As homeschoolers, we weren’t raised in classrooms with twenty-five kids who all matched us in age. We were raised in a home where we had regular contact with babies and grandfathers and young mothers and toddlers and teenagers. I spent a lot of time in ballet classes and also now teach ballet—I started when I was thirteen! When I was fifteen I was asked to direct our church’s Easter production. That included bossing all kinds of people around—from ages eight to eighty! I felt very socialized.

Rachel: Really, the idea that children are best socialized by spending all their time with people their own age is a weird one. There are twelve kids in my family—I’m twenty years older than my youngest sister. That means we all get to practice relating to people of many ages. Of course, we also interact with a host of friends, church people, and work colleagues. We run a chocolate business, so our oldest kids have all spent full days on the sales floor. We get to socialize in fun cross-generational ways that are also great preparation for the rest of life.

Jonathan: Perhaps someday those oft-answered questions will cease to be asked. But until then, I suppose we’ll continue being confronted with unusual questions and opinions about homeschooling. I imagine that each of you, coming from large homeschooling families as you do, have experienced your share of odd questions and comments over the years. What are your most memorable experiences in countering critics or trying to put to rest the odd notions people sometimes have?

Rachel: I recently talked to a new mother who wanted to know if the youngest children in large families are always less intelligent than the older ones. I had to laugh, because our little ones are way smarter than I was at their age! They pick up a lot of vocabulary and habits from the “big kids.” Mom’s gotten that question before, but I’d never had to answer it myself. The questions can get a bit exasperating, but I’ve realized that being from a big family (and this is quadruply true if you homeschool) is like being from another culture. People honestly don’t understand what life is like. The best way to counter the critics is just to keep being ourselves, forming relationships, and letting people see the answers in the way we live.

Carolyn: It’s rare that we actually get a brand new, original question. One of the queries we run into most often, as a family of seven girls and one boy, is, “Oh, that poor boy! Do you spoil him or bully him?” Mom sometimes asks, “Why ‘poor’? Didn’t God know what He was doing?”

Then there are the people who can’t believe we all belong to the same family in the first place. Last year we attended a church potluck for newcomers. As our family of ten squished around one table, we heard a curious whisper from a lady at another table. “Do you think that’s a group home?” she asked her friend.