Episode 2: Getting Outside With Confidence With Your Young Children

Why the outdoors is good for building resilience and inner strength in our kiddos, and how you, even if you're not an outdoorsy person, can get outside and off screens with your kids in easy bite size ways. 

Transcript

[00:02] Ellen: Welcome to empowered families where we nurture curiosity and inspire growth. I'm Ellen, your host parent to two kids and a former homeschool and outdoor science educator who is passionate about nurturing, creativity, enrichment, and a love for lifelong learning. I'm thrilled to embark on this journey with you. In each episode, we'll explore practical tips and strategies to help families nurture curiosity and support learning at home and on the go. Whether you are a homeschooling parent, a caregiver, or someone looking to foster a love of learning after school, on weekends, or during breaks, this podcast is for you. I hope you're inspired here to connect and explore with your family indoors and out. Thank you for being here. 

Hello. We're back with episode two, getting outside with confidence with your young children. We talked a little bit last week on the opportunity as you're kind of thinking about how to create more structured spaces in your house for how to bring nature inside and how to also bring the family outside together a little bit more often. But I didn't dive into it too deeply. So I wanted to take some time today to talk about, especially breaking down the anxiety of getting outside with your kids kids. Because I know particularly with young children, it can be overwhelming. Especially if they're maybe still potty training, or they're still in diapers, or if they need a snack, or they need a nap, or you've got multiple kids and they've got like different schedules, or if you're just not that much of an outdoorsy person and getting outside more often with your kids feels more daunting than inviting. I want to talk about it, and I want to start a little bit today with an article to just talk a little bit about. I'm not going to read the whole thing to you or anything but this. And you can google it if you want. It's an article on the benefits of being outdoors or an outdoor play in young children, and it's hosted on the National association for the Education of Young Children's website, the NaEYc. So this is an organization that does like credentialing for preschools and daycare centers with like best practices. The preschool that my kids went to was credentialed by them. They are excellent. I have really enjoyed their approach to developmentally appropriate strategies, really placed, centered, play based education in the early years that has been extremely beneficial for my kids now who are older and in elementary school. But the benefits of outdoor play, and I'm not going to read all of them out. You can look this up, but I want to share just a few key points that I really liked. One of them is it invites new context for learning. So if you're a young toddler or preschooler is mostly inside, maybe at preschool during the day or at home during the day, and you're not able to get outside as much as you can, they're really limited in the environment that the built environment that they're able to engage in and taking opportunities to get outside. And I'm not saying, like, plan an entire afternoon where you live outdoors, although I will tell you that I did do that. But I'm not suggesting you go full out. I was always a little more on the extreme. Again, I have a background as an environmental educator. I used to be an outdoor guide. The outdoors is very important to me and my family, so we do it a lot. And there are definitely homeschool families that go into this level of like, let's just do our learning completely in a forest school environment, which I love, but did not go that far. But if you're the other end of that spectrum, where creature comforts and the indoors and temperature control and all of those pieces are really important to you, I want to just encourage you to think about how you can do half hour, maybe an hour, one, two, three days a week with your kid, because it invites new contexts for learning. There's so much to see that you don't have to prep or plan for when you're outside. There's always trees that are changing or growing leaves or shedding leaves or turning colors. There's always different rock shapes and bark and textures. And pretty much everything outside, I believe, can turn into an art or a craft project or opportunity to make observations that are fun and a few suggestions that are really low bar. So let's just set it low bar, right? Like, it's a nice day. You could do it. There's an hour. You've got, like the kids. You have a small backpack. You just pack it up with whatever you need. Perhaps you need a couple snacks, a change of diapers, a jacket layer in case it gets cool, or a change of clothes. I've had to have a change of clothes. Come with me. For a kid, you know, they fall in the mud or the water, whatever we need to change. But there can. It's simple to print prep that bag, although I know it takes time. And then you. You get out and perhaps you just bring a container, like a tupperware or a small basket, and you set out on a collection expedition. And maybe the goal is to go collect supplies, you can come home and, like, create a piece of art. Maybe you have some paints at home for your, you know, your area that you've set up for imaginative and expansive play. And you can go out and pick up some rocks or chunks of bark that have fallen on the ground or maybe even some tree branches or anything that you find walking around your local neighborhood park. Or if you live near sort of like a wooded area, or if you're not in the forest, like I am in the Pacific Northwest, in a desert area, you find something that's interesting that you can bring home. And then maybe the child is