"But What About Socialization?" — A Different Way to Think About It

If you've homeschooled for more than a week, you've heard the question. Usually in the grocery store. Usually with a slightly tilted head… “But what about socialization?”

It's a fair question — and one worth actually sitting with, instead of just defending against. So let's…

The hidden assumption in the question

Traditional schooling groups kids almost entirely by birth year. It's efficient — but it's also, when you think about it, a little unusual.

In her book Homeschooling: You're Doing It Right Just by Doing It, Ginny Yurich points out that this kind of age-segregation is really a convenience for moving large groups of children through the same curriculum at the same pace — not necessarily something chosen because it's best for the child.

And it's worth noticing: this kind of strict age-grouping mostly disappears the moment we become adults. Once you're out of school, nobody sorts your friendships, your workplace, or your neighborhood by birth year. So why do we treat it as essential for kids?

Educator John Taylor Gatto put it bluntly, calling it "absurd and anti-life" to spend your most formative years confined to people of exactly your own age and background — cut off from the wider range of people and experiences the real world actually offers.

What homeschooling does differently

Yurich's point isn't that classrooms are bad — it's that homeschooling opens up a kind of socialization that's actually closer to real life. Homeschooled kids end up mixing naturally with people of all ages — at family gatherings, park days, library story times, co-ops, and community events — instead of spending the bulk of their week with only same-age peers.

That matters more than it might sound like at first. Being around people who are older, younger, or just different from us stretches us. When we're around someone with more experience or a different skill, it tends to inspire us to grow, not just compete. And Dr. Peter Gray's research-backed reminder that “children are naturally wired to seek out and drive their own learning,” fits right into this — kids given the freedom to socialize broadly tend to do exactly that, without needing it engineered for them.

The friend they'd never have met

Here's the part that struck me most: in a traditional grade-level system, children often choose their friends based on convenience (age) first and then the other things like common interest, kindness, etc. come second. I don’t think this is an intentional choice. It’s just that they are limited in their interactions at school. They are around the same 20-50 peers (depending on the size of the school) every day. That is a very narrow offering of friends to interact with. But, most children will be forced to choose their best-fit friend in that group, in an effort to belong. In reality, the friends they choose in that smaller sample, may not actually be the friends that they would choose, had they been offered a wider range of children (different ages, backgrounds, interests, etc.)

Homeschool communities don't work that way. A single group of families getting together might include kids from newborn to nineteen, with almost no overlap in "grade" at all — and yet real friendships form anyway, often between kids who never would have crossed paths in a traditional school hallway. The groups can still be narrow, but they are often narrowed more on the criteria of things such as faith, rather than age— something, in my opinion, that is more important. If I’m going to offer my child a group of 20-50 children to befriend, I would rather them share our faith over the same age.

Finding "their people"

Homeschooling gives kids practice at something we don't usually think to teach directly: finding their people, across ages, rather than settling for whoever happens to share their birth year. Your child's closest friend might be five years older. Might be five years younger.

So the next time someone asks about socialization, it might be worth answering with a question of your own: socialized to what, exactly? Because if it means learning to connect with people of every age, in every setting, with real confidence — that's not something homeschooling is missing. It might be one of the things it does best.

Sources: Ginny Yurich, MEd, Homeschooling: You're Doing It Right Just by Doing It (includes references to John Taylor Gatto and Dr. Peter Gray).