Would you have prefered to be homeschooled as a child/teen?

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I was homeschooled from age 11 to the present. If my parents didn't, I would have commited sucide. I didn't want to socalize. I just wanted to lecture people about my speical intrests or do things related to my special intrests.

I had a nervous breakdown when I was sixteen and that's why I'm still in high school at 24. I'm a senior anyway and mentaly I think I am around 17. If I went to college when I was bioigicaly 18, I just don't think I would have been ready. When I was biologialy 18, I was mentaly like a 10 year old. I supposedly look like I am 17 so when people ask how old I am (yeah I know that is really none of thier buisness but I get asked all kinds of weird questions so being asked my age is nothing) I tell them I am 17 because I am quite sick of having to agruee with people or people thinking it's so cool to look so young (there's nothing I can do about it anyway. I look younger so there). I perfer not to socalize with other people. My bearded dragon and cat are all the company I need.

I was homeschooled from grades 7-9 and 11-12. Best thing my parents did. It may even have saved my life.

For the first few years of school I had a couple friends but was also bullied, and had pretty much constant conflict with teachers. In grade 5 I started at a new school with nice-but-oblivious teachers and a serious problem with bullying, and I was friendless and continually picked on. Throughout both phases of schooling, every year I spent in school my behavior worsened and I got more anxious and depressed. I was talking about suicide (though not actually intending to do it), trying to run away from home, freaking out and physically attacking teachers (once even waving a golf club at one), feeling constantly anxious/depressed to the point where I forgot what being happy felt like, getting pretty much no schoolwork done because my entire life was taken up by coping with the extreme stress I was under, and getting sick all the time because the stress wore down my immune system and set off my then-undiagnosed asthma.

Then my parents started homeschooling me, and I gradually relearnt how to feel safe, then started to blossom in my safe zone, and finally started taking careful steps outside of it (grade 10 in a regular high school, auditing a university class, and now I'm a university student and I have friends ). I became a happy confident girl who read medical journals for fun, talked about disability rights to anyone who would listen, and felt proud to be myself.

If I hadn't been homeschooled I suspect I would've become actually suicidal instead of just talking about it. Or else been charged with assault for having a meltdown at the wrong person, or gotten myself hurt on one of my runaway attempts (once I ran out in front of a car because I was too panicked to look both ways, another time I spent half an hour being chatted up by a guy who I later found out was a dangerous person).

Regarding socialization, all I was learning in school was survival strategies for being bullied, which really don't help you with anything else. Things like 'avoid interaction whenever possible', 'deliberately annoy people so you can get revenge on them for upsetting you so much', 'lash out when someone tries to interact with you because they're planning to hurt you somehow' and 'hide your feelings as much as you can' (which caused meltdowns that seemed to come out of the blue because I hid the signs of unhappiness until I'd reached my limit). I used to never reply when someone my own age said 'hi' to me. I pretended I didn't want friends because kids would fake friendship with me to hurt me. I stared at kids weirdly and made annoying noises in class because it gave me a bit of satisfaction to see them squirm. When someone did something to me that I didn't like I'd act like I was OK with it, then loose control and freak out at them, which caused trouble with family members because they'd get attacked when they didn't know they were upsetting me. There is pretty much nothing useful I learnt in terms of social skills at school, just a bunch of lessons that are somewhat useful for surviving bullying and seriously counterproductive for having positive relationships. It was my family, my younger brother's friends and nice non-school adults who taught me useful social skills, not school. School just made my social interaction worse.

No. In some aspects, school was better then home.

I wish my high school was much larger then it was. I am assuming a larger school would have had a greater diversity of people.

I was home schooled from ages 11, 12, and 14. When I was 13 I tried to go to a mainstream high school.

I don't think anything could have changed my social development apart from a diagnoses and social skills classes.
Most of my social skills were developed in my early 20's by hanging out with people around my age.

I think home school was a good call. My mum found out how bad I was doing with my schoolwork and she knew it wasn't for a lack of trying. She made me cry once because I didn't understand a question. But I eventually got really advanced in my school work for the first time in like ever. It's also when I begun to realise I had a great memory for facts.

We had social days with other home schooled kids but I would just take my skateboard and skate all over the park and barely talk to people.

Best part was, I could do classes in my pj's.