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Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education and stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.

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Each week we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less travelled.

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We're your hosts, Vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School. Pop in your headphones, settle in and join us on this next adventure.

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In this episode, you'll get to meet us. Wondering who we are and how two high school teachers ended up starting a forest school, unschooling their kids and starting a podcast? Let's find out.

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We're your hosts, Vicki Oliver and Nikki Farrell. Today we thought it was time we introduced ourselves, who we are, what we do and how we got here starting a podcast. It's a get to know you show, so you have a better picture of the faces behind the microphone and can better understand our why and our entire purpose for being here.

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But now it's time to get vulnerable. How are you feeling about this show, Vicki?

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It's very exciting. I'm feeling like... this is an opportunity to dive so much deeper into the whole reason why we are doing what we do, why Wild Things was created, what kind of relationships and connections we're trying to make with people. I think it's

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with our programs when we're running them, we get to answer here forever and leave them here for all of eternity,

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the

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questions that we get asked by our families and our parents all the time.

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Yeah, that's right. And because even though we talk about it a lot and I love talking about it. It would be nice to be able to share that with people that haven't perhaps being able to talk to us face to

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face. Those that can't get to our programs.

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So do you want to talk to everyone about how we met Nick?

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It's a pretty funny story because I've been living on the Sunshine Coast for two or three years. I had two kids by then and I had been going to a playgroup locally that I liked but didn't love. The kids loved it. I hadn't found my people yet, I guess. I was really looking for a connection with a group of like-minded women and I hadn't found that yet. I saw an ad for a playgroup, a nature playgroup, and when I read it it was all Steiner and nature and I thought really quite hippie and probably too hippie for me which looking back now is pretty ironic because it turns out I am quite hippie probably more hippie than I thought but when I got there and I met Vicky so it was Vicky's play group originally and it happened to be her eldest daughter's birthday and she had a watermelon cake and there were these natural decorations and the children's vocabulary was just kind and nature-based they had this real ecological literacy And the parents were warm and welcoming. And not that they weren't at other playgroups that I'd been to, but I just went, oh, My people. I found my people. That sense of

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belonging sometimes. Yeah. Is that, yeah, you belong there.

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Do you want to share how you got there? Because if it wasn't for you starting your playgroup, we wouldn't be here.

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Yeah. So I was attending a playgroup when my first daughter was born. We moved to Mackay. We were there for two years up until my second daughter was born. And out of desperation, I found some, you know, I went to a playgroup as well and I just eventually started to find some really like minded people. And I went to a play group. It was a Steiner based play group in Mackay. And then when we moved back to the Sunshine Coast, I really wanted to recreate what I had found there. And I wanted to recreate a similar place of belonging for other people. And I wanted it to be in a more natural place. I wanted to be somewhere where mums wanted to come as well. So the few play groups that I had also tried, I didn't like being there. I didn't feel like I wanted to go there. I didn't want to go to a hall. I didn't want to go to a little church and spend my time there. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to look we have the most amazing places to meet up on Sunshine Coast. And that's how it evolved for me is finding places that people wanted to spend their time with their kids. And you know what? The great thing about being outside is that if you need to take a moment, if there is a conversation that you don't want to be a part of, being outside means that you can pretend to follow your child downstream and you can escape that. You can give yourself a little bit of space. And I think that's the great thing about having things outdoors is that you can, you know, find that space within that connection that you're seeking to still be to have those moments so I just I created what I wanted I just put it out there I'm like if I'm gonna find my like-minded tribe then I am going to have to create what I want and that's what happened and I was just really lucky that we have just been joined by the most amazing and continue to be joined by the most amazing families have made so many incredible friends and not only friends though but also business associates and people that I can and riff with about all sorts of things that are happening in my life, not just parenting, and that's what I think is so beautiful about our village.

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I think I didn't know what I was looking for at all. If you had have asked me... What was I missing from the playgroups I was attending? I couldn't have put my finger on it. But when I got to your playgroup, I realised the kids were happy because there was this beautiful rhythm. It wasn't a, at quarter past we're doing this and then at half past you have to leave your painting and you must come and do your reading. So there were no arguments over toys. The kids weren't bouncing off the walls. I wasn't getting sensory overload because of all the screaming and noise. So I was calmer and the kids were happy. So everybody was so much nicer

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to each other. And that's a lot of the feedback I get sometimes from people is, you know, when we do a story time or a song circle and, And you can almost see this little bit of anxiety. Oh, my son doesn't like singing. And my first thing is this is an activity for those that want to participate in it. If your son doesn't want to sing, I'm not going to force him to sing. He's not going to get anything out of singing a song if he doesn't enjoy singing. And if you're sitting there stressed because you're trying to make him sit down. And I know that a lot of things that I went to the library, people would often be put in moments where they felt so much shame because their child wasn't complying and being an obedient little child, which you can't be when they're at that age they are

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not designed that way to be

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so yeah absolutely want people to feel like you join into the things that you want to join in we will provide opportunities but that's all they are they're an opportunity and they might be a very welcome opportunity and some children love crafting some children absolutely love singing some people absolutely love listening to a story and there are other children that will not participate in any of that and that's 100% fine because what our playgroups were designed for, they weren't designed just for children. They were designed for parents as well.

