Many potential home educators worry about socialization when they hear others objecting to their homeschooling plans, saying, ‘Aren’t you worried your kids won’t be socialized if they don’t go to school?’ Unfortunately, our society too often sees socialization with peers as the only true way to learn decent social skills. Parents don’t count. But, is that a load of rubbish?
What is the Importance of Socialization in Child Development
Of course, socialization is incredibly important for child development. If you don’t get it, you could get:
- depressed and have less empathy
- lose your sense of reality (think of solitary confinement) and
- a decreased ability to learn
As a child, lack of socialization causes brain changes. Life Science said this:
They found that early institutionalization changed both the structure and the function of the brain. Any time spent in an institution shrunk the volume of gray matter, or brain cell bodies, in the brain. Kids who stayed in the orphanages instead of going to foster care also had less white matter, or the fat-covered tracts between brain cell bodies, than kids who, at a young age, moved in with families…children of nurturing mothers had hippocampus volumes 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing.
So, socialization is definitely important for child development – but, who says socialization only goes on in a school or preschool? In fact, we should be asking the question, ‘Is school taking away the time we might spend socializing our own children?’
Myth: ‘Socialization Only Happens in School’
The lie that ‘socialization only happens in school’ has led to a lot of heartaches where parents prematurely break bonds with their children which is painful for all involved and damaging to a child’s emotional development!
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