How to connect with 'wholesome' families

[RosemarySutcliffe]

Please no tiresome comments of offended outrage. I was hoping for ideas on how to meet home educated families in the hope that my children (ages 13,11, 7 & 4) could make friends with children more like themselves. Children who are familiar with classic literature (nesbit, ransome, tolkien, lewis etc), who are imaginative, interested in culture (shakespeare, poetry, enthusiastic, outdoorsy, well-mannered and have a sense of good sportsmanship, traditional childhood fun, how to be a friend and so on.
It feels like a needle in a haystack. We don't do gaming, my children don't have ipads or phones, they have only been exposed to edifying, wholesome films. They don't have behaviour problems or mental health problems. They are just decent, normal, imperfect, regular children. They don't know who Taylor Swift is, they've never played minecraft. How to meet like-minded people? It feels as if home educated children these days are often far more homogeneous than children who attend school. I don't mean any judgement of offence, it just can feel a little lonely as a family when you are raising them outside of the prevailing culture. We would love to have friends to invite for afternoon tea and poetry, dinner parties, bonfires, book clubs, put on plays with, swallows and amazon style adventures.. you get the idea.

This. You’ve niche-d them quite hard OP. I expect you plan for them to go to university. Hopefully they can make some friends then?

Just on the subject of technology, my daughters both have additional needs, both went to sen schools, but they can both work their way around a phone, an iPad, a smart TV, a sat nav, online banking apps - these are basic life skills these days. Most children are learning these from a young age.

Btw why can't they go to school?

Hahaha very good

Doing niche things is great when that is someone's passion or done alongside "the same things as everyone else."

But doing, and knowing about, the same things as everyone else is really important to being able to relate to other people and to modern life.

Children who went to the Sunday school picnic and attended debating clubs would generally have taken part in the normal social activities of their time - going to school, going to Sunday school, sharing silly comics, listening to children's hour on the radio and whatever else. But taking part in mainstream popular culture that allowed them to have shared experiences with other children their age.

If your children aren't attending school, they are already missing out on the largest opportunity to meet peers their age. And asking about Sunday school picnics suggests they are craving that experience.

Part of parenting as our children get older is letting them become more independent and equipping them with the skills to navigate the world in which they will be independent - not just the world as you wish it to be.

I do take your point that there is a certain type in some homeschool communities that I would be loath to imitate.

I don’t think you are going to raise basket cases, but rather you are trying to exert way too much control over the opportunities presented to your older children. His world does need to expand, but it needs to be him doing the expanding and choosing direction, not just sampling a carefully curated menu of your choices. Obviously there are limits due to logistics of getting 4 children to different places and what’s on offer where you live, but there’s clear blue water between a Swallows and Amazons childhood and sharing nudes on Snap. And that healthy, wholesome (ish!) middle ground is far more in evidence than you might think.

You say the internet is a dangerous place but you've been on it all evening-has it been that bad? your children will use it when they are adults, so do you not think a gradually introducing it and teaching them how to use it sensibly is a good idea?

My children read so many old books and then ask about debating clubs, sunday school picnics and I have to tell them that it's a bygone era!

Lots of debating clubs in secondary schools around here. Yes, they will probably miss out on such things (and having good male role models for your son), if you live very rurally and choose to home school.

Do you take them to Sunday school each week? If so and they don't offer a picnic, offer to organise one.

You won’t find any other families raising kids this way in2025. Try pre 1905.
Best thing you can do at this point is try and give them a bit more exposure to what is considered ‘normal’ so they won’t feel like outcasts as children or as adults.
At a very basic level you need to introduce IT, it’s like another language to navigate & without those skills your kids will struggle later on. Screen time / gaming is not necessarily idle, they are learning all sorts including coding. Don’t do them a disservice to satisfy your own eccentricity.

Thank you for this suggestion I think he'd love to do D of E. There is an outdoor activity centre fairly near us.

Also, you need to know if you can trust your child (this was hard for me). When we gave our kids internet access, I was convinced they’d use it for finding porn and buying drugs on the Dark Web and they’d be groomed/recruited by incels. What they have actually used it for (looking at their web traffic) is finding the cricket scores, doing Wordle, asking for help writing some Python code and learning magic tricks and packed lunch hacks off YouTube.

