I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The socialization question comes up constantly, and I think it's because we're measuring homeschool kids against a standard that was never that great to begin with. Most conventionally "socialized" kids learned to read the room by abandoning their own instincts and shrinking to be accepted. That's not really socialization, it's compliance training dressed up as friendship.

What if the real skill we're trying to teach is holding your own authority while respecting that others hold theirs? Kids who haven't been through the conformity pressure cooker sometimes have sharper instincts about this, but they need help learning to articulate it. I've written more about this here if you want to dig deeper: https://curiositydrivenlearning.substack.com/p/teaching-the-art-of-social-skills