For me, because my homeschooling was part and parcel with a very conservative religious upbringing, the most difficult part is, in a sense, still ongoing.
I don’t want to imply my childhood was like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or something, I was aware of what was going on in the world and stuff, but certainly sheltered and heavily influenced by my parents in how interpreted what was going on.
Breaking away from that, interacting with society more directly and more diversely than I otherwise would have, has overlapped with breaking away from a lot of the cultural and religious beliefs that were instilled in me.
That’s not an overnight process. I think anyone who has left behind a religious upbringing could relate to that, homeschooled or not, but the homeschooling and relative ‘isolation’ adds a twist to it.
And, what constitutes a ‘better adult’? This question is, ultimately, at the heart of the decision for people like my parents who chose to home school for religious reasons.
For my parents, a ‘better adult’ was one who had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, believed that the smallest possible government should somehow exert the maximum amount of control over people’s bodies and beliefs, and that the earth is 6,000 years old despite all readily available evidence.
Happily, they also believed a ‘better adult’ is a well-read one and so they encouraged me to read as much as possible and were (in hindsight) surprisingly lax with what I read, as long as it was a book. So I ended up drawing much different conclusions than they did about stuff.
I was homeschooled (and I mean homeschooled, like, in the subculture) from Kindergarten through high school and am nominally a functioning member of society in spite of that fact. AMA.