I found this passage interesting, taken from the book Nurture Shock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. The book never mentions homeschooling, but given these statistics, I would think the authors might not think homeschooling is a bad idea!
"We’ve put children in an echo chamber. Today’s average middle schooler has a phenomenal 299 peer interactions a day. The average teen spends 60 hours a week surrounded by a peer group (and only 16 hours a week surrounded by adults). This has created the perfect atmosphere for a different strain of aggression-virus to breed -- one fed not by peer rejection but fed by the need for peer status and social ranking. The more time peers spend together, the stronger this compulsion is to rank high, resulting in the hostility of one-upmanship…. We wonder why it takes 20 years to teach a child how to conduct himself in polite society – overlooking the fact that we’ve essentially left our children to socialize themselves." (Nurture Shock, p. 194)
