Denys Kaye admits he had an exceptional upbringing. "We were brought up in the 1950s and the 1960s with organic food and wholemeal bread. It was quite radical at that time, homeopathic medicine and everything," he says.
Based in Courtown, Co Wexford, he and his Belgian wife Kathya try to raise their four children Sarah (18), Charlotte (16), Thorgal (13) and Peregrine (9) in a similar fashion. "It's a bit difficult down here, but we have some friends in Wicklow who grow organic vegetables and as often as possible we get their vegetables. Now with stores like Tesco, and there's a few healthfood shops in Gorey, we are managing. It's hard sometimes." Part of healthy eating involves trying not to eat too much out-of-season or imported food. This may seem simple, but Denys says it is difficult to get decent fruit anywhere. Even apples are imported, he says, and they are terrible.
Encouraging a healthy lifestyle does not mean it is rigidly enforced, so sometimes the Kaye family even get treated to a McDonald's. "The age the children are at," explains Denys, "they are getting to the stage `Eugh, I don't like vegetables, I don't like this and I don't like that.' They want chips and pizzas and things so we try to strike a balance as much as we can. "It's no good being fanatical, because the children just go totally against it. You also have to live in the real world as well, the ordinary world. They meet their friends and we don't want them running off to friends' houses at any excuse to have chips and pizzas, because that's also unhealthy, I think."
Denys has noticed that his two daughters were much more accepting than their younger brothers about what food their parents gave them: "Certainly our youngest is far more vocal about his criticism. It's really hard to get him to eat vegetables and things."
Although Denys and Kathya encourage their children to eat healthily, they do give them a bit of leeway, says Denys: "Health is not just about what we eat, it is about what we think and what we do; how we bring up our children. We don't want to be totally rigid and totally fanatical, I think that's unhealthy as well because it creates a lot of resistance."
An integral part of the Kaye family life is the Steiner Waldorf method of education, through which Denys was educated. Despite moving from England to Scotland to Co Clare to the US to Dublin and then to Co Wexford, Denys says he and Kathya have tried to keep their children in Steiner schools as far as possible.
Kathya, a trained Steiner Waldorf teacher, was given the opportunity to take over the playgroup in a Co Wexford community called the Camphill Community.
She has now formed it into a full kindergarten with 20 children on ground donated to the school near Ballymoney. Denys finds that in Steiner Waldorf schools "they really make the effort to bring out the best in each individual. They don't try and make a model for society or make children fit society. They try and make the children into health human beings really. That's their ideal."
The move to Courtown from Dublin was in part because they thought Dublin was harming the children, the boys especially, says Denys. They had nowhere to ride their bikes, rollerskate or go on their skateboards. "They ended up sitting in front of the television all the time and I realised their health, their physical and their mental health, was deteriorating. They couldn't play any more, they just got really bored all the time and they lost their imagination and their creative ability to play."
In addition to his day job as a builder, Denys, with Kathya, trains people in healing; a combination of hands-on spiritual healing and an American system called transpersonal counselling, which is a combination of traditional counselling and healing.
This combination of healthy eating, a healthy education and healing is the result of the Kayes's holistic attitude. "We try to work out of a holistic attitude; that life is a whole and everything you do affects the paths and that the paths should work, as much as possible, harmoniously."
