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.

Don’t know if you’re Somerset way but Jason Rees Mogg has a brood who may hit the mark from what I saw on their TV show 😂

My children are fairly wholesome in some ways (into literature, sport, art galleries etc) but they also watch you tube and Netflix, play some computer games and do a lot of the usual stuff. I wouldn’t particularly want them to be friends with your children because they might not live up to your expectations and you would probably disapprove of them. I had a friend whose mother used to criticise me for being materialistic, wearing inappropriate clothes, reading teen magazines and being shallow. It was really horrible and I wouldn’t want my children to go through that. You might need to be a bit more open minded.

My children are a bit like this OP but they are at school so your children wouldn’t be able to meet them.
Just at normal schools, mind - nothing fancy or purposefully wholesome!
They are defo on the quirky side but also know who Taylor swift is and play Minecraft 🤩.

Have you tried tapping into Steiner School networks at all? Not sure if there is one near you but I think your beliefs would chime with a lot of those families’.

FWIW, I think it’s possible to showcase all this cultural capital to your children (which is great, I think) whilst also supporting them to keep a toehold in our modern, much less seemingly wholesome world too. Back in the days, lots of parents thought Elvis was a horrifying influence and tried to shield their children from him! That was my dad’s experience anyway. What’s considered wholesome defo changes over time!

It sounds like you need to join a Waldorf / Steiner community. They will be screen free, outdoor and child-led-imaginary-games focused families.

perhaps join clubs like am dram, music, beavers/scouts/guides. But I think you are really going to struggle to find children like yours in a society like today’s esp homeschooling and esp in a small community. My SIL’s kids sounds like they would be a good fit, but they go to a regular state school in London and do clubs like chess at the school.

my kids would be a semi good fit, but again we are at a state school and hang out with families from that school. Yesterday my kids spent 3 hours in an outdoor community swimming pool, 2 hours going feral in a stream catching crayfish with their bare hands and playing hide and seek in the reeds, 1 hour burying each other in a sand pit. They spent the eve having friends over for a sleepover where they built a fire pit, made homemade popcorn, and spent a long time played in the dark with torches in the garden. However they also watched Spy Kids at the sleepover, and as I type are on screens building in Minecraft together.

my point is don’t cut your nose off to spite your face!

The irony is that if any kid today in DCs school did a presentation on Perry Como or Neil Diamond they would get obscure retro musician knowledge kudos 😁

on the literature front - all these older books have some pretty unpalatable attitudes towards race/gender/religion. Your kids are missing out on modern children’s literature much of which is fantastic.

People in vegetable growing groups. People into sustainability. The Green Party events. Steiner school events. Crafting clubs.
you probably need to make friends with the parents first.
I was brought up in the 70s, not allowed to watch tv, wear fashionable clothes or listen to modern music. I played music and read and was well behaved. My parents wouldn’t answer my questions accurately. I saw people as ‘them’ and ‘people like us’. At secondary school I simply couldn’t join conversations with the other kids because I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was also intimidated and easily bullied. My school reports said I was immature , naive and not naturally sociable. The lack of current affairs education and understanding modern culture became a problem with my education. There were so many things I didn’t understand. At the time I knew I just didn’t fit, but didn’t know why really. I know now. It has affected me my whole life. I get what you are doing, but please be mindful of balance.

OP, you sound absolutely lovely and the childhood you are giving your children sounds brilliant. If I lived anywhere near you (instead of hundreds of miles away!) I would love our children to hang out. Have you looked at this movement to see if there are others in your area? You may have similar values to many of them
https://www.smartphonefreechildhood.org
a lot of the WhatsApp groups are by school but there should be many that aren’t aligned to a school as well

A lot of Taylor Swift’s lesser known songs are a lesson in poetry to me, by the way.

Taylor Swift was a very telling choice because only people who really know zilch about popular culture would dismiss her or use her as an example of all that's wrong with the modern world. If you come back tonight OP, I'd love to know how your ordinary schooling set you so against contemporary culture. And once again, it's very impressive how you're engaging here

Waldorf/Steiner also have some decidedly 'National Socialist' race ideas and looking at the reports from when my local Steiner Free School collapsed they really are not at all nice

I think at the moment he's pretty happy, our life is very full.. lots of camping, trips away etc. There are a lot of things he does that he really enjoys and always things he's looking forward to and excited about. But he has said he would like more friends, he misses some of our friends from Wales still. And he has asked once or twice when he will be allowed to have a phone as my sisters boy who is a year younger than him, has one.

Genuinely didn't mean to be dismissive of her, it's more that she was a person who I thought most kids will have heard of and so I felt it was a good example of my own progenys unawareness in that area! I don't know enough about her to judge her as a music artist. I am reflecting that it could be a fun thing to explore music that is popular in 2025, I am certainly not against doing so.

