The Smithsonian Institution’s recipe for genius and leadership: (1) children should spend a great deal of time with loving, educationally minded parents; (2) children should be allowed a lot of free exploration; and (3) children should have little to no association with peers outside of family and relatives.
—H. McCurdy, “The Childhood Pattern of Genius”
“But what about socialization?” If you haven’t asked this question already, a neighbor or grandparent certainly will.
The most convincing proof that home-educated children develop normally is a conversation with a home-educated child who’s bright, engaged, polite, interesting, and outgoing. Home-school graduates get into college and do fine; they get jobs and excel.
But it’s important to understand what socialization means. According to the dictionary, socialization is “the process by which a human being, beginning in infancy, acquires the habits, beliefs, and accumulated knowledge of his society.” In other words, you’re being socialized when you learn habits, acquire beliefs, learn about the society around you, develop character traits, and become competent in the skills you need to function properly in society.
Who teaches all of this? Agents of socialization include the family (both immediate and extended), the religious community, neighborhoods, tutors and mentors, the media (TV, radio, films, books, magazines all tell the child what’s expected of him, for better or worse), clubs (social or academic), the arts (both in observation and participation), travel, jobs, civic participation. And formal schooling in an institution.
Taking the child out of school doesn’t mean that you’re going to remove him from the other “agents of socialization” that surround him. Furthermore, think about the type of socialization that takes place in school. The child learns how to function in a specific environment, one where he’s surrounded by thirty children his own age. This is a very specific type of socialization, one that may not prove particularly useful. When, during the course of his life, will he find himself in this kind of context? Not in work or in family life or in his hobbies. The classroom places the child in a peer-dominated situation that he’ll probably not experience again.
And this type of socialization may be damaging. Thirty years ago, Cornell Professor of Child Development Urie Bronfenbrenner warned that the “socially-isolated, age-graded peer group” created a damaging dependency in which middle-school students relied on their classmates for approval, direction, and affection. He warned that if parents, other adults, and older children continued to be absent from the active daily life of younger children, we could expect “alienation, indifference, antagonism, and violence on the part of the younger generation.”1
Peer dependence is dangerous. When a child is desperate to fit in—to receive acceptance from those who surround him all day, every day—he may defy your rules, go against his own conscience, or even break the law.
We live in an age in which people think a great deal about peers, talk about them constantly, and act as if a child’s existence will be meaningless if he isn’t accepted by his peer group. But the socialization that best prepares a child for the real world can’t take place when a child is closed up in a classroom or always with his peer group. It happens when the child is living with people who vary widely in age, personality, background, and circumstance.
The antidote for peer-centered socialization is to make the family the basic unit for socialization—the center of the child’s experience. The family should be the place where real things happen, where there is a true interest in each other, acceptance, patience, and peace, as far as is possible.
Socialization in the family starts when very young children learn that they can trust adults to give them answers, to read books to them, to talk to them, to listen to music with them. Socialization continues as the child learns to fit into the lives of his parents and siblings, to be considerate and thoughtful of other people, to be unselfish instead of self-centered. A two year old can learn to play alone for a few minutes while the parent teaches a ten year old; an eight year old can learn not to practice the piano during the baby’s nap time. It’s the real world when a child learns to play quietly because Daddy is working on his income taxes. (We still talk about “the year we couldn’t go into the living room” because Dad was being audited and his tax papers were spread throughout the living room for weeks.)
In our society, children, taught by their peer groups, learn to survive, not to live with kindness and grace. Exclusive peer groups—cliques—start forming around age five. Even in kindergarten, children are accepted or rejected on the basis of what they wear, what toys they own, what TV programs they watch. Even when adults are supervising, these cliques survive—and strengthen—as children grow. And only the strongest flourish.
The trend in our culture is to devalue—even bypass—the family as a basic unit of socialization. But it’s within the family that children learn to love by seeing love demonstrated; learn unselfishness both through teaching and through example (choosing to teach a child at home is unselfishness at work); learn conflict resolution by figuring out how to get along with parents and with each other.