able to bring the outdoors in. Right. And then paints it or makes a painting out of it or does leaf prints. There's just so much that can happen that requires very little planning and direction. Right. It's very open ended. There's no, like, book that says, here's step one, two, three, and four. It's more good for both the child and for you to go, what could I do with this? And how could it be? And then let it begin. So it invites new contexts for learning because they'll engage with different materials and at the time that you're out with your kid. Right. I would encourage all parents I know it's tempting to also give ourselves a little break in distraction and then scroll our phones or check messages or whatever we've likely also been doing indoors. I would really encourage you to tuck the phone into the backpack or into your pocket so that you can also talk about the observations of what you're seeing, what's around us. How does the air feel? Oh, did you notice the sound of that bird? Just to help them enliven and become aware of their own sensory experiences. Right. As especially the really young, I'm thinking, like, 18 months, 24 months, they're just getting out into the world and learning about it, and so you're exposing them to more. It's just so beautiful. All right, so that's the first thing that the article talks about, is an inviting new context for learning, one that might be really nice. It's a very simple point that I like to embrace, is that it can promote better sleep. Right. A study of two to five year olds showed that children who play outdoors sleep better at night. This may be due to the physical activity, the stress reduction and exposure to natural light that come with playing outdoors. So I will leave that at that. Sleep is so valuable. It's also good for us as adults. It's actually turning into fall here right now as the time of this recording and it's rainy and gray outside at, you know, 09:53 a.m. as I record this, I do get affected by the lack of sunlight. So I have my happy light that's up on my computer monitor while I do this so I can get the hit of light that my eyes need so that I sleep well at night. So getting outside is the best fix for that. Even in wintry Pacific Northwest weather, it's better than being inside. And then the last point that I want to highlight here is that it can give children a chance to take appropriate risks. And I want to talk about this because there's a lot of different philosophies around how to protect and keep our kids safe, particularly as they're super young and they're growing. Right? Like, I wouldn't put my kid on a small strider bike onto dirt bike jumps where big kids are doing, you know, mountain bike kind of stuff that is not appropriately safe for my perspective. But I do want to let them climb and build and play and take small tumbles and falls and learn how their body moves in space. I don't want to protect them 100% all the time. I mean, let me back that up. I do want to protect them 100% all the time, but I know that if I do interfere consistently, that they will not learn to do it themselves and I will interact corrupt their ability to learn resilience. And so the best example I can think of this is the contrast between. And I did learn this through the support I got at our really great preschool and then just kind of incorporating it at home and seeing how beneficial it was. But at my kids preschool, when they were young, they had an outdoor area with all these, you know, milk crates and planks of wood, and they let them build towers, and they would stack the crates up, maybe three, four, even five high, sometimes, like two columns, and then the kids would put a plank of wood across the two of it, and then they would build stair steps out of the crates, and they would work together to climb up and, like, walk across this little bridge they made and then jump down. And I remembered, and these are three year olds and four year olds. I have pictures of this. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, they really, really embrace risk taking here, right? And teachers were always nearby. And if teachers noticed that something was really poorly constructed, right, like it was too wobbly or the crates weren't nested into one another for stability, they would stop it. But they didn't stop the kids from exploring. They even. They had a tiny playhouse that was probably the same height I am, right? Like, five and a half feet tall at the roof tip. So it's like a cute little, you know, playhouse. But I remember the kids building a bridge to the top of the roof of it, and I would come to pick up my son, and he would be sitting on top, top of the playhouse because he built a bridge to get on top of it. And the teachers were like, yeah, he's really good at figuring out how to get to the top of things. And he never fell off the roof. There was always an adult nearby watching and supervising to make sure he wasn't exceeding his risk tolerance. But they'd let him explore, and I took that to heart deeply when they came home and when we homeschooled. And when my daughter, who's three years younger, was growing up, I didn't limit a, the amount of what they could explore with their own bodies. And so I really want to encourage you to think about this and then take them outside, and you don't have to be as bold or as brave, but if there's a tree to climb, my rule has been, you are allowed to climb as high as you can get on your own and still get down. And if you're limited and stuck and I can't, we've never actually got. Gotten to a point where they went so high that I couldn't help them get down. But that's the limitation, because sometimes they'd be saying, like, help, can you help boost me up one more branch so I can just get a little higher? And I would say, no. If you're not able to get to that level on your own yet, that's your natural boundary. And so I