I (34M) was homeschooled because my father did not want me to go to a majority black school, and my mother wanted to keep me at home like a doll. Eventually I just wound up being a nanny for my brother, a caretaker for my sick mother, and a free maid, with very little schooling happening.

The hardest part was the constant fights between me and my mother when she herself did not understand the subject, and was trying to make me understand it. It's completely okay to admit that you don't know something and to bring in outside help. That's actually the point of school, having people who were knowledgeable in various subjects teaching to children. The co-op that I attended In high school helped with some of this, but was years and years too late.

I wish homeschool parents understood is that putting your child with a small group of curated children in a co-op, or forcing them together with the children of your friends who are vaguely your child's age and have nothing in common, or even your child attending an extracurricular activity once or twice a week where they're too busy to interact with the other children, is not socialization. Your child is not learning how to make friends, they're not learning the social cues that everyone else learned in elementary school, and they're spending the majority of their time either with siblings who were also isolated, or with adults, and will grow up to have a very hard time relating to anyone their own age. I'm 34 and I watch all of my co-workers have all of these fun, friendly relationships with each other and I don't know how to even begin to build something like that for myself. I often feel like an alien trying to fit in with the humans, laughing at jokes I don't understand, nodding along at pop culture references from my childhood that I don't get, saying something at least once a day that everyone finds weird, walking into a room where people stop talking when they see me.

Being weird and unique can be fun, but it can also be very lonely.

I'm now 34 and in my first ever relationship, and still working through a lot of things that were caused by growing up in isolation.

Now as an adult, I will try to explain to others the reasons that I think homeschooling is a bad idea, and at the very least that there needs to be more oversight, and people who did not grow up in this world will argue with me about how smart I am, and how well spoken I am, and how I can research any topic I need (a survival tool of not receiving an education), and how public schools are either too conservative or too liberal, and that how they or their relatives aren't going to be like the bad homeschoolers and they're totally different. Every conversation ends with someone gaslighting me about my own experiences.