[gregjor]

There's no reason homeschooled kids can't make friends with kids who go to school. All of my kids did. Most of our neighbors went to school. Most of the kids they met at sports, music classes, ice skating, friends of friends went to regular school. There's no hard partition keeping homeschooled kids away from other kids. Too many people imagine homeschooling as "kids locked up at home," cut off from the rest of the world and other kids.

Homeschoolers divide fairly neatly into families who keep their kids out of school for religious reasons, and families who choose to homeschool for other reasons, usually referred to as secular homeschoolers. Those groups can mix and do activities together, or they can stay partly or completely separate. I think that's what you allude to, but I'm not sure. We did not homeschool for religious reasons. Some of our friends did, and a larger number of homeschoolers we knew about chose not to associate with the secular families. But plenty of people homeschool for reasons other than religion or wanting to isolate their children from society, it's easy to find them.

[sanderjd]

For kids in school, all of those things are additive. They also do all those same kinds of activities in the hours between school and bedtime and on weekends and during the summer. For kids not in school, the options for social experiences during the school day are limited to the adult(s) with them, and other siblings or kids who are also not in school. During the school day, for most kids living in the US, that's a smaller pool of other kids to spend time with during the day. That's all I'm saying! Of course that doesn't mean they have no other ways to make friends! And I don't mean to imply it's a bad thing. "Having a larger pool of kids to see during school days" is certainly not the only metric worth optimizing for! But I think it just is true that, in most places in the US, kids who are in school spend more time with other kids than those who are not in school, just by dint of being in school being the default and more common thing.

[gregjor]

They may be around more kids during the day, but they aren't necessarily socializing with a lot of those kids. During class time they are forced to sit still and pay attention. During recess and breaks and lunch they break out into cliques.

Homeschooled kids have different social experiences, of course, but I don't think those are worse or less rich or varied. Without the constraints of school, kids have more time to socialize with other kids and with adults. They can do "real world" things with their parents. I suppose you have to get to know some homeschooling families to see for yourself.

Plenty of kids in school experience severe loneliness and isolation, and spend too much time on social media getting depressed. It's practically an epidemic, leading to mental health problems and suicide. I won't say that school causes those problems, but I think it's fair to say that sending your kids to school will not necessarily give them a rich and healthy social life.

[sanderjd]

Yep, don't read too much into the point I made; I think it is entirely consistent with this comment that the experiences are different.

I do know homeschooling families, of the secular socialization-friendly kind you did / are doing, and I think it's just empirically the case that it is not as easy for them to find things to do with other kids, during school days, as it is for the much larger number of kids I know who are in schools.

That doesn't mean it's bad (or that it's good) to have fewer opportunities to do things with other kids during school days, just that "most kids are in school during school days" is a real constraint on the ability to do things with other kids at those times.

But getting out of pure observation and into my own ... uncertainties, this is a significant reason I'm personally hesitant to homeschool, at least if I were to be the parent actively doing it.

Frankly, even with the school day and all the many structured activities with other kids that she's doing, the older my daughter gets (and she's only 6), the more I feel like she spends a lot of time with us boring old fogies, when she would be happier running around and playing make believe and stuff with other kids. I'm sure a big part of that is a personal problem, that we have boring un-kid-like personalities, and not nearly enough imagination and spark of creativity. But like, I am who I am! I like books and chess and computers and charts and numbers and stuff. I love being with my kids, but it would be a massive self-deception to think spending all day with me is going to be awesome for them.

So then, I start thinking about: What would we do? Where could we go, what adventures could we go on, who could we go on them with? And I just come up pretty blank. There are only so many museums and parks and stuff. Best case scenario seems to me that I would find a community of people trying to figure out the same thing, and we could do things together. Maybe I just don't know about them! But I spend a pretty sizable amount of time in all the public spaces in my area, often during school days (because kids are sick and have to stay home a lot), and my distinct impression is that there's nobody around.

Maybe they're all getting together, just in peoples' private homes. But I know the families with kids in my neighborhood and the ones surrounding it, and they're all in school, so if this is a thing, I don't think it's nearby.

Note that I'm saying these are all personal concerns, and they are about me, not about the kids. I don't think the standard school model is at all close to my idyll of what my kids would do with their days, but I think it's a bit closer to that than me trying to figure out stuff to do all day and driving all around trying to find engaging activities during the day, maybe with some other kids sometimes. I'm sure this looks totally different to other people with different personalities in different places.