Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy can one homeschool a highly social child?

You would hope not all but it depends on the home life a bit. there will be some violence wherever you are. Gang affiliations can spill from parents/siblings to little kids and drugs and alcohol seem to start making an appearance at 10 or so. Sex could be starting by fifth grade too. All these things should still be a small minority though I would hope.

FWIW - our local zoned public school does in fact have drugs and gangs at the elementary level. Really. The school that DS goes to is a charter school within this public school district. As far as I can tell, there are no drugs or gangs. I do feel that he is very safe at his current school. He's just not getting educated, that's all.

DD9 is in a magnet at a very poor Title 1 school where the gen ed kids are high risk by most standards, though we are not in a large city. We are not living in a bubble. Stats on suspensions for fighting, etc are published by the district and I see one or two per year or something like that for our school, so no real violence. No gangs for sure. I have never heard of an alcohol or drug incident. I mean, maybe--she's somewhat protected in the magnet. But the kids do mix. She is exposed to rough language and hears about rough home lives. But she is safe. Middle school, I freely admit, is likely to be different.

The OP's school dilemma was why we showed DD's school the Iowa Scale to give them objective criteria to defend themselves against the storm of 'me too' requests.

Statistically it just isn't likely that too many kids will jump the bars that the IS sets.

Absolutely LOVE this! lol.


We are homeschooling our extremely (EXTREMELY) social little girl, dd7, although I said it might not work out because she would be bored. After a couple years of elementary, she had lots of friends but 3 main kids she loved to hang out with, all boys for some reason. And her cousins, who fortunately live close.

One of her main buddies is homeschooling now, too, and the mom of the other two guys (brothers) is also seriously considering homeschool, so in the end she might not see them anyway if she *was* in school.
So, we have been lucky, but the real bottom line was school was not the place for her: she had vision issues which we are working on so that put her in an odd place reading wise, giving the school an excuse not to 'push' her. Nevermind every math pretest and iq test showed her miles ahead of k and 1st grade. For that matter, reading wasn't bad either, she was just holding her book funny and using 1 eye (yeesh!)

For now, and for us, this is a good decision; and she is motivated to socialize ALOT, unlike the rest of us, so I can count on her to remind me to make play dates for her when I would rather read a book and burn dinner. I mean she will be coming home from a party and asking about who we might have over when we get home! My ds13 sees more people because of her, and so do I.

While I understand the thought pattern, one also needs to be careful about shielding too strongly their child from the harsh realities of the outside world, otherwise, college will hit them like a stinking axe between the eyes where....

Bullying, violence, drugs, sex, gangs, unfairness, preferential treatment, very different educational styles, instructors who don't care whether you succeed or fail, and many other circumstances one learns to deal with in public schools is often magnified but seldom seen in home schooled atmospheres. Don't think this all goes away once one has a HS diploma in hand.

I've seen too many home schooled children devastated with culture shock from such a scenario. I'm not saying you can't prevent it, I'm just saying not all the problems go away with home schooling, in fact, it often creates new problems. Every situation has it's pros and cons.

My sense is it's not a question of whether to expose children to differences in perspective and experience as a homeschooled vs B&M student, but rather how and when to do so.

I see parenting as a process of training the child up to be his/her best self while, at the same time, giving your child the skills of self-knowledge and judgment required to navigate the world when things inevitably don't align with the child's inner world. This affects our family on a religious level, an intellectual one, and an emotive one. The gap has to be minded, and I can see well thought-out homeschooling being a solution to differences between the child and wider world because it fosters more opportunities for introspection and contemplation, which build maturity and coping skills.

Sure, as with vaccines, exposure is required to test these latent abilities. But I'd argue that the ideal balance on that continuum between exposure and incubation depends on the child and the unique environmental stressors.

I agree.

However-- I'm hard-pressed to identify an individual anecdote there in which the choice wasn't a deliberate move to "shelter" the child from the realities of the world as it is... most frequently motivated by ideological considerations in the parents.

Two varieties of parenting there-- those that believe that children are lovely little flowers that need to be nurtured and should be free to explore a world which is completely positive and never told "no" or presented with boundaries because those things are artificial limitations to the child's natural development...

and those that base their parenting on religious beliefs which they perceive to be undermined by other modes of schooling, or which they believe to mandate parents as educators.

THOSE groups of kids, absolutely this is a huge concern. It doesn't end well for them.

On the other hand, most parents on this board would be quite unlikely to choose homeschooling for either reason (certainly not as a majority consideration, anyway), and have little interest in limiting their children's exposure to the world at large.

KWIM?

How exactly does sending your child to school to be repeatedly physically assaulted prepare them for a professional career requiring a college degree?

I don't remember suggesting that we send our children to school to be repeatedly physically assaulted, if I did so by all means please point it out to me.

I think a lot of us are thinking in extremes here. The point of my post is that we have to be careful how much of reality we pull out kids out of, eventually they need to deal with that reality like it or not.