My attitude is that there is a difference between serving a child's needs and catering to a child's every whim.
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To answer your last question, homeschoolers usually do very well with "the rest of the world." As long as *your* attitude is not that your child is the center of the universe, your child won't feel that way. It is possible to encourage independent work from a homeschooler while mom does something else. I'd call it necessary, even!
I have an ongoing conversation with Wolf (5.4) about school work. He wants fewer worksheet pages, so after break we're dropping the spelling worksheet (not his words list though!). Bonus is that I had been planning on that anyway! We added Logic because we aren't accelerating math any more (already doing 2nd) and added root words because Phonics (3rd) is still pretty basic for him.
The other day I asked Wolf if he knew why he was in Independent Study in first grade and not in a regular Kindergarten classroom. He replied that he did not. I asked him if he wanted to know and he said yes.
I explained that if he was in a classroom with children his age he would be learning the alphabet, how to count to twenty, how to sound out and read basic words like cat, and that he wouldn't be learning Spanish or Logic or root words. I told he we had put a lot of thought into which option to choose and had decided that putting him in an environment where he could work at his level and be challenged would be the best idea. I asked him if he would rather be in a regular classroom and his response was, "NO! It would be way too boring."
He does all of the worksheets that he knows how to do on his own without any help. I only help on ones that need explaining or have a lot of writing (we do dictation for pages that require a lot of writing).
