Stars: ★★★★★ (Study This Book)

I must admit that I approached this book with a great degree of arrogance. I saw the title and immediately thought “Oh, I’m already really good at this. We do the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge and are the opposite of risk averse. I’ll read this book so that I can recommend it to others.” Thankfully, I was thoroughly humbled through the read and realized that even though our family is generally headed in the right direction, I still have much to learn.

Premise

As the title indicates, each chapter of the book walks through a general category ways for parents to help their children interact with nature more often, even daily if possible. It begins with a series of prompts to help parents engage the variety of ways they begin helping their children understand the outdoors better then continues with four chapters detailing food procurement strategies that get everyone outside.

Loved

1. The Simple Suggestions
   The book offers practical suggestions for families that live in urban areas. The chapters on camping and foraging were particularly compelling to me because both are relatively easy even from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area. The author walks through the progression, providing tips and tricks along the way. He recommends starting with car camping, which is the only kind that my family has done yet. This kind of camping comes with luxuries still available, like air mattresses and anything else that fits in the trunk. He then walks through graduating to hiking to camp, which seems adventurous even for us. So that will be one of our longer term goals.
   
   The foraging chapter was fascinating to me as he discussed the variety of ways to find edible plants. This was especially attractive because, as the author details, there are no barriers to entry. You can do a little research about edible plants near you, take a walk, and try to find them. No special equipment or large investments necessary.
   

2. The Harder Suggestions
   The further one reads into the book the more challenging it gets. I make sure that my children spend a lot of time outside, but activities like fishing and hunting are far beyond my current proficiency. I have an amazing gift in my husband, who has spent much of his life doing both of these things. We already have everything we need to go fishing, and I have full confidence in Afa’s ability to field dress a caribou, but these can seem worlds away from our life today. I look forward to figuring out how we can incorporate them more into our regular routines.
   

3. The Connections Built with Family
   I love when parents are honest about their shortcomings in their journeys toward connecting with their children. The author’s story about their first camping trip as a family of five was entertaining and enlightening, mostly because he describes how badly the whole thing was, at least from a parent’s perspective. He then explains how differently his children saw the entire experience. He is also honest about his irritations and frustrations during a host of activities, including his first hunting trip with his oldest son. These anecdotes are helpful in setting reasonable expectations. Things are going to go wrong, and I am going to get annoyed: and it is worth it all anyway.
   
   The author describes the different ways that all these outdoor activities build connections between parents and children even (or especially) when the original plan falls through. To me, this seems like one of the most important reasons to implement some of these suggestions.

Didn’t Love

I didn’t love the sense that I am so far behind. The author does a great job of outlining the slow steps each family can take into these new-to-us worlds, but I definitely finished the book feeling a little overwhelmed that we have so far to go as a family. I easily could have gone down the path of “we are so far removed from any of this that it isn’t even worth the effort to start.” Even after several days of ruminating the ways that we can start, the feeling hasn’t dissipated. Radically engaging my children with nature is a much larger pursuit than I ever imagined.

Lessons Learned

• Foraging is possible. After reading the book, I looked up recipes about how to use dandelions. My kids and I went out that day and made some dandelion cookies – again going with the theme of taking baby steps into these new activities.
• Gardening is a worthy endeavor. My mom helped me start a garden when we first moved into our house, but I never made the time to care for it and keep it up. This book reminded me that this is worth my time and effort, even when both are in short supply. I can train the kids to help me do the weeding, the caring, and the harvesting, which will in turn lead them to eating a wider variety of foods. Especially when food prices are increasing at such an alarming rate, a time investment in growing our food should be considered an even better use of the limited time we have.
• I need to schedule fishing and camping trips. My husband is good at both of these activities. He grew up doing all of them, but they are not going to happen if I do not take the time to research locations and put it on our calendar.