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

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.

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

When you allow yourself to become enthusiastic about the natural world around you, your enthusiasm will be infectious to your children. It won’t all be a picnic. Your kids may roll their eyes at you, or worse. The whining and fighting during that two-hour car ride to the lake may make you want to bag the whole trip. No matter what, though, stick wi

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

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.

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,

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