Sara Cole and Bill Barnes are raising their two children the so-called natural way.

They eat fresh organic, whole foods. They use naturopathic physicians. They turn first to herbs to treat health problems. At night, they all sleep in one room.

Their lifestyle is commonly called "natural family living." It can touch every aspect of life, not only health care and diet, but activities and play, choices in schooling and styles of nurturing.

"There are lots of us out there," says Cole, 35, a stay-at-home mom who finds support and advice from like-minded parents across the country on the Internet several times a day.

The Puget Sound area is a hotbed for the natural family movement: Politically tolerant. Environmentally aware. Abundant with organic, locally grown food. Home to Bastyr University, an accredited school that graduates dozens of naturopathic physicians every year.

There's no one right way to carry out natural family living. But these are common tenets: Promote the well-being and healing of the whole child through natural means and trust your instincts on what's right, even if it means disregarding tradition or published experts.

JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES Bill Barnes and Sara Cole play with their children Rosie, 18 months, and Theo, 4, on the couple's king-size bed in the bedroom that the family shares.

"It is a bunch of parents doing what people used to do several generations ago," Cole says. "A movement away from everybody else being experts on our children."

The movement, though, is not united. Families can disagree on critical issues such as whether to have a hospital birth or to breast-feed on demand or to let a child "cry it out" or to get their children vaccinated.

Some may be vegans, others meat eaters. Some choose public schools. Others home-school or pick specialty private schools.

Yet despite such disagreement, the movement is on the upswing.

"The natural family movement is much bigger than the dominant culture realizes," says Dr. Fernando Vega, a family-practice physician for more than 20 years in Seattle. Vega practices with a range of medical doctors, naturopathic physicians, chiropractors and other alternative providers at the Seattle Healing Arts Center.

The practitioners share ideas on treatment and refer patients to each other. With that kind of collaboration "you can't help but look at other possibilities," says Vega, who has taken alternative approaches such as examining the role of diet in fatigue, eczema and irritable bowel syndrome.

Peggy O'Mara, editor of Mothering magazine, is one of the gurus of natural family living.

"We kind of started it," says O'Mara, whose 80,000-circulation publication began in 1976. Many followers find each other on Mothering's online discussion board.

Natural family living was once a hippie movement, O'Mara says. But now, "It's a huge trend that's going to change our culture."

Other leaders of the movement are Drs. William Sears and Jay Gordon, who promote a facet of natural family living called "attachment parenting."

This child-rearing philosophy endorses being with the child as much as possible: that could be breast-feeding on demand until the child is ready to be weaned, carrying the baby much of the day, often in a body sling, and, during the early years, sleeping together as a family.

JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sara Cole and Bill Barnes sit at the table with their children. The family eats organic foods.

Gaining mainstream notice

The fervor for natural living has historically been ignored by mainstream medicine, but no more.

Parents' insistence on a natural approach to their children's care has forced the medical community to set aside skeptical, sometimes outright dismissive attitudes.

A few years ago at Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center, a family asked if an acupuncturist could treat their newborn.

Medical director Dr. Richard Molteni had never heard of such a thing.

But patients kept making such requests to soothe children during treatment or to try to save them when traditional medicine failed.

Molteni and his colleagues finally had an epiphany: "We were the group who were off the mark. At the very least, we needed to learn about those therapies our patients were using."

Children's now offers an array of complementary and alternative treatments — herbal and homeopathic remedies, massage and acupuncture — along with traditional therapy.

An acupuncturist, hired a year ago, has been so effective at relieving kids' migraine headaches and stomach and bone pain that a second one soon will be hired.

Children's also collaborates on research with Bastyr to determine which natural therapies work. Most natural remedies have yet to undergo the rigorous testing of mainstream medicine. Nor do they fall under the same requirements for labeling, says Molteni.

Children's is raising money to start a center for complementary and alternative medicine in pediatrics, following the lead of a few other groups nationwide.

The UW School of Medicine for the first time includes complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in its required curriculum.

"I think many of us in medicine have felt very strongly there's a holistic approach to caring for patients that we needed to get back to," says Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, who practices in Adolescent Medicine at Children's.

"You don't just ask about their illness. You ask about their life."