I think PotolKimchi makes a very good point about popular culture. Everything we view as "classic" today was new, and often radical once. Lots of classical music and literature was seen as quite shocking in its time. The music for Swan Lake was declared to be "undanceable" for example and Carmen caused outrage. Shakespeare wouldn't have been considered particularly high brow in his day and I doubt The Globe was an entirely wholesome place! It's the same with clothes, hairstyles, hobbies etc. Things that we look at as representative of some good old fashioned "better" time were the height of fashion once and no doubt had older people tutting and decrying "the youth of today".
It is perfectly possible for children and young people to appreciate both current trends and things from the past. If you listened to my young adult DC's play lists you'd find everything from Bach to Frank Sinatra and Abba to Slipknot. They've been exposed to a lot of different stuff in their formative years. They've been to classical music performances, ballets, museums and art galleries but also theme parks and rock concerts. They've read Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books but also Biggles and Alex Ryder. They have had music lessons, played multiple sports, camped in the woods and yes, as we live in the Lakes and sail, they have sailed their own dinghies to islands in true Swallows and Amazons style. But they like computer games too. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Wanting to protect your children from some aspects of the modern world is not unreasonable but rather than shield them it is, in my opinion at least, better to equip them with the skills needed to navigate it.
As to where my DC found friends with similar interests - lots of places. Their sports' clubs, Scouts, Church but mostly school.

Your kids are really going to struggle in adult life with such a narrow, 19th century upbringing. I love reading and the outdoors but you’ve got to teach them a bit about the world they live in, or let them have access to it. Not letting kids listen to pop music… do you live in a cult?

Do you ever want him to be able to apply for university? Or a job? Or rent a home?

almost everything is online now I’m afraid, you’ve not given enough of a balance in my mind.
You’ve filled their lives with wonderful enriching experiences but maybe they’ll struggle to integrate into society … or is that the point.

I had a great childhood very limited in tech and slightly more religious than your alluding to but I was encouraged to learn how to fit into the world and use a computer (still new when I was young lol) and I’m very grateful. I still listen to classical
music and read poetry but also managed to thrive at university and have a career.

Your dcs sound to have had a blissful bedrock of experience, but in a limited way. Now that you have given them that, I think you will have to learn to trust them. It's a tough world out there, and for their own sakes, they need to become aware of it. Better to go off the rails (maybe, a little) with you in the background than later on in life.

Back to the Proms. This year there is a Traitors Prom and a Star Wars Prom, alongside a Holst The Planets Prom. DD went to a Horrible Histories Prom when she was young. If the Proms can roll forward, so can you.

It's your job to equip your children for the real world, not hide them away with only those who share your values for company. Set them up so they can navigate their teenage years with confidence not confusion.

It probably says something that all these things are so trivial to learn that a small child can do it!

I understand because I used to want the same sort of 'Just William' childhood for my children, and I home educated all of them at the start. No screens for quite a few years. The oldest didn't go to school until A-levels. They've all been academically very successful, have joined mainstream education at various ages - eg at 16, 14, 13, 11 - and we all get along well.... BUT if I had my time again, I would not home educate through the teenage years, and I certainly wouldn't do it if living somewhere rural where the children were dependent on parents for transport. It was great when they were little, but after age 12 or so got progressively harder for them to find friends. We used to go to lots of home-ed groups and sports and drama groups, so they were mixing with kids from different backgrounds and we certainly found friends who also had limited screen time, though mine were always allowed some. I also found that the home-ed social scene changed a lot after around 2010. It used to be mainly 'alternative' families and religious families, then there was a massive influx of children who didn't fit well into school.
Now most of my children are adults, and I welcome their honest feedback about their childhood. They all enjoyed their early home-ed years, but they all feel strongly that home-ed is not a good idea for the teenage years, because of the social issues. We live in the suburbs of a large city and used to attend 3 or 4 home-ed groups a week plus 2 or 3 regular after-school sports groups. We used to go to national camps, and my children all travelled on public transport from around age 11 so they could actually meet up with their friends. Even so, there just weren't enough people around for them to find their tribes. There was a lot of implicit pressure on the children to be friends with my friends' kids, and those friendships haven't lasted. Consistently, they have told me that after they went to school, they were able to find friends who they got on with much better, because they would have at least 100 children in their year group to choose from, rather than, say, 10 in their approximate peer group at a HE group if they were very lucky.

