Ask HN: Anyone homeschooling their kids?
Looks like it's been a long time since this question was asked. Anyone on HN homeschooling their kids?
Curious to know more about people's experiences:
- Any online communities that have been helpful
- Good app / platform recs that have been useful along the way
- How was the transition to college (if attended) and adulthood if your kid is already grown up
- Anything that was a game changer that helped make homeschooling a positive experience
Adult and sibling socialization is not a substitute for peer socialization and adequate handling of it is the biggest factor separating success stories and not.
Although they have a bias that makes their attribution of positives and negatives imprecise, the list of top-upvoted posts of all time on the Reddit subreddit /r/homeschoolrecovery contains many examples to motivate wanting a success story and not a failure story.
It's not all doom and gloom. The success stories of homeschooling outperform even wealthy public schools in life outcomes and health, so the reward is there.
I was homeschooled and will be homeschooling our kids (first one coming early January 2027!).
Game-changers for me growing up, that I think my parents did really well: - change the curriculum to match the kid (i.e. learning styles, difficulty, pace) - use the public schools for electives, sports, drama, etc (my siblings took music classes for 1 period each day, we all did school sports still, etc) - have strict (or at least structured) time constraints on homeschooling (i.e. don't let it drag into the whole day; we had to be up, dressed, breakfasted, and ready to start at 9am, and we needed to be done by noon and didn't get lunch until our school work was done).
Congrats on the new one that's on the way and thanks!
and didn't get lunch until our school work was done
I am not surprised this is a salient childhood memory.
It sounds like you're interpreting that in a way I didn't say or intend. In fact, the exact opposite. It was the culmination of my list of things I think my parents did really well.
It wasn't oppressive. It was disciplined. I learned more in 3 hours at home than I did my senior year going to public high school for 8 hours a day.
I did not interpret it at all.
I expect it was quite motivating at the most basic of levels.
Regardless of how you do it, I can't recommend enough that parents do this one thing that I did with my kids. Do force them to write something. Every. Single. Day. It doesn't really matter what about, just ask them to do it and share it with you.
We have a group chat and since they were in middle school (I really should've started this sooner), they'd write a few paragraphs about their day. What they've done, the experiences, the new things they learned, etc. I was very strict about it. Sometimes I would wake the kids if they forgot to write anything. That really pissed off my wife, she'd be like: "you're punishing them over nothing". Sometimes I would forget to check, and they'd miss a day or a few. Then I would force them to backfill the missed days, etc.
This simple, daily exercise turned out to be the best possible gift with enormous compounding effect. My daughter at some point got the presidential award of academic excellence, my son went to college and received a scholarship, for a while he was a competitive swimmer, with dozens of medals - his HS team got second place and a state record, and all.
If you have kids, ask them for this simplest possible thing, start as early as you could. I promise you, years later, one day, they will be thanking you, and this random person on HN.
Have you thought about homeschooling up to a certain age/grade? There is a category of socialization skills that only a lot of direct, in-person, peer-to-peer time builds.
Are you able to point to any literature supporting this statement?
Alternatively, homeschool meet-up groups, or cousins.
I used to teach a homeschool PE class that was really just socialization with a theme.
I was a camp counselor in my late teens and early 20s, and we could always tell which kids were homeschooled. Always.
Could you expand on this please?
In a positive or negative way?
In a negative way. They weren't bad children, just undersocialized.
The benefits of school go beyond what the teachers teach.
But that problem can be solved.
It can be solved, yes. But it almost certainly won't be, in aggregate.
Counterpoint: I was also a camp counselor in my teens and 20s, and I even taught homeschool.
They were definitely easy to pick out, but I think in a good way. They were undersocialized with children, but felt way more at ease around adults. They understood more mature humor, spoke larger ideas in better sentences, and behaved perfectly.
And sure, they were a little "weird." As everyone ought to strive to be.
I couch youth sports, and same experience. It's getting better now that the kids are getting older (10-11). But when they were in 1st or 2nd grade, the home schooled kids were so far behind their teammates in social skills.
I only had one on my baseball team in the spring, while he was definitely not on the same level as the rest of the team socially, it could have just been that he is a shy kid by nature.
I've had the complete opposite experience, where adults often tell us they feel like our kids seem much older than their ages.
We lived in different countries where people speak a different language, during their earlier years, though, so maybe that also contributes to it.
It really comes down to the parents, like most things. If parents are heavily engaged, then the kids turn out more well rounded, regardless of where they go to school, public, private, or home.
I can also usually tell just based on the kids if their parents will be helpful or not. If I ask for a parent to help with setting up at the beginning of practice, or if an assistant coach can't make it and I need a hand, the way a kid acts is a pretty good indicator if their parent will get out of their chair on sidelines and come help.
There are outliers, but its a pretty good rule of thumb.
How old are your kids?
16, 13, and 7.
i will be
We haven't ever regretted the decision to do it with our 3 kids.