ECCENTRIC OR HARMFUL?
TV viewers were shocked by their ‘feral’ children. But their oh-so liberal parents insist no bedtimes, no school and breast feeding until five really IS best
STRANGE though it seems to them now, there was a time when young married couple Matt and Adele Allen wanted the same things as everyone else. They dreamed of a nice house, fancy car, the children at high-achieving schools and all family holidays abroad. Adele, a Spanish and linguistics university graduate, wore fashionable clothes while Matt, who studied leisure management and sports, looked buff in trendy designer gear. ‘Oh yes, we were pretty conventional,’ says Matt, 33, a former cruise ship fitness instructor, who married Adele in Goa on New Year’s Eve, 2009.
Photographs show them looking like models from the pages of a luxury lifestyle magazine.
‘We liked clubbing, drinking, eating out, travelling the world. We were earning silly money. We didn’t even think about where it went.
‘We were into all the materialistic things. I thought nothing of buying Adele a £800 white gold and diamond bracelet for her birthday.’
She could have been the ultimate yummy mummy. So how on earth did they end up sitting barefoot on a tatty, old leather sofa in a cramped one-bedroom, rented garden flat in Brighton with two ‘free-range’ children and a rescue dog called Noah from Bosnia.
Adele, 32, is sitting cross-legged on the floor breast feeding her fiveyear-old son Ulysses and daughter Ostara, 15 months, while Matt is talking passionately about the ‘healing powers of the sea’.
They are stony broke, relying on housing and child benefit to get by while they work towards a ‘selfsustaining’ existence. They’re seeking donations to raise £100,000 so they can move to Costa Rica in pursuit of their ‘self-sustainability’ dream. So far, they’ve raised £47.
Matt takes whatever work he can find as a health coach, but would rather trade services for goods than submit to more conventional employment. The furniture’s largely ‘free-cycled’ and there’s a strong smell of dog about the place.
The Allens have a vision of family life they’d like to share with us all called ‘off-grid parenting’.
It’s a world where children have no routine, no vaccinations, no doctors, no dentists, no medicine, no formal schooling, no financial security, no car, no naughty step, no TV, no nice toys, no suncream, no routines.
What they do have is breast feeding on demand until they decide when they want to stop.
Oh yes, and there’s ‘lotus birthing’, which Adele achieved with both children: giving birth at home with no medical intervention, not even a midwife, and leaving the placenta attached until the umbilical cord dropped off naturally.
This took several days, requiring Adele to carry it around in a cool bag, before they could symbolically throw it off the end of Brighton Pier to be consumed by the ‘healing’ sea. This week, when the Allens appeared on ITV’s This Morning to spread the message of ‘off-grid parenting’, all hell broke loose.
As writer and blogger Adele, who is penning a book called The Unconventional Parent, eloquently tried to explain the challenging concepts behind their alternative
lifestyle, all eyes were on Ulysses and Ostara.
While Ulysses leapt around like a jumping bean, Ostara toddled off and had a wee on the studio floor, next to an expensive-looking rug.
While the Allens took it all in their stride, married presenters Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford looked sorely tempted to dispense a little discipline of their own.
‘Feral’ was the brutal verdict of most of the ‘on-grid’ masses. So, has the nappy-gate incident prompted a radical rethink for Adele and Matt? Not a bit of it.
‘I’m proud that my children are wild and feral, I would rather that than have them living in captivity,’ says former nutritionist and children’s yoga teacher Adele, who is now a full-time mother.
‘Every parent has had a leaky nappy incident and what five-yearold doesn’t want to roam free?’
While Matt says: ‘We accept other people’s choices and do not judge them, so why judge us?’
ADELE adds: ‘We are not suggesting that everyone lives like us, all we are hoping to do is challenge people’s thinking about parenting and maybe integrate some ideas into their own lives.’
When I meet the family in their home — away from the ‘overstimulation’ of the studio — the children are delightful and not remotely feral, with Ulysses engaging his father in a charming conversation about purple thistles.
Yet most people would consider the Allens’ parenting methods misguided at best if not downright dangerous, but they have faith in the path they have chosen.
Adele admits that even her own mother is a little upset, thinking it unfair of the couple to impose their lifestyle choices on their children. They rejected her generous offer of a significant amount of money because Adele feels it might come with strings attached.
‘My mother has always been very supportive of us as a couple, helping us out over the years, but lately we have agreed to disagree over the way we are bringing up our children,’ says Adele.
