A contribution to the WWOOF newsletter

WWOOFing with a 7 year old in France

My husband and I and our just-turned 7 year old son WWOOFed for two months in France this fall, thanks to 3 wonderful, family-friendly hosts. While all was not perfect at all times, we are looking forward to continuing WWOOFing next spring and summer.

The task of locating family-friendly hosts was made much simpler by the option to sort for this attribute in the WWOOF host list. We then emailed prospective hosts, telling them about our family. Several were very interested, and several others very politely let us know that 3 people at once was too much. We searched the listings carefully, knowing that accommodation in a tent wouldn’t do, and that we preferred to be not too far from town, since we wouldn’t have a car. We know that most WWOOFers are younger than we are, but hopefully our maturity was a bonus for our hosts, in that we turned up when we were supposed to, were too tired at night to get up to no good, and already had some experience with carpentry, home renovation projects, and garden maintenance.

WWOOFing as a family comes with built-in challenges, of course. A child can’t be unattended on a farm, or in a stranger’s home. An unpredictable, spoiled, or disobedient child of any age is a very bad candidate for WWOOFing with his or her parents, and I would expect parents to be honest when they assess themselves for WWOOFing suitability, and to discuss the options with their prospective hosts. I have heard of arrangements where one parent worked while the other parented a very young child, in exchange for only half-board from the hosts, and this seemed to work just fine for both.

Ask yourself: will my child eat uncomplainingly what is put in front of him? Will my child sleep in an unfamiliar bed? Will my child understand that he is supposed to entertain himself in one corner of the garden with some sticks and rocks (and not wander off) while I weed for 4 hours between breakfast and lunch? Does my child know how to pet kitties gently and let an unfamiliar dog smell him first? Does my child listen when I say you’re not allowed to chase the geese, and to stay clear of the billy goat when we’re bringing the herd in and out of the barn each day?

The WWOOF host, if they indicate that they’re willing to accept children, must also be aware that having a WWOOFing family may mean that sometimes a parent will have to interrupt his or her work to attend to a child’s needs for a snack or to help redirect the child’s play… or that a child won’t be able to stay up until 9 pm for dinner…

At our first host (a large house, not a farm), we helped in the garden and in the house. I did a lot of cooking for the household and assisted with applesauce making and laundry. My husband also did yardwork and some handyman-type tasks. This is not so different than what we do at home, and the huge garden and lawn, all walled, made a perfect place for my son to explore and play. The host even had some toys, since her grandchildren visit at times. Our host and the rest of the household were always kind to our son, and indulged him with their attention and encouraged his artwork. Some nights he managed to stay up until dinnertime, other times I fed him early and put him to bed before getting dinner for the rest of us. He learned a few French words, and a lot about French food and people.

Our second host was an extended family (with lots of friends) with a goat farm in the Auvergne. We helped feed and milk goats, make cheese, harvest vegetables, bake bread, do housework and miscellaneous tasks around the farm such as gathering kindling and weeding the herb garden, and during all of it our hosts were wonderfully welcoming to our son, even when he was suffering badly from homesickness, being more than usually shy and requiring our attention throughout the day fairly often, and needing to get to bed long before dinnertime. Having raised 3 children themselves made our hosts familiar with working around children’s needs, and we tried our best to repay their flexibility by working as hard as we could on whatever was on the schedule that day, and doing more things than we had technically been assigned. A few times I watched our hosts’ grandson, and a few times they watched our son while we ran errands or went on an outing – an unexpected treat. Our son learned to help herd the goats, got to try milking them and making the cheese, was allowed a small piece of bread dough to knead and shape himself, and then had the joy of seeing his small creation come out of the oven. While sometimes he was a royal pain, at other times he made himself useful by helping scrub the floors of the bakery. There were: eggs to gather, a creek to visit, huge pastures to roam, cats and dogs to befriend, wonderful meals to eat, and a big pile of sand in which to dig. We were all very sad to leave, after a month sharing the lives of people to whom we’d become very attached, and we were told we’d be welcome back.

Our third host had two young boys themselves, so another one in the mix hardly mattered. The hours on this market farm in Nice were more “scheduled” than at our previous host, due to having a vegetable boxes to prepare for their customers a couple times a week plus the Saturday market to prepare for. But again, our hosts were accustomed to children, and the farm was child-friendly, with lots of pathways and terraces to explore, and a big tree to climb, with a rope swing. All our son had to do was help keep an eye on the chickens – more than once he warned me when they’d strayed out of their pen – but he also decided he wanted to learn to weed. This made me nervous, since our hosts’ livelihood depended on us not damaging his onions and fennel and lettuces… but with close attention even a 7 year old can be of use in the field, at least until he’s had enough and is ready to go off and play. The days we harvested olives at a distant location from the house, we prepared a bag with activities and snacks, and brought along a pillow and blanket for him to spread out in the back of the truck when he needed a place to rest. Our son loves olive oil, so we helped him survive the long days of watching us harvest by telling him about the fresh oil we’d get to eat when it was done.

I could write a lot more about what WWOOFing has taught me, but I’ll stick to the family theme; when we told our friends and family that we were taking a year off to go to Europe for WWOOFing and housesitting, many of them asked about school for our son, not quite realizing how important it is for us as parents that our son learn about where our food comes from, how hard farmers work, the importance of organic methods of growing food, and how rich a life can be had by raising your own vegetables, dairy, and meat. In this, WWOOFing is far more educational than regular school. I feel fortunate that in just two months my child learned a few words of a foreign language, discovered a new landscape, learned about caring for animals and being safe on the farm, learned to appreciate many different foods he’d never eaten before, and is now showing an interest in other cultures. Perhaps even more importantly, he’s talking about how he wants to live someday: in a small cabin, in the country, with a few animals and a garden… I feel sure than when we continue WWOOFing next spring our great experiences will continue.