BOREDOM HAS ITS benefits. So does solitude, that lost art in the age of wall-to-wall media. To occasionally be alone—not lonely, but alone—is an important part of parenting and of marriage. One time my wife, Kathy, rented a room at the beach, and spent a weekend with no electronic interruptions, no demands for time or attention, just the sound of the waves and gulls. She came home looking even younger than she usually does.
Several years ago, facing a writing deadline, I drove to the Cuyamaca Mountains. My friends Jim and Anne Hubbell had invited me to housesit a magical little hobbit house on their property there, and I planned to spend a whole week there, alone.
I had done this once before, on another deadline. I had spent a week in a bunkhouse made from an abandoned railroad car in the hills of Mesa Grande, just west of the Cuyamacas. There, I had worked during the heat of the day and then wandered at dusk through mountain lion country. I had always felt watched, and had carried a dried yucca walking stick. Each evening, when the stars began to appear, I would stop at an open watering tank to wash up. I’d float for a while, looking at the stars. Then I’d head back to the boxcar.
This time, the accommodations were better, a charming little house with windows of stained glass—I even had electricity, and a comfortable bed to sleep in. In the gray dawn on my first morning there, I opened my eyes to see a coyote standing next to a window. It stared at me.
I got up, made coffee, and went to work.
During these days of solitude, moving clouds and lifting wind would begin to bring forth voices: of a father and a mother, now gone, and of my wife and children. On the fourth day, Kathy and the boys, Jason and Matthew, arrived in the flesh for a visit. In solitude, even for a few days, a person changes subtly; the customary phrases and patterns seem odd, somehow. So our first minutes together felt a little awkward. But this is why taking a retreat, as a husband or wife or parent, is a good thing. Familiar patterns can shield us from true familiarity.
At the end of their visit, Kathy took me aside and said that Jason had commitments at home, but Matthew would like to stay with me for my remaining three days. He was terribly bored at home and needed a break from his brother (and his brother needed a break from him). “Of course,” I said, “as long as he understands that I need to work, and he’ll have to entertain himself.”
At eleven, Matthew was in the between time, in the gap between childhood and adolescence. This is a particularly magical stage in a boy’s life, a time when it’s good to take a break from routine, to spend some time in silence.
My wife and older son drove off, and Matthew and I went through the house to look for books for him to read. There was no TV and no radio. Not a single electronic game, either. He picked out a J. R. R. Tolkien novel and another book about a boy who adopts a wolf cub. He sat on an old couch behind me and, respecting my need for quiet, began to read.
Three hours later I realized he had not said a word. I turned around. He was asleep, holding Tolkien like a stuffed bear.
That evening, we walked up the hill and swam together in a round, tiled pool under a quarter moon, and later, we listened to the wind come up and the coyotes jabber in fits and starts. For the next three days, we talked only occasionally, usually in the pool or at dinner. He was a voluble boy, so I was surprised that silence came so easily to him.
The absence of electronics (except for my laptop computer) helped. So did the wildness of the land around us. So did the fact that his father was there, but quieter than usual. I asked him to take charge of feeding the cats and dog. He gave names to the cats, who followed him around the property, scrambling up the oaks to show off for him. In the evenings we swam or walked, and he took his camera, and snuck up on the deer that wandered through an orchard at dusk.
Matthew and I moved into a new rhythm. I got to know him better during those days, and perhaps he came to know me better, not because we talked, but because we didn’t. As a parent, you capture such quiet moments when you can, in the loudness of time.
Just as the re-naturing of everyday life can be an important component of strengthening physical, psychological, and intellectual fitness, a sense of purpose in a bioregion can also strengthen relationships between parents, children, and grandparents; and between extended families, couples without children, and just plain friends.
When life opens new doors for Ron Swaisgood, they usually lead him outside. Swaisgood is director of Applied Animal Ecology for the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research. He and his wife, Janice, shared their first date on the Dyar Springs and Juaquapin Loop, a trail east of the city that climbs gently through the Cuyamaca Mountains. They stopped at a rocky outcropping, and Ron set out strawberries, cheese, and sparkling grape juice. It was then that Janice first realized it was a date. “It’s where I should have kissed her, had I not been so nervous,” says Ron. “We spent the day together and got to know each other well, far beyond what would have ever been possible on a more traditional date.”
