I was homeschooled and will be homeschooling our kids (first one coming early January 2027!).

Game-changers for me growing up, that I think my parents did really well: - change the curriculum to match the kid (i.e. learning styles, difficulty, pace) - use the public schools for electives, sports, drama, etc (my siblings took music classes for 1 period each day, we all did school sports still, etc) - have strict (or at least structured) time constraints on homeschooling (i.e. don't let it drag into the whole day; we had to be up, dressed, breakfasted, and ready to start at 9am, and we needed to be done by noon and didn't get lunch until our school work was done).

I was a camp counselor in my late teens and early 20s, and we could always tell which kids were homeschooled. Always.

Adult and sibling socialization is not a substitute for peer socialization and adequate handling of it is the biggest factor separating success stories and not.

Although they have a bias that makes their attribution of positives and negatives imprecise, the list of top-upvoted posts of all time on the Reddit subreddit /r/homeschoolrecovery contains many examples to motivate wanting a success story and not a failure story.

It's not all doom and gloom. The success stories of homeschooling outperform even wealthy public schools in life outcomes and health, so the reward is there.

Regardless of how you do it, I can't recommend enough that parents do this one thing that I did with my kids. Do force them to write something. Every. Single. Day. It doesn't really matter what about, just ask them to do it and share it with you.

We have a group chat and since they were in middle school (I really should've started this sooner), they'd write a few paragraphs about their day. What they've done, the experiences, the new things they learned, etc. I was very strict about it. Sometimes I would wake the kids if they forgot to write anything. That really pissed off my wife, she'd be like: "you're punishing them over nothing". Sometimes I would forget to check, and they'd miss a day or a few. Then I would force them to backfill the missed days, etc.

This simple, daily exercise turned out to be the best possible gift with enormous compounding effect. My daughter at some point got the presidential award of academic excellence, my son went to college and received a scholarship, for a while he was a competitive swimmer, with dozens of medals - his HS team got second place and a state record, and all.

If you have kids, ask them for this simplest possible thing, start as early as you could. I promise you, years later, one day, they will be thanking you, and this random person on HN.

Have you thought about homeschooling up to a certain age/grade? There is a category of socialization skills that only a lot of direct, in-person, peer-to-peer time builds.

How old are your kids?

i will be