The thing about growing up homeschooled in an insular, paranoid household is that it’s not just about missing out on algebra or forgetting how to properly punctuate a sentence. It’s about never being equipped with the foundational skills that make existing in society feel like second nature. The kind of stuff no one thinks to teach because it’s supposed to be absorbed through osmosis—like knowing when to chime in during a conversation without derailing it, or understanding that birthday parties are for eating too much cake and not quietly wondering why no one ever invites you to theirs.
It’s about spending the first twenty years of your life inside a hyper-controlled snow globe and then being flung into the real world as an adult with absolutely no roadmap.
It’s about standing in the mall, watching groups of kids your age laughing together, and realizing you are fundamentally different from them in a way that can never be reversed.
The Socialization Paradox
The core lie of the homeschooling industrial complex is that isolation is good for children. That it somehow breeds intelligence, maturity, or wisdom beyond their years. The parents love to brag:
“My kids are better at talking to adults than their peers!”
Yes. Because they were never allowed to talk to anyone but adults. That’s like bragging that your kid is really good at sitting quietly in a church pew. It’s not an achievement, it’s a symptom.
Or this one:
“My kids play sports, they go to homeschool dances, they do co-op classes—see? They’re totally normal!”
Right. Because seeing other kids for two hours a week in a controlled, adult-supervised environment is definitely the same thing as growing up in a messy, chaotic, organic social ecosystem where you learn that Becky is a pathological liar and Tom always cheats at kickball but you let him because he cries when he loses.
Socialization is not a checklist. It’s not something you get by attending a homeschool dance where you don’t even know the names of half the kids. It’s something that happens over time, through repetition, through being around people enough that they become part of your life in a meaningful way.
This is what homeschoolers don’t get. This is why so many of them step into adulthood and realize they have no idea how to form friendships that aren’t purely transactional.
The Parent-as-Teacher-as-Jailer Model
When your parent is your teacher, your principal, and your entire social universe, there is no escape. There is no neutrality. A bad day at school doesn’t end when the bell rings because the person who humiliated you over your multiplication tables is also the person tucking you into bed that night.
There is no outside authority to mediate, no system of checks and balances, no way to differentiate between academic failure and personal failure. You struggle with math? You’re not just bad at math—you’re disobedient, you’re rebellious, you’re intentionally making life harder for everyone.
And if the homeschooling is religiously motivated, buckle up, because now your academic performance is also tied to your spiritual worth. Not understanding fractions isn’t just a minor setback—it’s a moral failing.
You are lazy.
You are willful.
You are making your mother cry because you refuse to learn.
And if you really loved your parents, if you really loved God, wouldn’t you just try harder?
The Aftermath: When You Realize You Were Set Up to Fail
You don’t recognize the damage at first. For a while, you assume you’re just an introvert. That you just need to put yourself out there. That if you simply try to talk to people, everything will click into place.
It doesn’t.
Instead, you stand at parties like an alien in a human suit, trying to decode what’s happening around you. You start a conversation, it stalls, and you have no idea how to revive it. You want to ask people questions about themselves, but your brain short-circuits and all you can think of is What’s your favorite animal? and you realize you sound like a lonely six-year-old trying to make a friend on the playground.
You don’t even know how to want things for yourself. When you grow up in an environment where every choice is made for you, you never develop a self. There is no personality to fall back on, no hobbies cultivated naturally over time. Everything in your childhood was filtered through the narrow worldview of your parents, and when that filter is removed, you’re left standing there, utterly blank.
You are 25, 30, 33 years old, still trying to figure out what kind of music you actually like.
And no one gets it.
Because to everyone else, childhood was normal.
No one believes you when you say you didn’t have a single friend growing up. They think you’re exaggerating. They think you just need to “get out there more.” They don’t understand that you’re not simply bad at socializing—you were never taught how to exist in a group of people your own age.
You were robbed of an essential part of human development, and now you’re expected to fix it yourself, quietly, without making anyone else uncomfortable.
The Unfixable Gap
The most isolating feeling in the world isn’t being alone. It’s watching other people form friendships effortlessly while you stand there, unable to participate. It’s seeing the way connections happen naturally for them—how they laugh at the same inside jokes, how they understand each other without trying—and realizing that no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you try, that invisible process will never quite happen for you.
It’s knowing, deep down, that the gap between you and them can never fully be closed.
You will always be catching up.
And the worst part?
The people who did this to you will never understand why you’re angry.
