Now here’s my question, have there ever been any studies to see the percentage rates of suicides among students who are home educated vs. students who are educated in a brick and mortar setting?
Sucide isn’t the end all be all of a healthy mind.
Less than a year ago in NH three boys were bored and committed a murder in cold blood. They picked a house tied up a girl and killed the mother in her own bed in front of little girl.
They had all been homeschooled at some point. One had attended a fancy private school but dropped out, another was a homeschool dropout ( actually the media never was clear whether he stopped school at the compulsory age or he graduated), the ring leader was a mormon, eagle scout who’d been homeschooled his entire life.
And anacdotilly there are homeschool bullies. There are Catholic HS groups these days but I know many people who are adults now who faced HORRENDOUS bullying from “straight edge” protestants. Catholic, mormon, agnostic/athiest children bore the brunt of it while parents stood by and said that they were homeschooled so it “couldn’t be bad.” They faced all sorts of abuses, verbal, physical and yes, even sexual.
Kids can be, and are, cruel.
There are bullies everywhere.
Praying IS a way to handle it, although it should be far from the only thing and WILL not prevent bad things from happening.
I disagree on the “victim mindset” being the reason behind the tragedy. If you look at the life of the girl in question you see that she was truly a victim. There was nothing she could humanly do to stop them. This was also not typical bullying, there was severe verbal violence, physical violence and sexual violence at play.
No where is really safe and you can’t prevent life. The homeschoolers that I knew who were more isolated even from fellow homeschoolers were like reeds in the wind, completely CRUSHED when they were made fun of in college. The others went absolutely WILD. And some were happy. But I knew my uni became reluctant to accept HS’ers because they were such a gamble. (either they were A+, 4.0, civically engaged or they dropped out after two weeks) HS’ers tend to do better at HS geared uni’s…Magdalen, Steubenville, Ave Maria (I don’t know the prot ones)
I think the best thing is to encourage honesty and communication and to ACT if action needs to be taken. So many people today are so afraid of being labeled “hillicopter parents” that they let their children be mistreated.
Infact, I just had a talk with my co-woker who is dealing with an abusive, bigoted teacher and expecting her 11 son to toe the line because she wants him to ‘obey authority’ and dosn’t want to hover. She refused to act and wondered why her son was getting withdrawn and mean to his siblings. Finally, she spoke to the other parents and found out that the teacher was using racial slurs in place of children’s names, humiliating children for mistakes, punishing special needs kids, and other horrible things. The teacher was fired, and rightly so.
