Record: Oz Guterman and Ari Neuman, “What Makes a Social Encounter Meaningful: the Impact of Social Encounters of Homeschooled Children on Emotional and Behavioral Problems,” in Education and Urban Society 48, no. 8 (2017): 778-792. [Abstract Here]
Summary: Guterman and Neuman are by now familiar names for readers of this blog. The pair has released several studies since 2016 about homeschoolers’ perceptions of education, the goals of homeschoolers, emotional & behavioral development of homeschooling children, motivations for homeschooling in Israel, and of individuation as a parental goal. The current study continues the emphasis on the emotional lives of homeschooled children, using the same sample that they used in their earlier work on emotional development.
This article begins with a brief lit review concluding that previous studies on homeschooler socialization have not compared homeschoolers who get a lot of peer interaction with those who do not, nor have they studied whether it makes a difference if a homeschooled child’s peer interactions are with other homeschooled children or with children who attend school.
Guterman and Neuman address these gaps in this study, which looks at 65 homeschooled Israeli children aged 6-12, all recruited for the study by the authors, who attended weekly meetings of homeschooling families to pitch their study. The children filled out the “Assessment on Emotional and Behavioral Problems,” while their parents filled out a questionnaire providing a thorough demographic and educational profile. The problems questionnaire included questions about “externalization” issues like aggression, rule-breaking, and so forth, and about “internalization” issues like anxiety, withdrawal, depression, etc.
Guterman and Neuman found that girls demonstrated more internalization problems than boys, and that homeschoolers who met more with other children had fewer internalization and externalization problems than homeschoolers without such opportunities. Whether these other children were homeschooled or went to school didn’t matter a whole lot, but in general results were a little better when homeschooled children socialized with other homeschooled children than when they were with children who went to school, especially for the lowest grades. Children in bigger families also exhibited fewer externalization problems.
Guterman and Neuman confidently assert that social isolation correlates with emotional and behavioral disturbances, especially of the internal variety. They go on to speculate that perhaps the reason homeschoolers who socialize with schooled kids fare less well than those who socialize with other homescoolers is that in the early grades such differences create more distance between children than the children are comfortable navigating at that stage of their lives. The finding about larger families is interpreted the same way. Children seem to do better when they interact with children with whom they have a lot in common.
At the end the authors acknowledge that the sample is not representative, and that findings for Israeli homeschoolers might not transfer to those in other countries.
Appraisal: I enjoyed this article very much. It offers something new to the socialization literature. We now have a set of theses that could and should be put to the test in other contexts. In my own anecdotal experience as a college professor at a religious institution that attracts a significant number of homeschooled children, I have frequently noted the diversity of personalities and rates of extroversion among undergraduates who were homeschooled. Some are outgoing, leadership-oriented, great conversationalists, etc. Others are reclusive, slow of speech, hesitant about the future. Why the difference? This article posits that at least two factors may be contributing: first, family size, where a larger family correlates with social fluency, and, second, frequency of peer interactions, especially with other homeschoolers. Want to raise well-adjusted homeschooled children? Have a big family and give the kids lots of opportunity to spend time with friends. Those seem to be the take-home messages of this article. Are those messages generalizable? Only further research can tell us that, as the present article, fecund though it is, depends upon a convenience sample.