50 Comebacks for Homeschooling Naysayers
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About Socialization
1. “Socialization? That is why I homeschool.”
2. “Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.”
3. “You don't go to school—how do you socialize?”
4. “What do we do all day? Nothing. We just sit on the couch all day, staring at the wall.”
5. “What swear word do you think my kids don’t already know?”
6. “Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.”
7. “Socialization is overrated.”
8. “With our large family, if you come down to breakfast in this house, you’re socializing!’”
9. “Socialization is the easy part. I just corner the kids in the bathroom every few days and steal their lunch money.”
10. “Oh, right, because (obviously) spending years with no one but her own family really hurt Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
11. “The last thing I need is what you call socialization.”
12. “In school, they tell you you’re ‘not there to socialize.’ But now you’re saying that IS why they’re there?”
13. “We want our kids civilized, not socialized.”
14. “I’m not relying on the school to socialize my kids.”
15. “I prefer to have my kids skip over the bullying skill you learn in middle school – after all, it’s really only useful IN school.”
16. “Well, I guess I can teach my kids how to swear, and we can make them wait in line for the bathroom.”
17. “You mean because we live in a cave, never go to a store, a restaurant, or a doctor’s office, never go to church, never visit friends or family, and basically avoid all contact with other human beings? How is it then that I’m talking to you?”
18. “Do you mean good socialization or bad socialization? Because it works both ways.”
19. “Do you mean, ‘Do I think my children are missing out on something by not being in public school?’
Yes, they are definitely missing out on some very important things. They are missing:
- the explicit, X-rated vocabulary from the playground, bathrooms, school bus;
- the sexual harassment in the lunchroom on hotdog day;
- the physical, mental, and emotional abuse from the little extortionist in the next desk who used to beat my child for the correct answers whenever the teacher’s back was turned.
My children do miss out on those things by not being in public school, and that is exactly why we are homeschooling!”
20. “New studies show that, contrary to popular mythology...the average homeschooled child has no problem ‘socializing’ with other children...as long as he remembers to use smaller words and shorter sentences.”
(From the Mallard Fillmore comic strip, 6/14/2002)
General Homeschooling/ Unschooling Jabs Get These Responses:
21. “If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.”
22. “It’s not as difficult as it seems.”
23. “You see a problem with the idea that my kids are out in the community all the time, while yours are cooped up in an environment that resembles a prison? And you’re worried MY kid isn’t in the Real World?”
24. “We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school.”
25. “We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the simple fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
26. “If you ask, ‘Are you worried about the quality of the education my children will get at home?’ Perhaps you should be more concerned about the type of education your children are getting in public school.”
27. “If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, the above goes double.”
28. “Maybe you should read some newspaper headlines about some of the awful things that are actually happening in schools today. This isn’t my imagination! And it’s WAY worse than it ever was when we were little.”
29. “Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.”
30. “Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.”
31. “This is working for us right now. If that changes, school will always take them back.
32. “If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.”
33. “How will YOUR kids find the time to explore their interests and discover what’s important to them if they’re stuck at school for their entire childhood?”
34. “Have you noticed that when someone has been “schooled” that it’s not a compliment. Why is that?”
All kidding aside, here are a couple of options for really diving deeply into these two topics.
Why does it bother us?
How can we overcome the questions?
What about when we have some questions of our own?
These Unschooling Guides are an excellent way to do a little DIY Unschooling!
Dive deeper into reasons and solutions for coping with critics who are family members in this Unschooling Guide!
Both of these Unschooling Guides are available in the Membership Group!
But Wait! There's more…
35. Please stop asking us if it’s legal. If it is — and it is — it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
36. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
37. Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
38. Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same person who is running up to pregnant women and telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.
39. Please stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
40. Please stop assuming that if we’re religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.
41. Please stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and the lines are long.
42. Please stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
43. Please stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don’t get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I’m one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.
Or
44. Come out from under that rock. There are proms available everywhere for homeschooled kids who want to go.
45. Please stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
46. Please stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t envy your Homework Police nightly battles.
47. Please stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. It’s not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.
48. Please stop assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
49. Please stop assuming that I must be some kind of supermom because I homeschool my kids.
50. Please stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school. I don’t think you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
BONUS!
- “If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling, don’t say anything at all!”
- “Pass the Bean Dip.”
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