How Free They Truly Are

It has been four hours since my husband walked out the door with our three children, called a cab, and sent them off to a shopping centre in Sapporo. Alone. Just the three of them.

I am sitting in the quiet apartment they left behind, and I am thinking about freedom — what it actually looks like, how it is built, how long it takes, and how quietly astonishing it is when you finally see it walking out the door in the bodies of your own children.

When we decided to homeschool — years ago now, when we were younger and less certain and had very little idea how the shape of our life would unfold — I could not have told you what learning would actually look like. I had my own years of conventional schooling as the only available reference point, and they were fine, and they taught me things, and they also taught me a particular and very limited idea of what education meant: classrooms, curricula, measurable outcomes, the steady accumulation of knowledge that could be tested and graded and filed away.

Unschooling arrived and asked me to leave most of that behind. Which I did, slowly and not without resistance, because the structures we internalise earliest are the hardest to question. Then came worldschooling — learning through movement and encounter and the daily confrontation with how differently the world can be organised — and then, eventually, even that label fell away. What remained was simpler and harder to name: just living, intentionally, and trusting that a life lived with curiosity and openness is itself an education.

I believe that now more fully than I have ever believed anything I was taught in a classroom.

When the children were small, our version of time alone — my husband and I — was leaving them in whatever accommodation we were staying in with a phone number to call if they needed us, and walking around the block. Both of us come from small, safe countries, and even then we were stretching toward something that felt at the edge of what was reasonable. Some of the places we have travelled since have not been on anyone’s list of the world’s safest destinations. We worked with what we had, held our breath occasionally, and waited for our children to grow into the independence we believed was possible for them.

It came. Not all at once but steadily, the way real things develop — through accumulation, through small acts repeated until they become capability, through the particular education that only comes from encountering the world as it actually is rather than as we have prepared them to expect it.

This year has shown us, more clearly than any previous year, what they are capable of.

In Taiwan they cycled alone through city streets, navigated night markets, found their way to shopping centres and back without us. In South Korea they figured out the metro — a system in a language none of them speak — and used it confidently, understanding that navigation is a skill that transfers across contexts once you have built it enough times. In Japan, which is perhaps the most navigable country in the world for independent travellers, they have moved through the city with a fluency that I watch with something between pride and a kind of wonder at how quickly children become competent when you give them the opportunity to be.

Two months ago our oldest took herself to lunch. Alone. Found a restaurant, sat down, ordered, ate, paid, came home. The following week she took her siblings — just the three of them, no adults, a restaurant lunch in a foreign city as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. Which, for them, it is becoming.

They are walking back to the apartment right now from their shopping centre expedition. I have received photographs: them at a table, food in front of them, faces happy and entirely unbothered. They navigate with maps and they are, crucially, not afraid to ask for help when they need it — a skill that sounds small and is enormous, the difference between someone who gets lost and stays lost and someone who gets lost and finds their way back.

The story that stays with me most is Anton in Busan.

He was walking from our accommodation to my husband’s co-working space — a route he had done before, crossings and all. Somewhere along the way he went a little further than he meant to and found himself in a part of the neighbourhood he didn’t recognise. He stopped. He assessed the situation. And then he did what I spent most of my own childhood and a significant portion of my adult life being unable to do: he asked strangers for help.

He explained, in English, to people passing on the street, that he was a little lost and that his father was working nearby and could they help him find the right direction. They did. He found his way back. He arrived at the co-working space not distressed but — and this is the part that matters — empowered. The experience had not frightened him. It had confirmed something he now knew about himself: that he could handle the unexpected, that the world would generally help him if he asked, that being temporarily lost was not a catastrophe but a problem with a solution.

I think about that walk often. About what it gave him that I could not have given him by keeping him close.

Our girls are taking their first solo flight in less than a month.

When I tell people this they respond in the way people sometimes respond to the choices we have made in raising our children — with a mixture of admiration and something that might be mild alarm. I understand the alarm. I felt versions of it myself, for years, before I understood that the alarm was mine to manage and not theirs to be constrained by.

Because here is the thing I keep returning to: for me, these ordinary acts of independence — going alone to a coffee shop, walking through an unfamiliar city, sitting at a restaurant table without the social buffer of another person — took most of my adult life to become comfortable with. I arrived at them slowly, through years of inner work and deliberate stretching beyond what felt safe, and I am still, on certain days, still arriving.

My children are not waiting for adulthood to build this.

They are building it now, in the daily accumulation of small freedoms — each one a small cup of confidence filled, set aside, available to draw from the next time something asks something of them. The cycle at the Taiwanese night market. The metro in Seoul. The lunch alone in Kyoto. The walk in Busan that became unexpectedly longer than planned and turned into a lesson in resourcefulness rather than a reason for panic.

This is the education that has no curriculum and cannot be measured. This is what I could not have imagined, back in those early days of deciding to do this differently, when I was unlearning my own schooling and had no idea what would grow in its place.

I am not suggesting this is the only way. I am not suggesting it is the right way for every family, every child, every set of circumstances.

I am saying that it is ours. And that watching it unfold — watching three small humans become three increasingly capable, increasingly confident, increasingly free people — is one of the great privileges and surprises of my life.

The apartment is quiet around me. In a little while I will hear the door, and three voices, and the particular energy that re-enters a space when children come home from somewhere they went alone.

They will tell me about their lunch.

They will show me the photographs I have already seen.

And I will listen as if I am hearing it for the first time.

Because in a way I always am — always receiving, with fresh astonishment, the people they are becoming.