The family unit—this basic agent of socialization—is itself a place to communicate with people of different ages. But socialization doesn’t stop there. As a family, you should make a wide range of friends of various ages. Home-school parent and lawyer Christopher Klicka points out that home-educated children are continually socialized through community activities, Little League, Scouts, band, music lessons, art classes, field trips, and the numerous events sponsored by local home-school support groups.2
By means of these activities, parents teach children how to live in society and how to relate to others. In contrast, peer groups teach a child either to take direction from the most popular kid in school or to transform himself into the most popular kid at school, often sacrificing intelligence and character in the process.
What about high school?
High-school students demonstrate what sociologist Charles Horton Cooley describes as “the looking-glass self”—they evaluate their worth by looking at themselves in the mirror held up by their peers.3 Unfortunately, the qualities that lead to high-school success—such as peer popularity and athletic prowess—are precisely those that may be of least use during later life. In contrast, the home-style classical education develops and rewards skills (perseverance, dedication, patience) that will be useful in later life. Is it more important that the high-school years be ones of dizzying social success followed by a lifetime of nostalgia or a time of preparation for a successful life?
Of course, high school isn’t a “dizzying social success” for most people.
At a reception for students at Cornell University, a ring of young women closes around Jane [Goodall], who is describing how adolescent chimp females often leave their community to join another. Kimberly Phillips, a graduate student in genetics, asks what kind of welcome a female can expect from the new community.
“Well, the males are delighted,” Jane says. “But the females beat her up. They don’t want the competition. One strategy the newcomer can use, however, is to attach herself to a high-ranking female, even if she is treated badly by that female. The others will eventually accept her.”
“God, it sounds just like high school,” Kimberly says.4
By the time the student reaches high school, he’s looking at a future that will probably be spent in family life, work, and community involvement. Doesn’t it make sense to spend your training time with these emerging young adults preparing them for the real life they’re getting ready to enter? There is life after high school. (There is even life after college and graduate school.)
In this day of endemic family breakup, teaching your high schooler to live peacefully in a family is probably the most important feat of socialization you can accomplish. Teach skills of resolving conflict, habits of doing for others instead of self, truthfulness, loyalty, sensitivity.
What about dating?
We’ll brave the collective wrath of American high-school students by suggesting that exclusive dating in high school is a waste of time. After all, what are you going to do if you fall deeply in love at seventeen? Get married? Break up? Have sex? We believe that sex without commitment is damaging at any age (we’re pro-marriage). But it’s even worse for teens, who are uncertain, vulnerable, and unsure of their own attraction. Sex can be a powerful, manipulative tool even for supposedly mature adults. It’s even more devasting when wielded by the unready. We have yet to find an adult who remembers high-school dating as rewarding and life-enriching.
Not that you should ignore the opposite sex (a practical impossibility). Lots of family-oriented socializing—parties that include not just teens, but people of all ages—give teens plenty of practice in relating to the opposite sex in an atmosphere that isn’t fraught with sexual tension, the pain of uncertainty, and the possibility of rejection. Look at the general state of peace, joy, and sexual fulfillment at the average high school and ask: Is this what I want my teen to be socialized to?
Positive socialization is all about living in your world responsibly, fulfilling your potential, taking advantage of opportunity, making the lives of others around you better. You don’t need the institutional school to teach these values to your child.
Practically speaking, you provide positive socialization through family-based and interest-based activities. The Red Cross offers CPR and baby-sitting instruction. Museums offer special classes. Church and community teams offer sports participation. Clubs for every hobby from photography to stamp collecting meet regularly. Science fairs, debate clubs, swimming lessons—all of these provide opportunities for social interaction.
Nor should you be afraid of being alone. A measure of solitude can develop creativity, self-reliance, and the habit of reflective thought. Socialize, but don’t crowd your schedule so full that the child has no time to think, to sit and stare at the walls, to lie in the backyard and watch ants crawl by.
RESOURCE
Sande, Ken, with Tom Raabe. Peacemaking for Families: A Biblical Guide to Managing Conflict in Your Home. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2002.
$12.99. Order from any bookstore. Visit the author’s website, www.peacemakerministries.org, for more information on conflict resolution. For those working from a Christian worldview, this is an invaluable guide to handling and resolving family conflict.