One of the Greatest Benefits of Homeschooling...

... is spending time with those older and younger than ourselves, rather than with our peers for the most part. Families provide the best opportunity for this. Edith Schaeffer understood this and wrote about it in her book What is a Family? And Charlotte Mason really illustrates it in the life of little children in this passage from Home Education:

"Let us follow the little person to the Kindergarten, where he has the stimulus of classmates of his own age. It certainly is stimulating. For ourselves, no society is so much so as that of a number of persons of our own age and standing; this is the great joy of college life; a wholesome joy for all young people for a limited time. But persons of twenty have, or should have [!], some command over their inhibitory centres. They should not permit the dissipation of nerve power caused by too much social stimulus; yet even persons of twenty are not always equal to the task of self-management in exciting circumstances [amen]. What then, is to be expected of persons of two, three, four, five? ... The clash and sparkle of our equals now and then stirs us up to health; but for everyday life, the mixed society of elders, juniors and equals, which we get in a family [emphasis mine], gives at the same time the most repose and the most room for individual development. We have all wondered at the good sense, reasonableness, fun and resourcefulness shown by a child in his own home as compared with a child in school life."