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Breuner, who helps teach CAM classes at UW, sees compelling evidence for using certain natural techniques over medication.

Massage, for example, decreases how long babies spend in the neonatal intensive-care unit. Biofeedback helps reduce stress and headaches. Acupuncture has reduced the amount of narcotics for pain. Yoga can relieve anxiety about mealtime for patients with eating disorders, she says.

As for parents who practice natural living with their children, Breuner sees little harm.

"The more time and effort you spend on your kid the better," she says.

If they're cooking healthful foods and avoiding the fast-food lane, how can that hurt, she asks. If they've learned to give a massage to their child at bedtime, that's "holistic practice at its finest."

But parents need to be careful, Breuner adds. Some natural remedies may be harmful. She suggests taking questions to a medical provider.

Natural family living can be overdone, says another doctor.

"Like so many other things, pushed to an extreme, it becomes a little faulty," says Dr. Robert Hauck, a retired pediatrician who practiced for more than 30 years, primarily at Group Health.

Sharing the family bed is "no big deal," Hauck says. "Most of the world co-sleeps outside of America." But he thinks parents can spend too much time with their children.

"I lament the loss our children have of unstructured, unsupervised play," he says.

2 families' choices

Amy and Clark Williams-Derry of Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood put careful consideration into their lifestyle.

Amy, 34, delivered their first baby in the hospital, but without any medications and with a doula, or birth coach. Studies show, she says, that the presence of a doula reduces the perception of pain, the time in labor and the incidence of complications.

The experience went so well, she chose to deliver their second child at home last year with a midwife.

Afterward, "We just curled up in the bed and fell asleep," remembers Clark, 37.

Now, the lawyer mom has returned to work. But she's still breastfeeding their 7-month-old girl, who goes to a day-care center near Amy's job. She breastfed the older girl for 21 months.

"Breast-feeding is very important in terms of nutrition and in terms of kids' relationship with their parents," she says. As much as possible, the family eats organic, or food that, in general, is grown and processed without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, growth hormones, genetic altering or irradiation.

"We're willing to pay a little more not to have pesticides in our bodies and our kids' bodies," Amy says.

One of their 3-year-old daughter's favorite foods is tofu (along with pizza). Amy makes baby food on the weekend, which includes grinding and cooking organic brown rice.

The couple does not use naturopathic care.

"But we both have an inclination that less medical intervention is better," says Clark.

They used cloth diapers with Madeline until age 2 and with the baby until 6 months. But now they're using disposables. Clark figures it's a toss-up as to which is worse, creating a lot of solid waste or using a lot of hot water to wash cloth diapers.

In Seattle's Montlake neighborhood, Sara Cole and Bill Barnes practice natural family living to the hilt.

They've come to this lifestyle through exhaustive research and trusting their instincts, and readily admit it's a luxury.

College-educated Cole is a stay-at-home mom. Barnes, 38, is the creator of an online cartoon strip. He also works at Microsoft and earns enough to support the family comfortably.

So the refrigerator is stocked with more-expensive organic milk, and fresh vegetables and fruit are delivered every week.

On the top shelf sits a medical kit containing vials of 29 homeopathic remedies, such as Nux Vomica for the stomach flu, German chamomile for eczema and Blessed Thistle to aid lactation.

"Tribes all over the world have been using herbs for thousands of years," Cole says.

Barnes is more skeptical of natural therapies, but believes they're a good place to start and much gentler than drugs, which can be hard on the body. He also believes in the lessons of evolution, which support the effectiveness of certain child-rearing practices over generations.

The couple subscribe to "attachment parenting." Cole nursed her son, Theo, to a little beyond age 3, in large part because he had severe allergies, and breast milk is supposed to help children on that score. Now she's nursing their adopted daughter Rosie, 18 months, with the aid of medication.

The whole family sleeps in one bedroom, Rosie curled up next to Cole and Barnes. At age 4, Theo's now in his own bed nearby.

As for Dad and Mom's sex life: It's terribly uncreative to think the only place you can have sex is in bed at night, says Cole.

Theo is near the age when he'll get his own bedroom. That's sad, says Barnes.

"It's awfully nice to wake up in the middle of the night and hear everybody breathing."

Marsha King: 206-464-2232 or mking@seattletimes.com