Well, maybe you could just start off by telling us a little bit about you and your family's journey to unschooling, Mei Ling.

Yeah, so we were really lucky in that I've been involved in a certain type of energy healing for a long time, and it's kind of been my therapy.

And through that, we've met lots of quite out there people.

And when we found out that we were expecting um my husband was on a train one day and bumped into one of these friends from one of those courses and when she found out that we were expecting a baby she was like oh and downloaded all of this information on us and one of the things she talked about was the continuum concept book and she talked about elimination communication and those were two really sort of pivotal things that that were super helpful for us because when we read um the continuum concept it basically just reminded us that children are human beings from the get-go and that you could trust your instincts you know and you could listen to a child and they would tell you valuable information even if they weren't using words and the elimination communication thing was similar because um the basis is that a baby doesn't want to wee all over you and so actually if you watch them you can see that they give you cues and then you can sort of develop that communication between you.

And we weren't militant about it because that seemed like a lot of hard work, but it really sort of dialed us in a bit more that, oh, actually our children are cleverer than we thought they were.

They're more capable than we thought they were.

and so then you fast forward a little bit of time then my eldest was about 10 months old and we'd been hanging around in attachment parenting circles and we were really lucky that we were in southwest London at the time and there was quite an active group with lots of kids who are a little bit older a little bit younger and one day we were at this meetup and they started talking about home education and I'm like well she's only 10 months old but I'll listen to this and I'm like oh, really, I hadn't considered that that was even a thing that you could do.

But did you find yourself falling into those places? Did you have all of those kind of schooled thoughts as well to kind of de-school yourself of when they were younger? Yeah.