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And I think perhaps that was the difference. I think I felt that. And even if that wasn't an intention, it was that because you're not – taking children out of their deep flow states and their play states then there was real time to connect with the other women and so I didn't return for my kids even though my children loved that playgroup hands down over all the other playgroups we've been to I went back for me so thank you from young mother me I would really like to thank you for starting it

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And it's such a vivid memory of you and our other friend, Sarah, sitting down next to me during that playgroup. And we started talking and it was like we were stealing sentences from each other's mouths. Every time we went to say something, it was like, me too. Me too. Me too. And I'm a teacher and I'm feeling this. Me too. And everything that we said was just so well aligned. And that, I think, was the start of this journey for us and searching for that next step for us. So the playgroup was there. the start and then our elders were getting to that age where it was school starting to decide where that was going to go and taking that next step and and what what did that look like for us as professionals as well what what

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do your careers

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look like

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some big big conversations about careers wasn't

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there yeah and then there's this like blurry time for me where it was where we delved into what was this going to look like and

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see I vividly remember I vividly remember you saying okay well if we're going to delay our children because this is what happened both of us were umming and ahhing around this time about whether we were going to send our elders to school and and at some point we're both around about the same time decided that we weren't for completely different reasons actually for both of our children and I just remember you saying well what are we going to do instead we should start something and I'm and I just went oh I think she's serious I remember asking you are you serious because if you if you're in I'm in And you were like, yeah, I'm serious. And that was it. And I was like, okay, let's

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do this. I think there was this time where I was like, I can't go back to teaching. Like that just does not seem like a well-aligned choice for me. And every day I was learning something new about childhood development. Every day I was learning something new about myself and my family and what I actually wanted and what I wanted that to look like. And as you chip away at that, you have to start finding something that fits And I think there was just a firecracker at my bottom to do something like, you know, like starting the playgroup was really big for me. It's the first time I've actually done something that wasn't what someone else had prescribed. And I wasn't just following the standard set of ways that you do things and, you know, you get a job and someone else tells you what to do. So that was sort of like the jumping board for me to go, actually, if I can do that, I can just, I can do anything we can do. And especially finding someone that you can do that together with. I couldn't have done that on my own. Like we would both have said that we would not have a business without each other.

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There's no way. Hats off to all the sole traders out there. Honest to God. I just, I have no words. Hats off.

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A hundred percent. And I think that's what's made our business. be so heart focused and heart centered is because, you know, we know how to come back to our why. We know what we're trying to achieve.

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Well, we started this all for our own children. Everything we've done has been for our own children. So we've created this village of parents that want the same thing. And they were there right from the start in that play group. There were already people questioning and living different kinds of lifestyles and challenging the status quo and asking really big questions about parenting. and education yeah so we already had a micro village we've just grown it

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and so it has been an amazing journey to decide how we are going to show up for kids what it is that we're going to do for our children to make sure that they have the best possible childhood that they can have that they will thrive and that they will

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continue to look that's almost the essence of what we do is that saying that we keep coming back to is that we don't want children to be fine we want children to thrive And so our aim is to create environments and programs where children do thrive. And we're just

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going against that rhetoric that children need to suffer in order to do well or that they need to go through all these really bad things in order. You know, that's just the way things are, like just moving away from that's the way things are and that's how it's always being done. That isn't actually true and that we are not all about taking away we're not helicopter parents and we're not about cottoning our kids we still want them to go through risky situations and hard and we can do hard things love quoting

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Glennon Doyle

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Doyle we can do hard things that we can trial things and know that we might fail at them but we don't also have to put them in situations that are damaging, harmful, upsetting, just because that's just the way