‘If Ulysses and Ostara reject our lifestyle when they are older and make their own choices, then that is fine with us. We just want them to be happy.
‘It is wrong to say we have no rules or boundaries. One of our rules is to do no harm to others and to treat everyone with compassion.
‘Of course we don’t always get it right. It’s hard not to fall back on convention and tell your child to “sit still” or “we’ll play later, I’m busy”, or give them a bag of crisps when they ask, but we let them tell us what they need. They reflect back to us what we show them.
‘I don’t wear make-up because I don’t want my daughter to grow up seeing society’s obsession with appearance reflected in me.’
Matt’s mother, a childminder, is fully supportive. Matt says: ‘It can be hard for family to see you adopt a radically different lifestyle.
‘To them, it might feel like a rejection of them personally and the way they brought us up, but it isn’t. Of course they’d like to see us follow a more traditional path, with steady jobs, an income and a foot on the property ladder, but we don’t want to compromise family life, not seeing our children because of the straitjacket of a mortgage.
‘Some parents feel compelled to put their babies in childcare because they have to work. Everyone does the best they can, but how does that impact on parent and child?’
Though some This Morning viewers accused the Allens of ‘lazy parenting’, the couple insist it is quite the opposite — it couldn’t be more hands-on and time-intensive — especially when there is no school to give you a break or routine to fall back on.
There are no set bedtimes. The children go to sleep when tired and wake when they please. They eat when they are hungry and go barefoot whenever possible to ‘connect with the Earth’s power’.
And there can’t be many mums who’d use breast milk to cure their child’s eye infection or let the dog lick clean a grazed knee.
The medical profession might have something to say about that, not that Adele would listen.
She says she has ‘cured’ her own short-sightedness through diet, eye-training and the power of positive thought, and claims there are antiseptic properties in dogs’ tongues.
‘I believe in the body’s power to heal itself. If you are breast feeding, that builds up your child’s immunity and they are sharing your antibodies.
‘Parents are often horrified when we say we haven’t immunised the children, but Ulysses caught scarlet fever from a child who had been vaccinated. If I felt either child was seriously ill or they’d been in an accident, I’d seek medical help. Would I let my children die? No.’
Matt adds: ‘We have taken Ulysses to hospital once when he suffered from an asthma attack caused by a severe mould allergy, but by the time the doctor saw him it had cleared and we were told there was nothing they could do for it anyway. His body healed itself.’
The couple have chosen ‘unschooling’ for Ulysses, where he dictates what he wants to learn about. They visit free museums, forage for wild food and encourage ‘unstructured learning’. ‘If Ulysses says one day he wants to go to school, then he can,’ says Adele.
‘We will be guided by him, but he is not missing out as he socialises with other children of all ages.’
Adele and Matt, who met aged 17 and 18 when they worked in a Watford restaurant, had very different childhoods from the one they are giving their children.
Adele, who shone at St Albans High School for Girls in Hertfordshire, had a conventional, financially secure upbringing. Her father, a council executive, suffered a fatal heart attack when she was five.
Matt grew up in a working-class family in Watford. His father Paul, he says, was ‘a del Boy Trotter character’, who also died from a heart attack, aged 40, when Matt was 18.
‘I have never smoked, but was shocked when health tests showed I had high cholesterol and that’s when I really got into health and fitness,’ says Matt.
‘But it was when I took up yoga that the real change happened. It was a revelation to me.’
After this shift from the material towards a more spiritual path, the couple started exploring an alternative lifestyle, accelerated by the arrival of children and their decision to move to Brighton.
‘In Watford, you are normal or weird,’ says Adele. ‘In Brighton, people are far more accepting of alternative lifestyles.’
MATT adds: ‘I have learned so much about myself from my children. I was a gung-ho extrovert who expected my son to be just like me, but he wasn’t. ‘He is a sensitive, introverted child and it was me who had to adjust, not him.
‘After he was born, I was gripped by fear over how we were going to provide for him in the future, but finding a way to get by and live in the present is very freeing.’
Now the Allens plan to move to Central America to lead a more eco-friendly life and open a retreat for other people seeking ‘off-grid’ enlightenment.
But will Ulysses and Ostara grow up to thank or resent them for it? Or go back on grid, even.
‘One day they may reject everything we believe in and become hedge fund managers,’ says Matt. ‘That is fine by us. That will be their choice, just as we have made ours.’