Originally Posted by Old Dad
Originally Posted by 22B
Social life? Choose one.

[ ] B&M school with bullying, violence, drugs, gangs.
[ ] Homeschooling in the safety of home with loving parents and siblings.

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.

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?

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.