited (2013)
U.S. Supreme Court, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925)