When else in life will our kids be segregated by age?

If she was in the local preschool, that would not have happened. I’ve heard the school has a “whole class” policy, meaning that a child can’t pass out invites at school unless the whole class is invited, so she may have been pressured to invite people she didn’t care about! And the guests probably wouldn’t have been so diverse. As it is, these are the kids she sees frequently and plays with – scarcity, as it were, since we definitely do not have 35 of the same age kids for her to choose from as the local school does.

We just had a socialization discussion here today. My 30 month old son receives speech therapy in our home. I was discussing with his coordinator what happens when he turns 3, and the services will be provided by the school district and what that would entail.

She advised me that I better start taking him to the library story hour so that he would be able to listen to his school therapists. (We’re going to homeschool, but receive services in addition to the homeschooling.)

Yeah, I’ll get right on that. ::sarcasm:: Because, actually, I DON’T want my 2 year old to be totally comfortable and chatty with whatever adult happens to be around him that day. I LIKE that he has boundaries and will open up to adults he knows and trusts.

That’s the thesis of Putnam’s Bowling Alone, right? Maybe the children will do better together than we have struggling against each other alone . . .

Wow, no, Dana is right. I was coming at it from outside that (or any)mainstream I guess, so didn’t appreciate that side to it — make everyone march in formation into educational diversity as conformist doctrine? lol! –

If you say “church,” I generally assume the more mainstream ones. There’s too much diversity among us to speak universally about anything, however.

We also have a number of friends who belong to other Christian denominations, other religions, and some who are not religious. As long as they are willing to take a “live and let live” attitude towards me, I’m willing to do the same for them.

I believe the best way to evangelize is by doing my best to follow Christ’s teachings in the way I conduct my own life. I don’t want to be like the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14 but rather focus on taking the plank out of my own eye as in Matthew 7:3-5.

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Not something churches hold against SCHOOLING? One of things I’ve held against very conservative Christian homeschool parents is being pushed away in open hs discussion, with chants about no “unequal yoking.”

Another thought. The point of this post is more or less that scarcity prompts children to set aside some things that might normally be barriers in order to develop those social bonds we all need. A child isn’t going to do this, but we can then reflect on these barriers and how important they really are. How are we really different? What are the core values we seek to affirm in our friendships?

I think you see the same sort of things in a neighborhood. I played with children in my neighborhood who would never talk to me at school. It is a different environment, and scarcity of children led us to get along if we wanted someone to play with. That’s a warped lesson to teach children, but I think maybe the more people there are in close quarters, the more we will segregate ourselves into homogeneous groups.

I’m also trying to be a little careful what I say about socialization in the schools. The system itself may contribute to the problems we see, but largely the children are acting on the values their parents have demonstrated to them.

So yes, my daughter’s friendship circle may not include people of other faiths at the moment. That isn’t intentional. We just live in a small town. In fact, most people out here even have Dutch last names because it was a Dutch settlement at one time. There are also lots of tulips.

But whether or not she would be allowed to have such friends is a parenting issue, not a homeschooling one or a church one. That whole issue of developing relationships with nonbelievers is one of the things that churches hold against homeschooling, so we have to defend ourselves even in an environment where one might assume there would be at least understanding.

Some of the strictest parents I’ve known have kids in public school…or private school. One of my friends in junior high had to call home every 15 minutes and another wasn’t allowed to talk to boys, let alone have any sort of friendships with them.