What came as a surprise to me was that there are many children in school who have quite traditional interests. I had been very evangelical about home-ed and childhood freedom from popular culture, but in reality it often seemed that many home-ed teens spent most of their lives online. The school children, though being kept away from screens for so many hours a day, possibly had more opportunity to develop their interests in other hobbies. I have met so many wonderful teenagers with wide ranging interests, teens whose families do long-distance trail running, or re-enactments, or sailing, and all sorts of other "wholesome" things, and they do this alongside going to school and mixing with lots of other kids.

I grew up in isolated rural areas and, even though I went to school, I still feel sad about the way this hugely restricted my ability to have normal social independence as a teen. I look at the freedom my own children have to just get away from parental supervision and make their own friends, and I'm clear that they have the better deal. We would meet children who came to home-ed camps who lived in remote places where they couldn't get about under their own steam, and these teenagers tended not to like it at all.

My personal advice would be, home education in the teen years is isolating, and living rurally with no public transport is isolating - doing both together is going to require a colossal effort from you to give the children freedom and opportunity to socialise, and it can't just be with people you hand-pick even if you can find the sort of people you want.

Practical advice: take them to the sort of things that motivated and interesting people do, and they will be more likely to find motivated and interesting friends.

1. Re-enactment groups are wonderful for this sort of thing.
2. Sports and hobbies are really essential.

One of the things my formerly home-educated children have enjoyed at school is debating clubs!!

Sounds fun

I'd exercise extreme caution with shielding your children from almost all pop culture. Like it or not Taylor Swift, Minecraft and Roblox are now interwoven into life. Grandparents are now spotted playing Mario Kart alongside doing the walks and teaching knitting.

I was brought up as a conservative Christian. Whilst I went to school, I did not know about pop culture, or who Nirvana were or even what was in the charts. We'd be in cafes and I adored hearing the radio because it wasn't Classic FM or the KJV bible. I stuck out like a sore thumb on party day at school, I didn't know how to dance or join in with the actions so I did what I did at ballet class. I was laughed at. When I was 13 had to do a project on a famous person we admired and I chose Elizabeth I. I had no idea. I watched my 1st Disney film at the age of 25.

I was so isolated and due to my childhood I found going to University very hard. A lot of cultural references go over my head but a lot of people stare at me like I am a time traveller if I quote the bible or any type of classic Lit. I have lost so many relationships and friendships because I don't understand how to react to different people.

Your children do need to know about the world and what is in it. Childhood is there for that very reason and not to shield from every influence that you don't like the sound of.

I adored reading Malory Towers with my DD and she's reading LOTR now but she also gets a little bit of time to play on her computer, listen to music or decide what style of clothes she likes. Those things are so important to learn in childhood.

When they were little we would go to heaps of home ed groups but where we live now the groups don't sound very edifying (teen social, gaming club) plus we are so busy with schoolwork (classical education style, not unschoolers) and after school clubs that we don't have the same time to commit.

This sounds so familiar to me - I have been there! The teen social clubs were often a couple of gaming stations in a dark room and teens left there to play alongside each other, not a lot of talking going on, and it seemed to me not enough activity to really allow people to relax. But by the teenage years, few children want to be going to this sort of thing anyway - they want independence.
Anyway.... Studying and then after-school sports took up a lot of our time, and it was hard to find new home-ed social opportunities.
When the children went into school one by one over a few years - it was an absolute revelation! You send your children off for the day, and someone else does all the hard slog of arranging the educational materials, lays on sports activities, allows them free time mixing with lots of other young people so they're likely to find someone they click with. It was amazing! It seems so funny in retrospect, but I couldn't see it at the time.
If you are following a structured education style anyway, you have much less to risk by trying school than a family of unschoolers, for example.

you’d be surprised. Most of the jobs our children will have sont exist yet, just like it was for us. Children learn coding in primary school now. Remember that initially books were seen in the same way.

I didn't say that young children can do all this but they tend to start using technology at a young age these days so are incredibly comfortable with it. If you have never been exposed to it, I don't know if you will ever have the degree of confidence peers have.

It’s ultimately selfish — you’re not adequately preparing your kids for adult life.

My kids are very young albeit similar upbringing so far - i plan to send to an outdoor private school. Iv found it hard to find children who have zero screen time and the other things you mention taking into account age differences eg. My child doesnt know what disney is never mind TS. The one place I have found home schooled kids who seem to have this sort of ethos was an evangelical church that we visited at Christmas time for a carol service. The religious side was a bit much for us but very nice people.

This is brilliant really made me laugh after reading the OP