A few years back, when my children were wee bitty babes, I belonged to an online community that was designed to support people who chose to follow a number of attachment parenting principles. It was a huge help to me since I generally found myself alone in this struggle to bring 3 children born 4 1/2 years apart up with minimal damage. In the many topics we discussed, sometimes parents with older children would post about their neighborhoods. Of the things that struck me were the posts about the homeschooled neighbor kids, lacking social awareness, knocking on the door many times an evening while kids were finishing homework. Oh those homeschoolers! So awkward to not realize that the other neighborhood children were busy with real homework and real issues! So annoying to constantly be on the doorstep banging on the door, interrupting the afternoon! It just proved how homeschooling was bad for children who would never learn the appropriate way to ask friends to play; how out of touch homeschoolers were.
I bring this up because we have neighbors. Neighbors who don't understand that homeschool kids may do schoolwork in the afternoons, and the evenings. Neighbor kids who knock, then knock again, then knock again, then knock again, then... yes, you guessed it, knock a fifth time in one afternoon, when the kids are trying to finish a particularly time consuming history project. Neighbor kids who don't quite understand that you cannot tell your mother you've finished your homework even when you haven't. Neighbor kids who try to encourage you to lie to your mom, who is sitting right behind you, as you stand in the doorway. You can't really lie, and hope your mom doesn't catch you until its too late when your mom is your teacher. In homeschooling, it doesn't work that way. The hour of accountability is much closer when you homeschool.
So yet another homeschooling folktale is disproved for me: homeschooling children are awkward weirdos who have no grasp on any situation outside of their own, while school children are savvy and quick to pick up on social cues. Now if we can only get that myth stricken from the books.
