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No, this was an adventure, designed and executed by my children, after weeks of long, hot nights spent reading The Famous Five. But tonight, our garden was not our garden, my son informed me. The walls of our garden were the walls of a derelict castle, and we were camping out, ready to launch an attack on the smugglers inside, who were using the deserted ruin to signal to ships by moonlight.

Good stories jump off the page and inveigle their way into our imagination. Good stories issue an invitation upon which we can act. Good stories can work magic - if we let them.

However, if our hearts are not open to accepting this invitation, we will never get to walk through the gate into this world of adventure and imagination, and will never get to enjoy its fruits. There are so many things that threaten our ability to do this.

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It’s easy to complain that the world “nowadays” is busier than ever, but I imagine that every generation has always thought thus. There is, and has always been, and will always be, something else which could be done instead of sitting down with a good book - particularly a good book that is read aloud together as a family. And I am sure that that thing, whatever it may be, might seem more “productive”, more “important” or more “urgent”.

But I ask you, I urge you, to make time to read something out loud, together, that sparks a fire inside of you and your children, that makes you want to stay up late reading, just to get through one more chapter. Making childhood just that little bit more magical might be the most productive, important and urgent thing you do as a parent.

So if stories sow the seeds of adventure, we need to make sure that the ground is fertile enough to let them grow. As a family, we make a determined effort not to over schedule our diaries. Life is busy enough as it is with work, lessons, events, and appointments. And it is so tempting to think that we are doing the best for our children by making sure that their weekends and evenings are packed full of exciting activities and important extra-curricular clubs. If you want permission to just ‘be’, take this as your sign.

Spontaneous adventures, the kind that make for those lasting childhood memories we all want to give our children, don’t happen when there is no time and no place for them to grow. It was precisely because we had an empty evening that we were able to hunker down in the tent watching for smugglers. And as my back pressed into the crisp, warm grass and the end of summer sun found its way through the folds of the tent’s canvas, I thought how many other memories had been made in this walled garden - how many children in the history of our 500 year old house in the English countryside had begged their mothers to go to bed late just this once so that they could live out their imaginative adventures.

One of our sons commented once that he really liked the mother in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. I asked him why. “Because she joins in their games” he replied. It surprised me - partly because that he knew that the children’s world was make-believe, and partly because he appreciated that a grown up ‘went along with it’ in order to enhance her children’s own enjoyment. From that day on, I determined to be more like Mrs. Walker.

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And why wouldn’t I get involved in their games and adventures? I could stand at the kitchen door and call them in for supper, because it’s supper time and that’s what we should do, or my husband and I can crawl under the canvas, sit where our children tell us they need lookouts, and share their magic. I have to spend so much of my time telling our children what not to do, - “Don’t throw a stone, it might break the window.” “Don’t hit your brother.” “Don’t ruin his game.” - that it is liberating just sometimes to say “yes, let’s do it.”

When we educate our children, we have been conditioned to think about utility and productivity and we often forget that we are raising humans - mind, body and soul. We surely should strive to create the conditions for our children to flourish in all aspects of their life - to pursue creativity, to get lost in their imagination, and to form strong relationships with their family - these things will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.

And let me tell you, I am not advocating for any of this because I don’t believe in academic rigour or because I think we should just let children learn whatever they want. I am reminding myself, as much as anyone else, that when we nurture an atmosphere that feeds the whole person, we tend to end up with exactly the thing we were worried that this approach would overlook. Our children want to read because they love stories, they want to find out about science because they love investigating the unknown, and they want to learn history so that they can discover hidden worlds.

That evening cost us nothing - we just had to create the conditions for it to happen. Organically, spontaneously, messily. But our children woke up the next morning still talking about it and making plans for our next quest. We just had to be willing to jump into an adventure when some muddy, excited faces appeared at the kitchen door asking us to eat outside.

So, on that ordinary Monday night, we went to bed as explorers, as adventurers and as heroes, not merely as individuals who hadn’t eaten at the kitchen table. Enid Blyton knew a thing or two when she wrote “adventures always come to the adventurous.” Your family’s adventures are lying in wait for you…be sure to let them in.

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Just last week, another mother said to me “oh I don’t know how you do it - I’d lose my mind being with my children all the time, I need to stimulate my brain.” What she was really saying was that mothers who stay at home with their children - particularly those who choose to home educate - must have completely sacrificed having any form of intellectual life. Her comment was not unique - there is a widespread cultural assumption that intellectual life belongs to the period before children, or that it resumes once children are no longer hampering its development.

