All that bratty childish selfish bullying competitive starving obnoxious avoidant behavior that our society seems to think is normal for young children no longer looks normal to me. Of course, we will all have our human moments of bad behavior, and children are as human as any one. But that stereotype of children - that siblings always fight, boys are mean, boys against girls, bitchy girls....you know - the ways we expect kids to act. All of that has become normalised in our society.
I've come to see that as social construct. Kids are as human as all of us. They act as they are expected to act. They are as polite as they are required to be, just like all of us. I'm not saying that homeschool kids are different so much as I'm saying that homeschoolers have different expectations for their kids. So what used to look like normal behavior to me, now looks like social construct. Children are lovely people. If your child is over the age of two and isn't fairly good company, you probably need a parenting class. Likely, you need to learn to say no effectively. Beyond that, school does a poor job of socialising most young children. Because, school was never designed to socialise children. In fact, it would be most accurate to say, left in school, young children socialise each other. This has happened enough generations that the results look normal. We seem to have collectively forgotten that results arrive from choices and decisions.