>Homeschooled people just assume others must be unhappy in those places where they dont go, but that is not the case and not shown in statistics.
I hear you. I grew up in the "homeschool evangelical separatist" bubble, where sending your kids to public school was seen as a sin. I know I still have some unconscious biases left over from that that I'm still working out, and having never been in the public school system myself, I can't speak from any experience there.
I mostly speak from the hearsay of friends/family who did go to public school, some of whom did both models and were generally unhappier (bullied, left unhelped by overburdened teachers) than when they were homeschooled.
My point was not that the unhappiness is a universal experience, but rather than the mandatory nature of repeatedly returning to the same place for school makes unhappiness, when present, inescapable. Thus, yes, there's socialization happening in those cases, but it's negative, and it's inescapable without major changes (like changing schools, which for many requires moving, given the high cost of private school).
>Also, those people asking the question you find weird were asking about the experiences and kind of socialization that they consider big deal and was not going on in that place.
This is the part where I think you're trying to speak to my experience from a place of assuming you have more knowledge about my life than I do. I know the conversations that happened with us as kids and with our parents. The assumption was that if you weren't around other kids in school, specifically, that you were missing something important that these other adults described as "socialization", but often couldn't actually define beyond just using that term without a good understanding of what it means.
As another commenter points out, "socialization" is different from "socializing"; it's an actual sociological "shaping" process (like how some environments can socialize children towards learning that you shouldn't steal, while other environments can socialize children towards learning that they should do whatever it takes to get ahead, including stealing). Socialization is a process, not a goal; it's how community norms and standards are instilled through both negative and positive reinforcement, but those community norms and standards (like "the biggest kid on the playground gets their way through threats", as in one family member's case) can be negative.
The adults asking these questions, when asked what they meant, could never articulate what they were afraid we wouldn't be socialized towards. Just that we "wouldn't be around other kids", which both wasn't a direction of socialization (but was instead a means of socialization) and was demonstrably untrue by the fact that these questions were being asked at soccer practice, at the playground, at the local YMCA, etc.