Best friend says I’m depriving my son/doing him a disservice

My best friend and I have been friends since we met in college in 2008. We became teachers together. However I moved to another state in 2015 because I got married to a man in the military. However we are still very close and talk every single day. In 2018 I had my first child. I stopped teaching and became a stay at home mom.

My friend has always been very traditional in her belief systems. She’s very much a rule follower, things are black and white, right or wrong, and she doesn’t sway easily from what she believes. For a long time since we were in college she would make fun of homeschooling and say it was child abuse to deprive kids of social interaction at school. At the time I didn’t have kids so I didn’t really have an opinion and just agreed with her. However, now I’m a mom and she is not, so my opinions have shifted and hers have not.

This year I decided to homeschool my son. We live in a small town outside of the military base and we didn’t like the schools around us and couldn’t afford private. He has autism and ADHD so I didn’t want to send him to an overcrowded rural school, you know?

My friend keeps telling me I am doing him a disservice and he will never learn how to interact with other kids. He has friends that he sees regularly, I take him to parks and field trips, and he is going to start baseball in the spring. I’m like, how am I depriving him at all? But like I said, her beliefs are super traditional and she does not deviate from what she thinks is right. I told her well, maybe when you become a parent you will feel differently and she got super offended by that comment. I told her that opinions can drastically change especially if you have a child with special needs, but she stands by homeschooling is “stupid” and should be illegal.

What would you do in this situation? I do not feel supported or respected by her at all.