Indeed, my life B.C. (before children), did look very different from my life now. Physical, repetitive tasks dominate many of my waking hours - and hours I had perhaps hoped would not be waking hours. Feeding, dressing, clearing up, and reading the same books time and time again sometimes do seem a world away from the boardroom, looking at graphs mapping headcount to revenue, and from the seminar room, debating some finer detail of history with a world expert. I did enjoy those chapters of my life - both my career and my time at Cambridge. But I propose that intellectual life does not have to be put into storage whilst children are underfoot; indeed, it can find a flavour all of its own and can be nourished and enjoyed alongside parenthood.

When we stop expecting intellectual life to look like work, we free ourselves from the expectations of productivity and output, which I have found particularly liberating. At university, I had to churn out several 3,000 word essays weekly, which brought its own challenge and sense of achievement, but perhaps nurtured the - undoubtedly useful - skills of skim reading and summarisation more than a truly intellectual spirit. Freed from these shackles, I have found it easier, and no less rewarding, to become actively intellectually engaged. I listen to historical and political podcasts whilst washing up, or read a couple of pages of a well argued book before falling asleep, and I keep a journal, in which I chew over questions for weeks at a time. I have made peace with the fact that I might think about an idea for months, without producing anything concrete to present as a conclusion to those thoughts. I have come to believe that fragmentation - of time, of concentration - does not necessarily equate to intellectual impoverishment; it simply requires a different relationship with ideas.

Uncoupling intellectual thought from economic or academic output allows me to actively choose and focus my time and attention on a small number of intellectual preoccupations that interest me, and pertain to my life, as it is, here and now. Indeed, I would argue that children do not prevent intellectual thought; they give us an enormous amount to think about. For example, I’ve spent the last several years of motherhood immersing myself in better understanding arguments about, and research into, childhood, child development, classical education, and the history of our 500 year home. I live alongside these questions, rather than study them systematically. I think about them when I am walking with my children or cooking supper. And this lived experience raises more questions - across the fields of psychology, philosophy, history, language, politics, economics, ethics, anthropology and more.

And as my children grow and learn, I learn from them how to nurture a growing intellect. Perhaps the biggest lesson has been to remind myself of the value and joy of re-reading. I see their eyes light up when we read a favourite book for the tenth - or fiftieth - time. I hear the excitement of our eldest son as he spots something on the second reading of a chapter book that he had missed the first time round. In a fast paced career and competitive academic environment, I had lost sight of this simple pleasure. Speed and efficiency were in, wonder and delight pushed out. But more than that, I realise now that as a society, we have confused consuming information quickly with thinking deeply. The two are not the same.

I also have begun to hold myself to the standards I set for my children. Like an ever-growing number of parents, I gasp in horror if you suggest I should let my children aimlessly scroll through social media or sit for hours in front of the television. Why then should I live by different principles? I would rather read a handful of good books slowly and attentively than consume a constant diet of reality TV and lifestyle reels.

Not only have I learnt from my children. I learn with them. Far from being a hindrance to my intellectual life, they are part of it. The British educator, Charlotte Mason (1842-1923) stated that “education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Home educating (or homeschooling) my children has inspired me to ensure that our home and our life is a nourishing environment for them to grow intellectually, and as I share that atmosphere with them, I benefit from it too. Every week, we have a great work of art that we look at together, discuss, and explore. We listen to classical music together, read mythology, explore the natural world around us, and spend long days asking and answering countless questions. Many conversations with my four year old are far more intellectually stimulating than the banal chit chat of adult drinks parties. So instead of thinking “how can I protect my intellectual life from my children?” I have begun to ask “how can I build an intellectual atmosphere in which both my children and I can thrive?”

This is not to say that I never think about topics that do not revolve around my children. I write, I pursue my own interests, and I read articles in which my children have absolutely no interest. I also try to keep learning new things - most recently gardening and watercolour painting - both for my own enjoyment and because I believe it is healthy for my children to see curiosity and lifelong learning as a lived practice.

So to come back to the comment I mentioned above, I do not feel as if my brain stopped working the moment I had children. I am a different person from the one I was before having children. My questions have changed, my interests have developed, and yes, the time I have available has reduced. But these constraints are the very parameters which have reshaped my identity. I have not become intellectually passive and I am no less ‘me’. Indeed, I now engage with questions that really matter and have direct impact on real lives; lives that my husband and I have brought into existence. The stakes for thinking these things through are higher than ever.

An intellectual life is not the same thing as a career or productivity. It is an habit of attention, an atmosphere of curiosity, and a desire to always question and seek answers. Perhaps motherhood itself has brought me the most intellectually demanding chapter of my life to date.

I am new to Substack and write this essay as my first foray into sharing some thoughts this way - do subscribe if you’d like to hear more ideas like this.

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