Born to be wild!
As a new TV documentary visits the children who are allowed to ditch school to do what they want, would you adopt the new parenting style of these feral families?
SO, mums and dads, picture this. Your seven-year-old daughter skips into the living room and says that she wants to shave her head. Do you (a) tell her not to be so ridiculous and to go and do her homework? Or (b) point her in the direction of the clippers and let her get on with it?
If you are part of a growing tribe who embrace a concept called ‘extreme unschooling’ — aka parenting without rules — then the answer is obviously the latter.
The above scenario actually happened while cameras were filming at home with the Rawnsley family for a new Channel 4 documentary on the phenomenon.
The Rawnsleys have seven children who, when we meet them, are sliding down the stairs on mattresses dragged off every bed in the house. The title of this show is Feral Families — and, as the kids climb out of windows, help themselves to ice cream cones as a bedtime snack and hurtle down the stairs headfirst, it seems a perfectly valid one.
Mum Gemma, 35, a mobile hairdresser, and dad Lewis, a chef, made the decision some years ago that conventional parenting was not for them and the ‘no rules’ approach would work better.
So their seven children — as well as Pearl (the seven-year-old) there is Skye, 13, Finlay, 12, Phoenix, nine, Hunter, five, Zephyr, three, and baby Woolf, who has just turned one — are well and truly in charge in this house.
‘Right from the off, we felt really strongly that we didn’t want to be the sort of parents you see shouting at their kids in the supermarket,’ Gemma says. ‘We felt that our children needed to be given the power to develop as people, to make their own decisions.’
What does this mean in practice? ‘It means that if they say they want to use the mattresses to make a slide, that we don’t automatically say “no”. Why should we say “no”? We are facilitators, so we will lift the mattresses for them. The conventional response would be to say: “No, you can’t take the mattresses and make a slide”, but why not? We put cushions at the bottom. It is safe. And they have the most amazing fun that is wonderful to watch.’
Ditto the hair clippers, so willingly entrusted to the care of livewire Pearl, who is just seven?
Yes, it seems. ‘I’m a hairdresser and barber,’ explains Gemma. ‘So it’s only natural for kids to be curious about it. I actually showed Pearl how to switch the clippers on and what to do with them. Maybe most parents would say “no”. ‘I disagree. Cutting her own hair teaches her independence, encourages her creativity, improves her motor skills. She did a good job with her hair, too, but even if she’d made a mess of it, I’d still have praised her for it, because you want your kids to feel proud of everything they achieve. It bolsters their self-confidence.’
What does allowing the kids to have ice cream before bedtime teach them, then, apart from the correlation between sugar and teeth cavities?
‘They aren’t allowed to do this every night,’ Gemma points out. ‘During the week, we are quite rigid about healthy eating. But at weekends, things are different.’
Gemma insists there are some rules in the household. ‘It’s more that there are no unnecessary rules. We feel that, as a society, we’ve become too hung up on just saying “no” to kids, without thinking of why we are doing it.’
While home-schooling has been around for decades, ‘unschooling’ is a more recent American import which is now catching on with families like the Rawlings who live in Yorkshire. And some Irish parents are also taking the method on. It means that rather than doing homework, children learn ‘organically’ at their own pace.
They also, it seems, choose what they want to learn themselves. And if they want to learn fire-juggling or drumming, and reach their teenage years unable to properly read and write? Well, the message that comes from this jaw-dropping programme is that that is fine.
Jenna Presley, 38, has four children. Her eldest, Dylan, now 20, was conventionally educated. ‘He went to school. He did exams. I did everything with him in a mainstream way,’ says Jenna.
Then came Archie, who is now 13. When Archie was seven, Jenna became increasingly distressed about how he was adjusting to school life. ‘He hated it. He was depressed,’ she explains.
‘My background is in mental health, and I could see he was depressed. I’d have to drag him down the stairs to actually go to school — it was verging on child abuse.’
Family life was also a drag, she says. ‘We were living a normal conventional lifestyle. I went to work, he went to school, but there was no quality of life. It was all: “You brush your teeth, go to school, have dinner, do homework, bed.” We wanted more.’
So Jenna took Archie out of school. This is perfectly legal, as long as you inform the authorities. At first, Jenna drew up study timetables and ‘tried to replicate the way he had been learning at school’. Yet still, Archie refused to engage.
‘I do think he is mildly dyslexic,’ she explains. ‘He really struggled with his reading and writing.’ All the
‘Cutting her own hair improves her motor skills’
More reason to get formal assistance with his education, you might think. But Jenna disagreed and, buoyed by research into the idea of letting chil dren do their own thing, she let Archie decide what he wanted to learn.
Mostly, this was the drums. ‘Archie came alive. He was finally doing something he loved,’ Jenna says.
What else does Archie study? Well, since leaving school, he has taught himself to juggle fire and throw knives. ‘He’s very responsible, much more so than other children his age.’
In a shocking revelation during the programme, Jenna says she would allow Archie to have a gun, if he wanted to learn to shoot.
‘I mean, obviously, I’m talking an air rifle, and not when there are younger children around, but I know my son — probably more so than parents whose children spend all day at school know theirs.’
She says that ‘unschooling’ has been the making of Archie.
‘He’s blossomed. He’s become a confident, independent boy. It’s completely transformed him.’
It’s also, it seems, left Archie with the literacy skills of a much younger child. He struggles with his reading and writing and, while he does not think this is a problem (he says that if he needs to write, he can just use his phone), other members of the family are appalled. His father (who is not with Jenna) wasn’t consulted about Jenna’s unschooling decision and, she admits, ‘wasn’t happy’.
‘His mother, Archie’s gran, phoned me up and said I was ruining his life.’ Her own parents weren’t happy, either, and her dad Mick, 66, has employed a private tutor for Archie.
While Jenna has allowed this, she simply doesn’t agree that exams matter. ‘I mean, I went to school, but I still left without any exams. I went on to do a degree later. I don’t believe in getting hung up on a piece of paper. School suits some children. It did not suit Archie.’ But will Archie not end up unemployable, at least anywhere other than a circus?
‘No, I think as a society, that’s what we have been led to believe, but Archie has already worked, helping out at a local festival putting up the marquees, and all the reports that have come back to me are about how amazing he is, and how good his work ethic is.’ She’s not convinced school would do a single positive thing for him. ‘I mean, my eldest, Dylan, went through the school system.
‘He is working as a barber, which isn’t a job that you need A-levels for. And when he sends me texts, I can see that he can’t spell, even with his education.’
She’s a passionate advocate of this lifestyle, and her younger children, Otis, five, and Silo, will be raised in the same way.
But what if they show an academic bent? ‘I think that might be the case with Otis. He’s already streaks ahead with his reading. But that’s the point. We take each child on their own merits and assess what is best for them.’
While some of the families involved struggled with the title of the show (Gemma, the mum-of-seven, admits she baulked a bit at the ‘feral’ description), Jenna is proud to call her family feral.
‘I don’t see it as a criticism at all. To me, feral means free-spirited, not hemmed in by convention. I want my children to grow up happy, not feeling that they have to conform.’
Mother-of-three Vickie Hairsine, 25, says her move into ‘extreme unschooling’ was gradual.
Her eldest daughter, Jessica, now seven, started at primary school, but became increasingly ‘sad and withdrawn’, to the point where Vickie removed her, even though she admits she was nervous about doing so.
She says her husband Mike, 35, struggled with the concept of ‘no rules’ parenting at first, but that the more relaxed approach has made their household ‘much, much happier’.