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Let’s get one thing straight; this blog is about family life, home education, parenting and entrepreneurship. BUT we won’t be trying to paint a picture of how wonderfully easy breezy it is all the time – because it fucking isn’t!
But, it is a lot of fun!
We’ll be sharing our experiences, warts and all, in order to:
- Raise awareness that home education is a viable and joyful alternative to school
- Pass on our knowledge in a non-judgemental but hopefully thought provoking way
- Build a community of like-minded people
So, who are we?
An ‘unschooling’ family of five living in rural Nottinghamshire (UK) – there’s us two (Miles & Louise), and our three sproglets. We find ourselves regularly travelling around connecting with friends and family, visiting attractions and enjoying life without the restrictions of a school timetable.
Meet the family
The ‘grown-ups’… we’ve been together for 16 years, married for 8 and parents for 6. Our personalities are very different and often complimentary. Miles is driven, plain talking and stubborn. Louise is less goal oriented and more focused on the now. She is deep thinking and emotional – often coming up with ideas that Miles then runs with – like this blog!
As teens we were both reasonably academically gifted and understandably directed by teachers and encouraged by our families into university and professional careers (good careers – but certainly not our passions). We both became secondary school teachers in our twenties, but for reasons we’ll get into in other posts, we left the education system behind and started new careers; Miles in the music industry and Louise as an actuary.
We love the idea of a slow life… but as you may be able to tell, that’s not quite us!
We recently started our own business, Cassette Property Group and along with this new blog, and a couple of podcasts, we are planning to set up a self-directed education space for our community over the next few years.
We love the idea of a slow life… but as you may be able to tell, that’s not quite us! Nevertheless, we incorporate as much ease as possible into our lives and make sure that the things we do truly matter to us.
Miles loves music and learning about all sorts of random things (hand weaving to etymology). Louise is a fantasy fiction fan, prolific doodler and feeding her brain with podcasts about economics and science, and interviews with fascinating folk. We find peace in running, walking and yoga. Some of our favourite things to do are going to gigs and music festivals, watching gritty TV and the odd bottle of red wine.
Perhaps like you, as many parents of young kids often do, we neglected ourselves. Fortunately, 2022 has seen us making a solid effort to model self-care and a love of lifelong learning to our children.
Openly ‘de-schooling’ ourselves and sharing this process with the children is a byproduct of our dive into unschooling. We work to shake off biases and assumptions picked up through wider society and our own schooled experience.
Our spawn
We have Francis (six years old), Ada (five) and Annie (three). The plan was to send them to school because, well… everyone does. When Francis had just turned three and we received a letter about applying for primary. It felt so wrong. He was still so little! Since he was a summer baby, we knew it was possible to delay his school entry by a year – radical, we know! As we looked further into this, we met other families that had done the same and those that were doing things a little differently – their children didn’t go to school – at all! As we spent time with these families and felt inspired by their lives, we curiously began to consider it as another option for us.
How did it feel to be out of the system? Scary. It was all on us.
The decision to take the kids out of the education system also felt rebellious and exciting!
The older two children went to nursery a few days a week but it was always a fight to get them there. Pretty much every separation was a tearful and emotional mess. It never got better. We wanted to be with our children and they wanted to be with us.
After months of talking about it, we made the decision to try home educating full-time and removed them from nursery a few months before the first lockdown in 2020.
How did it feel to be out of the system? Scary! It was all on us. The decision to take the kids out of the education system also felt rebellious and exciting!
The children’s interests are expansive. They all love messy, creative play, spending time outside climbing, jumping in puddles, bouncing on the trampoline, foraging and making campfires at one of our weekly home ed meet ups. They all love listening and moving to music – a current favourite is Reel Big Fish. Perhaps not the most appropriate for little kids, which we didn’t realise until we heard them running round the house singing “everyone else is an asshole!”. A lesson for life, perhaps?
Francis is often a super hero, Sonic the Hedgehog or a Power Ranger. He also enjoys chess, racing games and lots and lots of physical play. Francis connects with us by having a back tickle whilst listening to our books read out loud. He loves anything pink, has wild long hair and will often talk to anyone. He goes to bed with a calculator, loves counting, making treasure maps and enjoys building rockets, steering wheels, super-vehicles out of lego. Think Mowgli, with a science degree, racing past in a pink blur.
