remote area/homeschooling

[Magali]

I live in rural Canada far away from friends and family.  My little guy is going to be 4 this May and I really would like to homeschool.  But part of me thinks it might be better for him to go to school for the social aspect, and to get him out of the house.  Because we don't have friends here and the area is very rural with not a heck of a lot to do especially during winter, I worry that I might not be doing the right thing.  We don't plan to live here forever and would like to move closer to Halifax at some point and I feel really comfortable with homeschooling then because I have no doubt we would have more to explore and keep us occupied.  I just think he might really enjoy meeting and playing with other kids because right now aside from his 4 month old sister, or when we vacation to visit family, he doesn't play with any other kids. Thoughts?  Is it "wrong" of me to homeschool when we are so isolated?

[moominmamma]

We live a few km's outside a village of 600, in the mountains of BC, several hours from a city the size of Halifax, more than an hour from even a very small city. It's been fine for us. We developed a network of friends from the village nearby. Not agemates for my kids, necessarily... some older kids, some younger, a lot of adults. Not people we necessarily see a lot of, but we see them over the long term often enough that my kids feel connected to the community in general and a number of people in particular. My kids had pretty minimal social needs as youngsters, and they have always each other (my first three are each about two years apart, so they played together a lot from about age 3 onwards). And we did get quite plugged into the music education community around here, so that by age 5 or so they had developed the beginnings of a long-standing stable peer group of fellow music students. With those points taken into consideration I'd have to say that my kids' social needs have been easily met. 

Miranda