Well, I have tried to duplicate the public school environment as the Paterfamilias - beatings in the bathroom; offering drugs; applying condoms to various fruits and vegetables...
We do what we can.
Perhaps Mater& Magister has some thoughts.
Well, there's something to be said for socialization. If there's a congenial homeschool support group around, you've got it made. But...
Thinking of my favorite homeschoolers in history, the family of St. Thomas More: it was an extended household with More's children and grandchildren, tutors, servants and their children, etc. I'd have to imagine that most of the great homeschooled people of the past did so in social networks rather bigger than those of today.
Even a socially-cohesive neighborhood would address some of the social isolation problem. In the working-poor neighborhood I grew up in, at least we knew our street: on our side old Mr. Abbey and his dilapidated little store, the Rogers, the Wygants, the Fullers, the Gilkeys; on the other side the "Biergarten," a tavern with the Stallsmiths living above.
Kids could range around freely for hours without the worry of perverts grabbing them. A double-dutch jumprope would bring a half-dozen girls gathered around; and we and the boys played stickball in the street. It was great.
I bring up all these seemingly peripheral musings because we really are much more relationship-impoverished these days. Think of it. If you don't know the neighbors (we don't) and you don't have much of a support group (we didn't) and Mom'n'kids are kinda stuck in the house (and we were), it's possible to see some debits.
Nevertheless, there are big credits to balance those debits: teaching and learning at home was great when our boys were pre-teens.
Now that they're both teens, they may need to range around. They have the grace of their Baptism and a sound moral core. They might not put up with the mickeymouse rules and narrow authoritarian Bu!!sh!! of the conventional classroom; but if they turn out a bit oddball, a bit rebellious, I shall think it a good thing.
My musings as of today.
Your Mrs. Don-o
"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates--people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call 'life'."
"The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms." --- Thomas Merton