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that it is. Yeah, it's always been done. And the thing is, we won't get into this in today's episode. We'll cover this later, but it's not the way that things have always been done. No. You know, traditional schooling is quite modern, actually. So let's move on from there. So after we decided to hold our children back and Vicky asked that big question of what next, what are we going to do with these children we decided to start a homeschool co-op now we weren't homeschooling yet we'd never been to a homeschool co-op we were teachers and high school teachers not early child care or primary school teachers but anyway we ended up in a in the local PCYC using their hall and we introduced some maths and English and art activities and we had a beautiful group of about 30 so we ended up we put the call out for primary school age children and we ended up getting two groups so we had a primary and a preschool age group so about 30 children and again just the most magnificent families but what we found out after about six months of this we enjoyed it we loved it but looking back now some of the things that we did were quite hilarious so

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for

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example we would bring in we did this one activity that just stands out in my brain we went out down to the creek which is right by the PCYC where we run all of our programs now and we went and collected all these items for sensory play and we tried to get the kids through the sensory play inside and meanwhile they just wanted to play with their friends and they're on the gymnastics mats and you know not really wanting to participate in our maths and english classes and then every afternoon after our co-op we would go down to the creek that was how we finished it was nature play and you can vouch for this whenever we would walk down to the creek there would just be this hell

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yes

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the whole was a little bit it wasn't soundproof what's the word

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sensory overload there was a lot of noise because I was screaming having a lot of time like they were having a ball great time and we would be hosting classes and a lot of effort went into them for half of the children to not be interested just wanting to play or we could have done everything that we were doing inside outside

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which

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was basically what pushed us out the door.

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And so it was funny, wasn't it? Because when we first started, most of us were like, yeah, you know, we'd like you to sit and try everything to all our children. And then within weeks, well, we don't want to force people because, you know, if we wanted them to go to school, they'd go to school and they're not there. So we want to give them the choice. But very quickly we realised we've had so much learning in the last five years. So much. That children just want to play and they want to play on their own rules and their own time in the way that they want to play and all the things that we wanted them to tick up there in the hole we then went down to the creek and they just did they were doing the things we wanted them to do but with their own freedom.

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That's right. They chose to do it because it was the right place, the right time, the right setting. And we always have things, like we always have provocations or invitations, but there's never a gender behind what we're doing. No. And we do get stuck a little bit between being seen to provide something for children by

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parents. That's for the parents, yeah. And then

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sometimes I think that maybe that isn't actually parents, that's just our own...

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That's

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our own perceptions of our role. So there's still a lot of unpacking. And for the amount of time that we've been running these programs, we still will have the same conversations about what we provide in our programs. It will be an ongoing conversation. What is it that we do for kids and with kids and how do we convey that message to parents so that we are actually doing the right thing for children and not to just appear to be doing the right thing for the parents?

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Yes. So let's talk a bit about that. So from the homeschool co-op we went and did our forest school leader training in Brisbane and that just blew our minds. It certainly did. Yeah,

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it just opened. It was like that permission, like that permission slip that we needed to say you can do these things now. Like you can do them, you can do them safely. It was

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seeing people do them too. It was evidence that this worked and that we could do it safely

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yeah and and that that children will absolutely love it that children will absolutely get so much more out of this style of being than anything else that we had tried. It was like that finally we found something that truly reflected our values on educational learning.

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And I might just pop in there, it also reflected both of our individual journeys to getting here. Both of our separate careers, our childhoods, our education have all led us to this point. And again, I think we didn't know what we were looking for. And when we found the forest school philosophy, we both went, oh, that's it. There

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it is. It's been hiding me from plain sight all this

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time. So we quickly ditched the homeschool co-op as in within two or three weeks we went from homeschool co-op, boom, right, we're starting the forest school philosophy. Yep, totally rebranded, started a small business and started Forest Kindy. And

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we just started to add more programs based on the feedback, the conversations we were having with our families. So with our kindy families, they were loving what we were doing. were doing with kindy and they'd say my seven or eight year old that goes to school would absolutely love this do you do you think you'd do a holiday program we were like oh my gosh ding ding of course we'd love to do a holiday but that sounds amazing

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just give us a few weeks to look up the legislation

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exactly so a little bit of back-end work and bob's your uncle we've got raft building and fire and bush cooking and making weapons and all sorts of amazingly fun activities for children to participate in

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and then from there we had requests from early childcare centres and schools to come and do professional development workshops. So we've created a suite of those. It's just people have asked and if we've been interested and it's been aligned with what we do, then we've just said yes. And that's why we're here.

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And that has led us now to the podcast because, you know, those conversations we continue to have with people and we had a lot of pressure. Oh, pressure is probably the wrong word. A lot of encouragement from our From our village. Why don't you start a podcast? When are you going to start a

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podcast?

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When are you starting a podcast? Well, you know what? Now we're doing it. Now we are.

