Can't agree. Unless parents make a specific effort to get them out with other similar aged group of kids (maybe other home schoolers) then the kid is going to most likely have stunted social and emotional intelligence even if their academic intelligence is off the chart. Even as a kid who spent most breaks reading something several grade levels higher than my current one, I still liked to wander off and hang with the other kids in public school. I still enjoyed comic books, flag football at recess, and cartoons.
> the kid is going to most likely have stunted social and emotional intelligence
You're either ignoring history, or assume that people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way... Sure kids can learn from each other, and in a healthy way, but the structures that we have in place to foster that (universal public school) are fairly new in the grand scheme of things...
For context, I'm a former educator with a lot of experience with homeschooled kids. I've also read a lot of literature on early childhood development and socialization.
I think the phrase "[the kid has] stunted social and emotional intelligence" hides a lot of nuance. The more useful rephrasing might be: "this person's ability to relate to people and navigate complex social interactions, particularly in the culture in which they were raised, is below average".
The important takeaway is what matters most is your ability to handle social interactions with peers.
> people who lived >150 years ago were all emotionally damaged in some way
"Emotionally damaged" is a very culturally relative term. If you transported people from 150 years ago to the present day many would be considered "emotionally damaged" by modern standards even though they were functional people in their own time. This is because social intelligence is measured against a person's lived context.
Coming back to homeschool - many home schooled kids have not had the same level of socialization as their peers in schools. That lack of socialization causes a negative feedback loop where more socialized kids don't want to interact with the homeschooled kids leading to the homeschooled kid being even more under socialized. The window of opportunity to effectively intervene when this process starts is short and when parents fail to act I have seen it cause decades of suffering for their kids.
The "socialization" kids get in the American school system through their peers is something that people in most of the world would consider utterly dysfunctional. And the fact that educators haven't realized that they've helped create a completely non-functional generation of kids is a damning indictment of the field.
Is it better for the first bully a person encounters to be in the 3rd grade or as an adult with an unreasonable boss or a peer who dishes out emotional abuse on the side? American schools can be brutal but so is the world at large.
I think we need to teach kids that this behavior is not appropriate and to teach them skills to handle it and seek out others to help them if they need it. Otherwise you end up long term with people like Putin in charge.
The window is not an age range exactly, but a window of time determined by:
1. The current age of your child
2. How much less socialization they're getting than their peers
3. Their natural proclivities towards socialization
Socialization starts becoming important around ages 2-3. Points 2 and 3 being equal, the size of window expands as children age. Isolating your child about 6 months between 3.5 and 4 could cause a potentially permanent setback if not actively addressed. By age 12 a year of isolation is probably around the limit before rapid action is necessary.
A major caveat to these guidelines is they don't really apply during COVID. While the reduced socialization for children is probably not good for them, lots of children are being under socialized and so your child can likely still find peers at similar socialization levels to interact with and not fall into the feedback cycle.
Perhaps, but I think under-socialization will be less of a problem than many fear because most kids were under-socialized. The fact it's happening to most kids and not one or two eliminates the feedback loop.
I would argue that it's most teenagers and young adults today whose development is "stunted." They spend all their time with their peers and have a hard time acting like something other than children.