take that approach with, like, a lot of different things, but it's giving them a chance to develop their body awareness, their sensory awareness, their gross motor skills, and then decision making for themselves. Not to hear from a parent. Yes, no, yes, no. What am I allowed to do? What am I capable of? What am I not capable of? Because my mom or my dad said so, or my caregiver said so, I'm going to decide what I'm capable of based on my own experience. And your kids will run the gamut in terms of risk taking behavior, right. You may have a child who does not have fear. My daughter was like this with water. She did not have fear. She believed she could swim. She would throw herself into the pool, and I would be horrified because she had not had enough lessons yet to know how to get from a to b super safely in a short amount of time. So she. We got her in lessons and she learned to swim like a fish very quickly. But it was like, wow, that's a lot of bravery here. And I had to watch her very closely for a couple years because we had access to a pool during the pandemic. And I feel like she half taught herself how to swim. But getting lessons made me feel a lot better. But it teaches them what they're able to do. And I was going to say, you might have to rein it in if you have a super risk taking kid. But for the kids that are somewhere in the middle, right, like a little bit tentative, maybe a little bit reticent, but then they want to try, but then. And they start to do something. Those are the kids you don't want to limit. They're the ones who are testing their bounds and they're building their inner confidence and they're building their experience. So let them climb up a stack of rocks that are not going to tumble down. Right? Like, a lot of play nature play areas have, like, big boulder towers and tree stump obstacle courses. At least they have those where we live. So it might be different. You might actually have to go engage with, like, the real nature somewhere and kind of just make assessments of what's safe and not safe, but don't over protect, is what I'm saying. It's okay for them to take small tumbles. It's okay for them to have small falls. And of course, if they're really young and they're little, maybe they're just learning to build their muscles and they're going to climb up on top of one rock. And the contrast I had mentioned earlier that I sort of wandered away from was I remembered watching another daycare provider. This was an in home daycare. And they had these very simple rocks. They were just landscaping boulders. They were about 2ft high and they weren't stacked on anything. They were just there on the ground, not going to move. Huge, big granite boulders. And I remembered the provider looking at the child who had climbed up to the top of one of them and then was jumping down and the predator going, no, you're gonna fall. Get off of that right now. And this was the three or four year old child who was entirely capable of being 2ft off the ground on a rock where if she fell, she was gonna fall into the grass. And I remember being very surprised at how limiting the approach was at this place. It didn't say anything. This person, you know, I was not in charge of anything here, but I was very surprised, and it made me very grateful for the approach that we had taken because my kids have such confidence. Climbing, jumping, biking, running. They're so capable. And I have always felt it was because we didn't. We didn't have limitations around what they were able to do outside of actual, you know, you will fall and injure yourself profoundly if this happens and accidents happen. I mean, my son did actually fall on something that was just 2ft off the ground when he was eight or nine years old. And it was because it was getting towards dark and he just misplaced his foot. Right. But he got a big gash on his slip and it was messy and all that, so it was kind of scary. But, you know, those. Those are like, life has risk, but for, like, the 99% of the occasions, they will survive. I didn't mean to screw you with that one. I'm just saying, like, the minor, minor thing is what actually hurt him and not the major stuff where he is very conscious and careful. Right. Yeah. So those are a few points that came out of the article and I expanded on it. Right. Gives children a chance to take appropriate risks, promotes better sleep, and invites new for learning. The outdoors are just so rich and you won't get these experiences staying inside. And so I'm going to shift now, because what I want to talk a little bit more about with you is how it would be if you are overcoming a bit of outdoor anxiety. If you feel like a not outdoorsy person or parent, you're uncomfortable with outdoor activities. I just want to encourage you to try. The most that you need, especially if you live in an area like we do, is you just need weather appropriate gear. It can get real hot in the summer. It can get very rainy in the winter. You may live in a cold climate where it actually snows if you have the right gear and you have some extra layers in a backpack and you have warm snacks in winter. So, like, I like to fill up a thermos of hot cocoa when I take the kids outside. They always love that. Or just little bits and just treats, right? They need snacks, they need to eat. They need some fruit, they need some nuts, they need some granola bars. Like all the things that you would bring on any normal outing to go out to a restaurant anyway, pack that along with some of the weather gear into a backpack and just grab. Grab a basket and go outside. Grab that tupperware container, do some collection activities and just really embrace that. You could also be outside exploring and also building some of your own confidence, you know, don't go drive out to a wilderness area and throw yourself into the deep end. Maybe drive to, like, the neighborhood. I'm sure