Absolutely! At the same time, homeschooling parents can (and in my experience with a number of homeschool groups over the years, frequently do) go overboard in protecting their children to the point that it’s virtually impossible for those kids to socialize with other kids.
As an example, by the time I was 8-10 I had been taught that the following were sinful or just “bad”:
–Listening to pop music of any kind
–Wearing particularly “girly” outfits, especially any that included leggings or any kind of cartoon or popular characters
–Watching TV of any kind
–Watching any Disney movie that had a princess in it, except “Beauty and the Beast”
–Wearing shoes with cartoon characters or lights in the soles
–Wearing nail polish or makeup, even though at that age it would only be for dressup/play
–Wearing a two-piece bathing suit
–Talking to boys
–Giggling
–Sleepovers
–Acting silly
–Video games, up to and including taking turns playing “Tetris” on a Nintendo hand-held game (yes, I’m dating myself here
)
–Calling an adult by their first name, even if they asked me to
–Reading most books that other children read
–Playing with Barbies (or other fashion dolls) or Polly Pockets
–Eating fruit rollups and similar snacks
I also hadn’t been allowed to have any but one or two carefully-selected friends.
As a result, all other children (and later, teenagers and those in my peer group in college) were a complete unknown to me. I had nothing in common with them beyond our respective ages. Nothing. I couldn’t talk to them about anything, I wasn’t allowed to do most of the things they did for fun, and as a child and young teenager I had unconsciously assumed the attitude that if all those things listed above were “bad,” then that was true of the people who did them.
I now have a few close friends (interestingly, all but one of them were homeschooled), but I had exactly one friend in high school, and the reason we were friends was that she, like me, was an outsider who’d moved to a small town high school. By then, I was smart enough not to tell my parents that this friend, who was courteous and polite and somehow got under their radar, was also a bisexual Wiccan. We bonded more over being incapable of socializing with our peers than anything else.
I’ll teach my children to be “different” in that they’ll be taught to adhere to truth even when it’s hard, but I will *not *force them into the sort of insane mold I described above. I’ve talked to a lot of former homeschoolers, and most of them lived in the sort of rigid madness I described above, too, though their rules were sometimes a bit different, albeit just as arbitrary. (Other typical rules included that Disney Princess movies might be okay, for example, because they taught a girl that her job in life was to wait for a husband, but any sections involving magic had to be fast-forwarded. Or that any girl or woman who wore pants or shorts was “a bad woman” and to be avoided lest she lead your five-year-old brother into sin. Etc.) Not all homeschoolers lived like that–my husband was homeschooled, and had a good experience plus the advantage of having parents who enrolled the kids in extracurriculars at the local public schools from a young age–but this sort of thing is very common in religious homeschooled kids. To this day, I have to reevaluate my initial reaction to every single person I meet because it’s almost always very negative and very wrong: “Oh, she wears high heels and tailored slacks. BAD!” “He goes out for a few beers with his friends after work. Clearly, he’s a despicable human being who’ll be a terrible and neglectful father.” I only wish I were making this up.
I still have almost nothing in common with most of my peers, and find it very difficult to make conversation if there isn’t a definite goal to it. I didn’t have “the college experience” because I was working three jobs and taking overloads on classes; I had no time for the extracurriculars that make up that experience, so I feel like a fish out of water when people talk about theirs’. (Don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret not drinking to oblivion or doing equally stupid things, but it would have been nice to have the time and social ability to join the on-campus Catholic group or go to a sports event occasionally, that sort of thing.)
Lest you all think I’m being terribly dramatic, let me mention that I do have some friends, and that I actively work on learning how to be better socially every day. It’s still hard, though, and I wouldn’t wish it on my kids.
One final note: growing up like this is enough to make a lot of kids reject their faith. When you finally reach 18 or 20 and realize that throughout your life wearing cartoon-character tennis shoes and having extramarital sex have been held as being pretty much equivalent on the “Bad, Evil, Terrible Things Some People Do Scale,” there’s a very good chance you’ll use the common sense God gave the average platypus and get the heck out of Dodge–and, by extension, your church. Learning to be different from society by saving sex until marriage and living in a kind and charitable way is great. Learning that in order to do so you must have nothing whatsoever in common with anyone who doesn’t believe exactly as you do is counter-productive.