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And can we just say how much we've been loving it? It's been, you know, when you've been enjoying your job and you get into this rhythm and We love our job. We love our programs. But we didn't realize that we're looking for the next challenge. So we kind of get the best of both worlds here where we get to go outdoors. We get to play with kids and build rafts. And then we get to come here and use our intellectual brains and, you know, dive deep and chat to these experts and our heroes and our mentors that really inspire us to do what we do.

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And to share those things that we know work so well in connecting with our own families. Like I was having an experience with one of my girls yesterday when we went on a bushwalk and we were dealing with some really hard emotions. And I just put into practice all the stuff that I've learned when it comes to positive and respectful communication and what could have been a really horrible situation for all of us de-escalated and everyone was heard and that's the sort of thing I want other people to learn about that it's not easy parenting isn't easy but there are ways in which we can talk to children talk to each other that will increase that connection, will allow us to feel all of our emotions and have our needs met. And that's that underlying what we are trying to create with Wildlings is that freedom, which comes in so many different forms, but that freedom to just be who you are, to be accepted for your emotions. It's so important and it's something that we need more people. At the end of the day, what I want for my girls is to live in a society where more people are able to freely express who they are.

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Yes.

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be able to express their feelings and emotions and to clearly communicate their needs with other people. The only way I can find that that will happen is if we spread this information that we are learning and continue to learn to other people.

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And can I add in there that we are still learning? We are not

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experts. Not experts. No, I don't think anyone ever is. And I think that's the beauty of it. We will continue to find new and amazing ways of being and parenting and communicating and living our best lives through that constant learning.

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And that's what this entire podcast is about. It's about exploring children's rights and autonomy. It's about exploring play and why children have to be able to play. They need to play. And that includes risky play and nature play. We really want to delve into that respectful parenting because through respectful parenting, we open up that freedom to be ourselves. We open up that beautiful language so that there's less yelling and there's less fighting and there's less sibling rivalry and less tantrums so that Ultimately, when we talk about all of these things, we're just creating simpler, calmer, happier, healthier families. Ultimately, that's why we're here. That's

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it.

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Some of the tidbits that we've learned, we want to pass them on.

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In order to fit in. We want true belonging. You can tell I've been reading a little bit of Renee Brown lately.

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Listening to a bit of Glennon

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Doe.

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My goodness. Yeah. My heroes, seriously, right now. They're

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my current inspo. Yeah, the more we learn about these things and the more that it becomes part of a conversation and the more that we see people doing it too because I know that when I see parents who are just nailing, absolutely nailing conversations or conversations difficult situations with their kids, it's easier for me to then do that with my own kids. It is so much easier for me to see people who are yelling at their kids or speaking badly to children or teachers who are Being very authoritarian, it's very easy to fall into that because that's what we see the most of. But we want to change that so that more people can see what it's like to have respectful conversations, to not have to fall into those patterns that are not helpful or productive

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or fair. You can't be what you can't see.

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That's right. And that's what we want to do. We want to be able to give people more tools and real-life examples of how we talk to children but also why. So it makes it easier for us to choose better solutions. Yeah. Even if we're not perfect at them.

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And we're not. I'm going to just reiterate that. We have times when we yell and we have times when we're authoritarian, but it's getting less and less. And our family life right now, I'm personally, I'm probably the most content I've ever just about ever been because I have these freedoms within my work. Our families have these freedoms. I have time to play. I have time to connect. And I have a beautiful group of friends and family around me who support me for who I am. You can't ask

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for much better. Yeah, that's right.

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But I've used a lot of these tools to get here.

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That's right. And it's not easy and we're still working on that. But

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yeah, I think that's what I like. The English teacher in me is so excited to hear the stories. I just love there's plenty of people's lives out there that I admire, but that I wouldn't want to do. I don't want to climb Everest. I don't want to do, there's plenty of things out there that I just love that these people are frothing on their own life. That doesn't mean I want to do them, but gosh, I love hearing their stories. Thank you so much for joining us today. We hope you can feel our passion and purpose beaming through your headphones. Ultimately, we're here to support parents and educators in giving children respect and freedom. Freedom to learn, freedom to play, freedom to be themselves and to be loved for who they are. By bringing in experts in child development, we hope to normalise many of the behaviours we as parents can find really, really hard. Not Knowledge is power. With empathy comes more patience, more understanding, more acceptance and more love. Less yelling, less trauma, less fractured relationships and less frustration. If we can help just one family, then this is all worth it. If

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you'd like to check out some of the content we've created to start your nature play journey, you can head to our website at www.wildlingsforestschool.com forward slash Raising Wildlings 3 to check out our free nature scavenger hunt printable from the show notes. Stay wild.