One of the most frequent accusations levelled at home educated children is that they’ll not have any friends and they’ll miss out on socialisation opportunities. I dare say this may be the case for some, after all it takes all types. But even coming from a slightly anti social family background, my children are working out their own way of doing things, and making their own friends.
Many friends that they’ve met over the years through home ed camps live a fair distance away. When they were younger this wasn’t a problem – they saw each other a few times a year, and seemed happy enough with it. Now they want to keep in touch between times and independently, technology is taking over. Both the older children have blogs, and they use private forums for chatting. This week, I was grateful for our good internet speed and access when Big decided to take up video chatting with a friend a couple of hundred miles away. It’s been great to hear them laughing and giggling together as if sitting side by side, and I suppose all I need to worry about now is bandwidth limits! (Anyone know how much a two hour video chat takes up??) Although I daresay we can just upgrade to another package if absolutely necessary. I’ll be keeping an eye on who she’s chatting with as well, no popping over to services like Airtime which allow connections with complete strangers. (Bizarre idea. Can’t quite see why you’d want to do that tbh.)
It’s not so surprising that technology would form a big part of how they support relationships. It’s no secret that Tim and I as a couple met on an email list, and our first communications were that way. We quickly upgraded to phone conversations, and it wasn’t that long before we crossed the boundary into physical communication, so we’re no strangers to long distance friendships/ relationships. I’m just quite pleased that I can say IT has been firmly covered this week as Big was motivated to locate and install hardware and software so that she could have fun.
And isn’t that the best motivation to learn anyway?
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