[ksdale]

As a homeschooling parent, we hear this trope all the time and it has not been borne out by our experience at all. My wife and I probably both have above-average social skills, but our kids are all well-spoken, empathetic, and kind for their ages, and we tend to have to help them unlearn the social "skills" they learn from their friends who go to public school.

And we're not really sticklers when it comes to behavior, we mostly just want them to not be rude and to think about other people when they do things that impact other people, and we have not found that kids who attend public school are especially likely to possess those qualities. (I also went to public school and spent a good part of my early adulthood unlearning crappy social behavior that was learned in school).

[Exmoor]

As a former homeschooled child (K-10, I started attending community college in 11th grade) who is still in contact with many dozens of friends I met through homeschooling, I would agree. I would say that my homeschooled friends probably average just a bit better in the social skills department than my friends who attended private and public schools. That said, my homeschooled friends almost all came from middle-class, two-parent households from the suburbs, so my guess is that any advantage in those skills was more likely to be due to that than their schooling.

If you keep your kids locked at home 24/7 they will certainly have difficulty learning how to talk to other kids and adults, but nearly nobody does that. Most homeschooled families were involved in organized classes and activities with other families, even 20-30 years ago and my impression is that those experiences have only increased.