jbellis

Good post on this from Penelope trunk:

"In school, friends are a function of proximity (the social psychology term for this relationship is propinquity.) If you put kids in a classroom and then tell them they have to wait for recess, they have to be quiet for math, they have to line up, and so on, then the kids have shared problems: how to get through stuff that they don't like.

"The same is true of college: Kids are in a dorm spending most of their time not doing homework. They are hanging out together.

"Then comes adult life with new cities for new jobs and they have no idea how to make a friend that is based on interests rather than proximity. They have no idea how to make a friend by appointment. But that is actually how people have friends in adult life. Which is most of their life.

"So how homeschooled kids make friends is how people make friends in the real world: by common interest."

http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2012/09/20/how-do-homeschooled-kids-make-friends/

Sounds like a much more likely explanation is that this boy would be inclined towards introversion anyway. Forcing him to be "social" in a public school setting would just make him miserable.

My wife and I are both introverts; we are the parents of four very extroverted children. Anecdotes are not data and all that, but it sure looks to me like this is more innate than learned behavior.

This is mostly a non-problem. Home schooling is a lot of work. It's almost unheard of for people to bite that off when they are unqualified to begin with.

Parents actually have a huge built in advantage: one of the reasons home schoolers do so much better than their peers in every metric [1], is that one-on-one education is shockingly, shockingly more effective than one-to-many [2].

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-37242551/can-homeschoolers-do-well-in-college/ [2] http://www.isegoria.net/2011/12/blooms-2-sigma-problem/

FYI, Kiyosaki is a fraud.

http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html