Homeschooled kids and Socialization

About ten years ago, when homeschooling was newer and more rare (at least it seemed so to me), and before I kids, I worked at a public school and was having lunch with the other music teachers.

One of the teachers (who had schooled kids of her own) said, "My sisters' kids are homeschooled, and they're very socially backward children."

"How so?" I asked, always the journalist in conversations like this.

"They can't handle any kind of difficulty or problems; they just fall apart if the least thing goes wrong."

One of the other teachers (who also had a schooled child) nodded and said, "My neighbor's son is homeschooled. He's fourteen and doesn't have any friends his age. In the afternoons he comes over and plays with my son, who's only ten."

Now.

Here's a few thoughts I now have about that conversation:

1) If, in fact, a child "falls apart because they can't handle the slightest difficulty," maybe it's partly their personality. Maybe those kids were still very young. Maybe their parents are like that, and they're learning bad coping skills. Maybe their parents make them feel incapable.

Or ....

Maybe they're not different from other kids that age, but since they're homeschooled, people notice it at say, "Look! That kid's crying over spilled milk! It must be because they're homeschooled and can't handle anything!"

But it surely isn't because homeschooling=no difficulty or challenges in life. There are all kinds of opportunities in real life to have things go wrong and learn coping skills. You don't have to create them or go to school to find them.

2) I will admit, at the time, the idea of a fourteen year old boy having no one but a ten year old to ever hang out with did sound sad. But notice the assumptions we all made here: One, that coming over the neighbor's house was the only time the teenager saw other kids. Maybe he had great church friends on weekends, but they're busy (or live too far away) during the week. Maybe he went to a co-op, or was in a band, or had chess tournaments, or whatever, on a weekly basis.

Maybe he actually liked this ten year old child. Wouldn't that be a novel thing? Maybe they had common interests, even though they were different ages. Maybe the teenager was interested (whether consciously or not) or someday being a teacher, or a camp counselor or something, and the idea of being with somebody younger appealed to that part of him.

Maybe.