I liked school well enough but once I reached university I soon came to feel my education had been abysmally poor and fairly soon after that realised I have been raised in a barren wasteland when it came to cultural enrichment. I wanted so much more for my own children and I do feel that I've achieved that. To me our life feels quite romantic in a way, if that's the right word, and very much like the film reel I used to play in my head before I had them.. animals, home made plays, our very own stream and a big treehouse in our (tiny) bit of woodland etc. Which is not to imply our life is perfect, far from it. But I had my vision and I built it and love it. However I do see many of the points people have raised and I am.in fact compiling a word document of potential pitfalls and concerns as well as many excellent suggestions and things to follow up or research.

It's great you've done that but just make sure you are also equiping them for life as adults in the 21st Century. Otherwise they will struggle to adapt.

Well I am intrigued to look up some lyrics now. I will admit to knowing nothing of her other than she is mid-thirties like myself and has never married or had children, that she writes songs about her various previous relationships. When I was at the dentist I saw a clip of her on television, she was at some sort of sporting event and jumping up and down clapping her hands. I could see her appeal to a young audience.. there was something very youthful in her mannerisms that I would associate usually with a schoolgirl. Many people on this thread have mentioned her as a great role model to young girls which is interesting to me. I have three daughters and another on the way so I will be going on to Wikipedia to look at her life and make up my own mind. We enjoy reading biographies and I do like to select inspiring lives to read about. But inspiring will, of course, be subjective.

My dc were exposed to all of these things, add art, classical music, folk music, hiking, sailing etc yet I didn’t cut them off from the world they lived in, they went to school, played Minecraft and fortnight progressing to world of Warcraft etc and we love Taylor Swift. Please consider the long term impact on your dc - I know a family that took your approach through church and both dc no longer speak to their parents now adults.

Thank you for your very kind and generous words. I am delighted by this link and would be keen to connected with families part of the organisation, schooled or otherwise. Thank you again.

She is a brilliant song writer and a good role model for young girls. She bought all of her songs back from her publisher in order to regain control etc.
Her songs are stories and each album is a journey.
My highly feminist 13 Yr old DD rates yer highly.

I appreciate the goos suggestions and thank you for taking the time to share your own experience, I do value it.

Ps if they weren’t already adults my dc would have happily played swallows and amazons with your dc, or put on plays it’s not either or - kids can do both which you don’t seem to grasp. Your dc live in the 21st century and need to prepare for it

This is exactly why I eventually put my DC into school. I didn't have much of a selection of home education groups, but we couldn't really fit in anywhere. Over the years the one single group morphed into a:

• Christian group, which included worship
• mental health group, where every child had either ASD (as did one of mine) or severe MH issues. It was the only thing the parents spoke about (and a lot had MH issues themselves) and the DC all sat alone
• the 'green parents'. My god, they were so irritating with their holier than thou, gentle parenting schtick and competitive my-child-is-so-amazing performative parenting
• the trans kids group

I just wanted a group where the kids socialized and the parents socialized. No forced activities, no parents trying to cajole my child into taking part in a play their DC had scripted, or slagging off the LA, or bullying parents who liased with the LA. We never found it, the DC became more in need of normal, organic socialization, so off to school they went!

Oh we do read more modern books also, there is an independent bookshop near us and we have picked out plenty over the years that have been written in the last 20 years.. and we use the library. You must see that my original post was a very rudimentary sketch of our life, there is so much more we do and enjoy than the few examples I compiled above! It would be folly to attempt an exhaustive list.

I also seem to have given the impression we have some sort of strange cut-off point in the 1960s for what music we will entertain and this is most definitely not the case. My elder children have amassed an impressive record collection in recent years and of course you don't find up to date music in charity shop record baskets, nor pick them up cheaply on ebay. But I do use Spotify and the children have their own playlists on there. I only mentioned Elvis as a random example that we are not just listening to Bach all day long.

So I think you’re getting a bit of a hard time on here (even if I can kind of understand why!). My 12 year old is - despite living in a big city and going to a bog standard school - more interested in the sort of things your kids are and not that on top of popular culture/doesn’t play computer games etc. As a result she’s a little un mainstream (and probably a bit weird - which there’s nothing wrong with - I am probably a bit weird too). She has amazing and close friendships, but it takes her slightly more time to find them than if she had more in common with kids with more popular interests. For her this is fine - as she goes to a massive school with loads of kids so can find her tribe within that. With no positive or negative judgement attached it’s just going to be the case that if your kids don’t go to school they don’t all have a regular cohort of 100+ kids to find their people in, and are therefore less likely to find them

Oh and to add, from people I know who home ed, I would say there is probably a more recent movement (again - not passing judgement on the reason) for kids who have struggled in mainstream to dominate in home ed communities rather than parents who have just chosen another way and therefore you are probably going to find lots of kids who are in home ed groups because they struggle socially etc