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

biophilia hypothesis suggests that humans

I’m reminded of a conversation that I had on an airplane one time when I was flying solo with my two older kids, in Katie’s absence. As I struggled alone with snacks and diapers and keeping everyone buckled up, an elderly man behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Enjoy this. Right now, at their age, it’s all physical. Later, parenting beco

Where’s your closest available magic? Once you’ve committed to taking a look at nature on eye level, where does your glance fall first? You have to start somewhere, and really, it can be anywhere. It may take a while to reach that true eye-level gaze, and even require daily practice, so make it easy on yourself. Wander over to the nearest waterway

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

Like it or not, nature is out there. It cannot be ignored. You can live in fear of it, which is no fun and does little good. Or you can respect and admire it, which opens you up to glimpses of magic.

Fear prevents engagement; lack of engagement builds into a habit of avoidance; and pretty soon it’s just your family stuck inside four walls, where perhaps the biggest obstacle of all—technology—abounds.

our kids need to understand that they are not above, outside, or apart from their physical environment—they are completely intertwined with it, and it with them.

I recognize that butchering deer and feeding fat to magpies might seem a bit extreme, especially for parents who are struggling just to get their kids out of the house for an hour-long trip to the park. But my point is to accentuate the types of interactions that I try to foster between my kids and nature. Beyond the imperative of getting my kids o

Like many parents, Katie and I have had to move our kids all around the country as we’ve pursued various work opportunities. At this point, our eleven-year-old, James, has lived in five different homes across three different states. It might sound strange, but that little shack stands in his mind as a point of security. He first visited the shack w