Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

Two hours a week of time spent in nature, in whatever increments are available, has been shown to radically improve people’s outlook, with adult participants in a large-scale study in England self-reporting improvements in both physical health and emotional well-being. Other studies have shown immune-boosting effects, improved cognitive and motor s

biophilia hypothesis suggests that humans

I do still suffer guilt for not having taken greater precautions to protect my son from Lyme disease. We were lax about insect repellent that day and I hadn’t tucked his pants legs into his socks to prevent ticks from crawling out of the grass and up his legs. I didn’t check him thoroughly when we got home. That goes for myself, too. In many ways,

What birds visit your home habitat? Buy a bird identification book and install a birding app on your phone. (The Sibley Guide to Birds is a phenomenal book; the region-specific Eastern and Western North America books are even better. For apps, try eBird, which was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)

Considering all this—our desire for connections, the impermanence of those connections, and our impulse to prepare our kids for an unpredictable and unwieldy life—it feels imperative that we foster strong bonds between our kids and nature. As creatures of the earth, we are inherently and intrinsically connected to the natural world. This world is d

Salmon are an anadromous fish, meaning that they live in the sea but migrate into rivers to spawn. While many people might regard salmon as a saltwater species, because that’s where they spend the bulk of their lives, Danny argues that it’s better to think of them as a freshwater fish. Their lives begin in freshwater and, since they die after spawn

But if their only exposure to nature is in places where protective barriers are necessary, how can we expect our kids to feel connected to the natural world? If we want our kids to feel a true and pragmatic sense of stewardship for the environment, we need to let them relate to it as a peer, as something that they’re entwined with through symbiotic

Observing nature requires quiet contemplation. The practice of studying nature is calming.

In his 1993 memoir The Thunder Tree, ecologist Robert Pyle coined the term “extinction of experience,” and since then many researchers have jumped into the fray. There are bodies of work on the demonstrable decline of kids’ contact with nature, as well as the negative impacts of this trend—most alarmingly captured in Richard Louv’s 2005 Last Child

The pandemic has reinforced our love of nature, and it has revealed our need for the knowledge, skill set, and equipment necessary to experience it in a safe and sustainable way. Another thing reinforced by the pandemic is that we place an enormous value on feeling connected. This was hardly a surprise.