Teen gets slice of rural Cork life in TV series 'Raised by The Village'

CAN a teenager with an all-consuming passion for gaming find the balance his life needs on a farm in County Cork?

We will get to find out as Raised By The Village returns for a second series on RTÉ1 tomorrow at 6.30pm.

Over four episodes, urban families who need major help with a teenager who is veering off-the-rails take drastic steps to get it - by re-locating them to a rural community.

The series is based on the old adage “It takes a village to raise a child” - but is that still true in the modern, disconnected world?

In the first episode of Raised By The Village, we meet 15-year-old obsessive gamer Karl, who is at constant loggerheads with his parents at his home on the Lakeside Estate in Mullingar.

Karl has totally retreated from his family into his all-consuming gamer world, but now he is sent to the Hynes family, who run a dairy farm in Aherla in County Cork

Can the family help him to reconnect through digitally disconnecting? And can the experience of real-life farming help the teenager to rebalance his life?

Also in the episode, 13-year-old Dion, of Clondalkin, says goodbye to her life of bed-rot duvet days and all night Tik Tok benders for a phone-free week of hard-graft on the O’Neill family’s Organic Plant and Poultry farm, outside the village of Knightstown on Valentia Island in County Kerry.

The series calls to mind past generations, when there was no internet, no parenting manuals and no behavioural psychologists. When parents relied on the village and their collective wisdom to figure out their parenting problems.

The families of the teenagers agree to move them to the heart of the countryside, allowing them to be raised by a village.

But will the teens learn to behave better when they’re part of a tight-knit community where the local adults keep a very close eye on what they get up to?

The series sees eight urban teenagers from Dublin, Limerick and Mullingar embraced by remotely located rural families in counties Kerry, Roscommon, Cavan and Cork.

The teenagers live with local families and take part in local activities, experiencing an early-to-rise, wi-fi free outdoor lifestyle that’s a million miles away from their worlds of Playstation, TikTok, fast food, late nights and all-day lie-ins.

Raised By The Village is vital viewing for every Irish parent who’s ever wondered if raising their kids in a slower-paced, more community-centred environment might make a real difference?