I am legal guardian to one of my grandchildren who is now 18. I home educated him and he never attended school. While we mixed with his peers at group activities etc, there were many families who could be called 'feral' among them.
Some of them were at the extreme end of feral - no rules, absolute little tossers who would just do, say, and behave any way they liked with no consequences to others in the group. Parents would smile benignly at their children and to anyone who complained about their children's behaviour. However, there were other families who lived a similar lifestyle - as the above with eating ice cream in the middle of the night - that story has been done to death in the media, and the purpose of this is to give a more extreme view of those of us who home educated our grandchildren/children. There was one American family who used to come to the group activities. He was ex-military and now a Pastor. Wife was the epitomy of a Stepford Wife. Kids were little buggers. He made his sons wooden swords and they used to go around bashing the other kids with them. His reasoning was that they were 'expressing themselves'. I won't print on here the conversation I had with him when one of them hit my grandson over the head with his wooden sword and we ended up in A&E with my grandson having concussion.
I had friends in the home schooling community who lived a very relaxed, laid back way of life. Children ate what they wanted, when they wanted, house was a tip. The children were always happy, polite and well-adjusted, academically bright, and have done very well. The lifestyle wasn't for me but I saw both ends of the spectrum. Much of the time, these parents don't look ahead to the future when their children will be adults and have to move on to the world of study/work where there will be rules like it or not,
There is an increase in home education in the UK. Parents deregister their children from school because they feel the school doesn't meet their children's needs, autistic, asperges, and other issues where funding has dropped off and parents want to protect their children so home educate them. Then there are those who home educate from the beginning for many reasons - that they want to live outside the system, and myself, where we live in an area where the schools aren't that great and my grandson had developmental issues and heart trouble. The picture of home educators in the programme are not the norm by any means. Most of us just want to do the best we can for our children/grandchildren.