by Adam Jacquet

Created on: August 31, 2009

Homeschooling provides two main advantages over public schooling when it comes to building relationships between siblings: first, the amount of time spent together is vastly greater. And second, homeschooled siblings learn to face challenges together, while public schooled children must find others to help them through tough times.

If one were to study the relationships between a child who has been in public school their whole life and their family, often one will find a certain distance between that child and their siblings. It's a simple fact that relationships require time to fully mature, and if a child spends very little time interacting with their siblings on a daily basis, the relationships between the siblings will suffer accordingly. Many times, even the child's parents will experience a certain amount of distance from their children. While public schooling is the only option for many families, it does have a detrimental effect on the familial relationships of almost every child enrolled in the system.

Homeschooled children, on the other hand, spend almost the entirety of every day with their siblings. While one cannot expect them to enjoy one another's company day in and day out, homeschoolers have a massive advantage in building familial relationships in the amount of time that they spend together. Even if every day isn't a brand-new experience that binds the children tighter together, every day has time in which they talk, play, and learn together, getting to know one another's strengths, weaknesses, likes and dislikes, fears and quirks.

Over a long enough period of time, almost any human being will develop some bond with another human with whom they are in constant contact. Adults will bond with other adults given enough time; even abductees and hostages have been known to experience Stockholm Syndrome after enough time spent with their captors. If fully-developed adults can form such relationships when given enough time together, obviously developing children will easily form very strong connections to other children when they spend every day together.

In addition to having time together, homeschooled children often learn to teach one another. Their mutual struggles through schoolwork further serve to enhance their bonds. Children enrolled in public school often form strong friendships with people in their classes, and sometimes place their friends above their own family in importance. This is usually due to their sense of unity, which springs from primitive survival instincts: humans survive when they face adversity in large groups. Homeschooled children face struggles with the only peers who are near them: their siblings. Publicly schooled children face their struggles similarly, but the only peers with them at the times of difficulty are their classmates.

So while homeschoolers bond with their siblings and learn all about their personalities, public schoolers do the same with classmates. Homeschooling provides children with the time and the unifying trials to build strong relationships with their own siblings, something that few public school children have.

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