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

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

This idea that the world is perpetually going to hell seems hard-wired into our psyche. There’s a thought, often misattributed to Socrates, that Garson O’Toole (aka the Quote Investigator) traced to the 1907 dissertation of an otherwise unknown Cambridge student named Kenneth John Friedman. It laments the intergenerational discord in ancient Greece

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,

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

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

The pandemic rubbed our noses in that reality by taking away so much that we’d taken for granted. Of course, impermanence has always been the norm. Friends move away. Family members die. Social media communities dissolve. We leave our hometowns for school or better jobs. As our communities repeatedly splinter, we’re forced to engage in a lifelong r

Until the moment I became a father, I never felt truly and absolutely responsible for anyone. Becoming a parent is an epiphany: You’re up! As part of my responsibilities to my children, I knew that I was wholly responsible for teaching them everything I knew about being a human who feels at home in nature.

Part of our job, then, as parents, is to teach our kids to deal with the impermanence of these connections. When Katie and I got our kids their first pet, a brilliantly purple betta fish, we viewed it as being a lesson in death and loss (bettas only live a few years) as much as a lesson in caretaking.

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