Ada is a non-stop creativity machine. She doesn’t think outside the box because the box has already been torn apart, painted on and thrown out the window. She loves baking, painting, drawing and teaching herself the piano. Ada also likes a snuggly story and watching cooking shows. Her current favourite is “Is it Cake?”. She has developed a really strong emotional intelligence, floats around the house on her tip-toes in a mismatch of clothing and needs regular time by herself to decompress.
Annie is often in a world of imagination. She acts out little plays and stories with her toy animals and dolls – interestingly this is more so than we ever saw than with the other two. Annie can be VERY loud – shaking the foundations of the house with her conversational volume. She loves spinning and bum wiggling to music. Fiercely independent and free, she runs off, exploring the world without a care for her own safety or our desire to be able to see her!
Home is where the noise is
It is loud, messy and random things end up in the most random places. We found a whisk in our bed the other day! There are blanket dens, soft toys, potions… the list goes on.
The best learning happens when it’s not constrained by the need to keep the space looking like a show home. It does gets tidied up eventually, however. We fairly recently bought a robot vacuum cleaner, which is a MASSIVE help. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say it’ll change your life!
On the flip side our home can actually be incredibly peaceful, with large trees surrounding the garden that sway in the breeze, you can hear the sheep bleating in the field nearby and can see for miles into the distance from the front of the house. Naturally, that peace is often shattered by noisy play, disagreements and shouting. But hey – they’re learning how to cooperate, negotiate and solve problems together, right?!
Work, rest and play
We’re always trying to find a balance between work, play and time together – it can be a challenge. Particularly for Louise with her actuarial job and less flexibility over her working hours. This is in contrast with the childrens’ general freedom from our societies obsession with time.
Often it is a struggle to find quality one on one time with each of the children on a regular basis. They really do love each other and often don’t want to be apart even if that’s what they really need in that moment.
They play beautifully together – but there are many emotional moments in the day. We continually practice advice from the many parenting books we’ve read over the years. Sometimes they take to it like an absolute dream. Sometimes, they don’t give a fuck.
We don’t really have set bedtimes for the children anymore – it changes day by day depending on how active they’ve been; whether they’ve fallen asleep in the car, etc. The evening is usually a loose wind down, but can be a bit of a struggle sometimes when they all want taking to bed at the same time, especially if one of us is still working and the other is already more exhausted than the children. It can be a struggle to fit in “adult time” but we make the most of what we have.
“…Occasionally Furious”? – it’s what it says on the tin.
Sometimes we lose our shit.
“Healthy, Curious… What?”
“Healthy” – healthy bodies. A healthy mind. Healthy relationships.
“Curious” – curious about life. Wanting to be better. To know more. To see more.
“…Occasionally Furious”? – it’s what it says on the tin. Sometimes we lose our shit. Our buttons feel pushed, we revert to reactive parenting and explode in a rage of doom. It never solves anything though. Afterwards we feel like failures for not having total robotic control over our emotions. After such a shitty moment we leave the room and calm down ready to repair our relationships.
The furious element of the blog title also refers to our frustration with some of societies structure, loss of the ‘village mentality’ support system and other things we miss due to the need for industrialised productivity.
We are privileged to live where we are when some crazy shit is going down in other areas of the world. Yet we have a system so stuck in its ways when we have the ability and knowledge to do and offer so much more helping people get the most from their lives.
Our plan for the future…
We want to continue to learn and grow as people and to share what we can with others. We plan to continue home educating, in particular, unschooling, and to follow our own passion for community and education by using our new property network and knowledge to set up self education spaces – a cross between libraries and schools but without the bullshit rules. We’d love to travel and do more music festivals and adventures as we (hopefully) have more spare money and as the kids get older.
You made it to the end! We are so glad and hope you’ll enjoy sharing our home education and life journey with us.
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Miles & Louise xx
Miles, an ex-teacher turned business owner, home educator and co-founder of home-educating blog healthycurious.com, is on a mission to empower others to break free from societal constraints and build the life they desire. He and his wife Louise, unschool their children.
With a rebellious spirit and a strong drive for success, Miles ran a DIY record label and music publishing company for five years after leaving teaching.
As a hobby Miles began creating a large catalogue of white noise and sleep-inducing sounds under the moniker Noise Foundation. Things went a bit nuts and he now receives millions of streams annually on Spotify and Apple Music from all around the world.
In addition, Miles and Louise run Cassette Property Group, a property investment company helping others to build assets for a freer life.