'The most convincing proof that home-educated children develop | Family Matters

"The most convincing proof that home-educated children develop normally is a conversation with a home-educated child who's bright, engaged, polite, interesting, and outgoing. ... Taking the child out of school doesn't mean you're going to remove him from the other "agents of socialization" that surround him. Furthermore, think about the type of socialization that takes place in school. ... This type of socialization may be damaging. Thirty years ago, Cornell Professor of Child Development Urie Bronfenbrenner warned that the "socially isolated, age-graded peer group" created a damaging dependency in which middle school students relied on their classmates for approval, direction, and affection. He warned that if parents, other adults, and older children continued to be absent from the active daily life of younger children, we could expect "alienation, indifference, antagonism, and violence on the part of the younger generation."

Peer dependence is dangerous. When a child is desperate to fit in--to receive acceptance from those who surround him all day, every day--he may defy your rules, go against his own conscience, or even break the law.

... The antidote for peer-centered socialization is to make the family the basic unit for socialization--the center of the child's experience. The family should be the place where real things happen, where there is a true interest in each other, acceptance, patience, and peace, as far as is possible.

... In our society, children, taught by their peer groups, learn to survive, not to live with kindness and grace. ... The trend in our culture is to devalue--even bypass--the family as a basic unit of socialization. But it's within the family that children learn to love by seeing love demonstrated; learn unselfishness both through teaching and through example (choosing to teach a child at home is unselfishness at work); learn conflict resolution by figuring out how to get along with parents and each other.

... In this day of endemic family breakup, teaching your high schooler to live peacefully in a family is probably the most important feat of socialization you can accomplish. Teach skills of resolving conflict, habits of doing for others instead of self, truthfulness, loyalty, sensitivity."

- Jessie Wise, author of The Well-Trained Mind (and mother of The Well Trained Mind classical trivium-based homeschool method which I highly recommend.)