you know how to get to the neighborhood park and that maybe not be one of the places that creates some of that anxiety. But if it is, like, engage over there, go to the park or drive to a more local kind of more natural area. We have regional parks and where we live, and there's more kind of natural places with small, like one, two, or three mile hiking trails. Those are great places, kind of off the beaten path to take kids outside of, like, a paved environment where they can walk on the dirt and explore the textures and the sounds and the smells. And you can have that benefit of getting your sort of, like, dose of nature for the day to help improve your stress and to give you a break and embrace, like, quality connection time with your kids. Right. The stresses that I really notice when I'm out in the world in these places with families, with kids, is when the parent doesn't want to be there or the parent is distracted and looking at their phone and their kids have kind of lost an anchor point and are sort of whiling into different directions if the parent. And it requires presence. But if you want to be building this connection, if you want to be building a culture of calm with your family, removing the distractions or the devices. Right. And having those opportunities to spend some quality time for half an hour. Right. I'm talking small baby steps. Half an hour outside can really be a way to build new bonds and connections and strengthen that sense of cohesion and ease some fears in the family. If a kid encounters something you're not sure about, there's a way. There's, like two ways to react. Oh, my God, don't go over there. Which inspires fear and makes them feel like that's not the right thing to do and they've made a mistake. Or you can go, oh, that's really interesting. Would you mind taking us back up just a little bit and let's go see what that is. Right. If it's a steep slope, I mean, if it's really steep and you think they're going to fall, you could definitely shout and have them come back. But I often find that approaching with calmness and curiosity to something I'm not sure about and then inviting a conversation around it is a really beneficial approach to building confidence together and to increasing the capacity for connection in other areas of life that you will then encounter as well. It's a great place, and I'll say this as a final point. I think the outdoor. So I do a lot of solo parenting. I did a lot of solo. My husband does, too, because I think I explained this in the last episode, but when we were homeschooling and even now, to some extent, even though our kids are in school now, our schedules were pretty flip floppy, where if I was working, I would work three days during the week or two days during the week and one day on the weekend. It depended on what my husband's schedule was. I would be working on the days that he was home so that I could, you know, still have income and a practice and take meetings and run sessions and do the things that I did. And he would be home, so he would be solo parenting when I was working, and then vice versa when he was at the hospital. I would be solo parenting. I have always said the outdoors is my favorite, favorite co parent if I don't have my husband to support me. The outdoors are so wonderful because they. It is so big, and there's always, like, a couple places that you can go that you get used to that, you know, the kids are going to really integrate and enjoy again. We're lucky there are giant trees where we live. And this park that was a mile from my house was huge, but had giant sequoia trees. And the branches would just go all the way out. And if you went under the tree, it was almost like entering another room. And they would clamber the branches, they would take the fallen ones and make bird nests, and then. But they would be so big so that they could be inside of them and I could just relax with my kids sometimes getting to a point where I was just reading a book and they would be playing in the trees for, like, hours, or they'd be building a little hut, or I would be engaged with them and helping them to build a structure and then making, like, a perfect little place that they could lay down inside of it. And it's not on a screen, and we're connecting and we're exploring together, and it's so possible. And I did it a lot, all the time during the pandemic, during homeschooling. Like, we were always doing something like this, this. But if you introduce a half hour of this twice a week, it will make a difference and it'll create new connections that you haven't had before. So I just really want to encourage you to find all the small ways you can to, you know, turn off the screens inside and get outside together as a family in small ways that are not overwhelming. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to subscribe rate review share this podcast if you liked it and do send or post in the comments on Instagram if you found this helpful, or if you have strategies that you like to share with other people who are also learning to get outside more often, and if you have more questions like what else could we focus on to talk about this? How can this podcast help you learn more about what you need to make your family calm and connected? Okay, thank you so much and we will be back soon. Thank you for joining me on this episode of empowered families where we nurture curiosity and inspire growth. I hope you found inspiration and practical strategies to support your family's learning journey. Remember, whether at home, home on the go or out in nature, every moment is an opportunity to nurture curiosity and foster growth together. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and share it with others who may benefit. I can't wait to continue this adventure with you. So let's keep exploring, connecting, and learning as families. Until next time.