The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)
There’s a few problems with it -
The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)