The Socialization Benefits of Homeschooling: Free Play
The Socialization Benefits of Homeschooling: Free Play
The first in a series
The pediatrician's response wasn’t surprising.
“Are you enjoying school?” he asked our nine-year-old son in between the usual poking and prodding of an annual checkup.
“I don’t go to school,” our son responded cheerfully. “I’m homeschooled.”
“Oh?”
He was masked, but my wife and I could see the concern in the doctor’s eyes. Now we were the ones who would get poked and prodded.
“I hope he’s getting to see other kids.”
“Oh yes!” my wife responded.
She then launched into her prepared remarks and specified all the state-and-doctor-approved ways our son spends his time.
“And what’s your favorite subject?” the doctor asked our son.
The question gave my wife a chance to take a breath. Then she wound down her defense, as I peppered in additional details. We watched the doctors’ eyes relax. We had passed the test.
I try to avoid getting defensive in such situations. As interrogations go, it was mild. And although homeschooling is becoming more common, it’s still not mainstream. It’s natural for doctors to be a bit more concerned about homeschoolers.
Natural, but is it sensible?
If my son had simply mumbled something about school, the doctor probably wouldn’t have probed further. Notice the assumption: If the patient is in school, he’s being socialized properly.
But why assume that?
Yes, we could all point to many well-adjusted schoolkids, but are those kids well adjusted because of school?
In many cases, yes. But in other cases, those kids may be well adjusted despite school.
Consider the traditional school model—direct instruction, nearly constant adult supervision, age segregation, timed periods devoted to discrete topics, and so on. It did not emerge as the victor in some evolutionary process that pitted all educational models against each other. It was created for political reasons and it persists for political reasons. Today political reasons are why experimentation and innovation in education lags other fields.
Why assume, as the pediatrician apparently did, that the traditional school model earned its status as the default “preferred” model? Indeed, there are many reasons why homeschooling delivers socialization benefits.
Today I’ll focus on free play.
RELATED: Back to *Home* School: 5 Lessons I’ve Learned
Children love to play, but they also need to play.
“Free play is the main way that young mammals learn how to become old mammals. Mammals have to play with each other, and they play as much as they possibly can. Kittens, puppies, squirrels, children.” So says NYU social psychologist
in The Coddling of the American Mind, the soon-to-be-released feature documentary I directed, which is based on the bestselling book by Haidt and .Drawing on the work of pioneers like psychologist Peter Gray of the
Substack and my friend (who heads up Let Grow), Haidt and Lukianoff point to the erosion of free play as a big reason for the dramatic rise in anxiety and depression among Gen Z.Soccer practice doesn’t count as free play. Neither does ballet.
To truly engage in free play, children must be free from adult supervision. Mom and dad may hang around at a distance, but they may not assume the role of cop or judge. They may assume the role of lifeguard. If someone faces serious danger, adults may intervene. Otherwise stay under the umbrella.
Children must organize the games themselves. They must have the freedom to play or not. And don’t let the squeals and laughter fool you, they’re engaged in serious business. They’re learning how to be civilized.
If there’s a dispute, they can’t run to a teacher or a parent to fix it. They must control their tempers, pacify the warring factions, and persuade the parties to cooperate. After all, the stakes are high. If they fail, no more hide and seek.
Ask people who are Gen X or older about their childhood, and they’ll be delighted to regale you with tales of creeks, frogs, secret forts, skinned knees, and scuffles. But we parents are often hypocrites. We enthuse about our free range childhoods, yet insist on supervising nearly every minute of our children’s lives.
I’m one of the worst hypocrites.
I enjoyed a rather free-range childhood, complete with dirt clod wars on the walk back from school. And today I’m immersed in an environment of work projects, colleagues, and friends where I regularly see the benefits of free play. Yet something inside of me still screams, “Protect!”
Free play has waned in recent decades, and school is a big part of the problem. Children are spending more time at school—mostly inside and under adult supervision. Recess offers a little more freedom, but schools have been cutting back on recess and worming their way into after school hours with more homework.
Today the familiar routine is for children to go from adult-controlled school to adult-controlled soccer practice (or similar) and return home for adult-controlled homework.
I find it hard to let go, but I know I must. Homeschooling helps.
Homeschoolers aren’t bound by the superintendent’s schedule so I can separate my feelings from my actions, and ensure that my son gets to run around like a kid should. Our community of homeschool families also helps me let go. In our country town, my wife and I are the nervous city slickers whose stomachs churn whenever we see a child scamper up a tree.
But we employ the “fake it till you make it” strategy. We smile through our anxiety in hopes that one day we’ll be as free range as the other homeschool parents. But maybe they're faking it too!
Sometimes I suspect that each family receives a fixed amount of anxiety, and it’s up to the parents to decide if they’ll bear most of it or pass the burden to their bubble-wrapped kids.
We’ve learned that homeschooling is like snorkeling. You don’t know what you’ll find until you dive in. And we’ve been heartened by all the homeschool groups, co-ops, and “schools” we’ve found. We engage with a handful of them, and one of these little platoons is known colloquially as “farm school.”
Twice a week my son joins kids of various ages as they descend upon a farm filled with chickens, goats, trees, and vegetable gardens. It’s run by a married couple and their collection of volunteers. The school offers academic subjects and electives (my wife taught an improvisational acting class), but we chose it for the outdoor play. Kids climb trees, play field hockey, and tend to the animals.
And yes, farm school has its share of conflict.
One time a boy was picking on my son. The hassling persisted and my son surprised the boy with a double-leg takedown. He then put the boy into the mount position, controlled him, and negotiated (thank you jiu jitsu!). After the boy agreed to relax, my son released him and they became friends.
Skenazy would call that incident an “anxiety killer.”
In a recent New York Times essay, she and Camilo Ortiz, an associate professor of psychology at Long Island University, explored some promising approaches used to diffuse anxiety. In a world where you can find “13-year-olds who’ve never been allowed to go to the park without an adult or run an errand or even cut their own meat” their prescription is simple—let kids do more things on their own:
We both bemoan the fact that parents across the economic spectrum now believe that the more supervised, structured activities they can put their kids in, the better off they will be.
We think this constant supervision and intervention could be hurting kids’ chances to become brave and resilient, and a recent Journal of Pediatrics article concurred. What’s missing today isn’t just the thrill of climbing trees or playing flashlight tag. It’s that when an adult is always present — in person or electronically — kids never really get to see what they’re made of.
Skenazy is helping to change that.
Her organization offers The Let Grow Project, a homework assignment that helps kids tackle new challenges—from walking the dog to running an errand—on their own. Teachers and parents report that the activities boost kids’ confidence, and Ortiz has witnessed similarly promising results.
In a small pilot study, five kids diagnosed with an anxiety disorder completed 10 to 20 new challenges on their own. All five kids went from saying they felt worried most of the time to saying they felt worried a little bit of the time. Now Ortiz has a larger randomized controlled trial in the works.
It’s good to see more teachers listening to people like Skenazy and Ortiz, but schools are bureaucracies and bureaucracies move slowly. Homeschool parents don’t have to lobby for free play at school board meetings or parent-teacher conferences. They can simply get on with it.
An open secret among homeschoolers is that it typically doesn’t take much time—maybe two hours per day—to cover academic subjects. That leaves lots of time for free play and other anxiety killers.
I try to remember that when I catch myself hustling my son through the activities of daily life or fretting about how many subjects we’ve covered before lunch. Mastering the toaster and running wild with his buddies might be the most important things he could do today.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.