A month later, Janice and Ron went on their first trip together. They traveled to Michoacán, Mexico, to witness the spectacle of the monarch butterflies overwintering in the mountains. Millions of monarchs congregated on the pines, so dense that you could not even see the green needles. The ground was covered by “a sad carpet of dead monarchs,” he recalls. “And the air was so filled with butterflies that if we paused for even a moment, the monarchs would begin to land on us. My new girlfriend, gazing deep into my eyes, covered with butterflies—that’s an image to remember.” A year and a half later, Ron took Janice back to the rocky outcropping in the Cuyamacas, where he had failed to kiss her. “I summoned up my courage and was going to propose to her at the outcropping, but it was summer and hot, and there was an unusual outbreak of biting flies on the trail. We turned back before we got to the rock, bug-bitten, hot, and sweaty. I didn’t want my proposal met with a slap across my face—meant to kill a fly.” They never lost their love for that place, though. Years later, they named their firstborn after the trail: Owen Dyar Swaisgood.
Since then, Ron tells me, he has discovered a whole new world. “The past six years since arriving at fatherhood have provided more vivid and meaningful experiences in nature than my first forty years without children,” he says. “My children have reconnected me to nature on a more profound level than ever before. They have opened my eyes—the eyes of a trained animal ecologist!—to nature as I’ve never seen it before, or can no longer remember from my own childhood.”
Such a statement may seem surprising, coming from a man with one of the best pedigrees in the nature business. Quiet-spoken, at once easygoing and intense, he describes some of his past adventures: how, in Africa, he almost “became part of the food chain for the first time” when a rhino charged him and stopped just a few feet away, and when a buffalo chased him into the trees; how in a Peruvian rain forest, he sat spellbound as animals passed by “like animate waves,” including white-lipped peccaries “that snort and root and clack their tusks,” and brown capuchin monkeys, “leaping from one palm frond to another.” But now, he says, “I spend a lot more time looking down at the creepy crawlies. I move a lot slower through nature and, thus, spend more time in nature.”
Nature relaxes and opens the channels of communication, he explains. “Nature can be coexperienced by parent and child in ways that Chuck E. Cheese’s just can’t.”
Families can be bound, over generations, by a shared love of baseball, by a family business, by other shared interests—but nature has its own power. What better way to escape the constant, interrupting beeping of modern life and actually have a chance to spend concentrated time with one another than a walk in the woods?
“Research has not looked specifically at a link between outdoor experience and quality of parent-child attachment, and certainly parents can be sensitive and responsive to their babies and young children indoors or out, but, in many ways, the natural world seems to invite and facilitate parent-child connection and sensitive interactions,” according to Martha Farrell Erickson, a developmental psychologist, founding director of the University of Minnesota’s Children, Youth, and Family Consortium, and expert on attachment theory in child psychology. In a 2009 paper for the Children and Nature Network, she wrote, “Building gradually and slowly over the first year of a child’s life, parent-infant attachment is a child’s first close relationship and, to a large extent, a model for all relationships that follow.”1
Research into the importance of the quality of the attachment between a child and primary caretaker, and how that relates to a person’s development throughout life, has been accumulating since the 1960s. While child care providers and other adults can offer children a sense of security, most of the responsibility for building attachment falls to the primary caregiver—the parent, grandparent, or guardian. Approximately 70 percent of babies in the United States develop “secure” attachments but about 30 percent experience “insecure” or “anxious” attachments.2 According to developmental psychologists, positive early attachment is linked to whether children (and these children later, as adults) perceive the world as a safe place, learn to trust and affect the people around them, have the power to ask for what they need, and feel confident and enthusiastic.
Unplugging from electronics and taking a baby “into the backyard, a park, or a nature trail,” Erickson writes, can eliminate distractions “and create an opportunity for what is called ‘affective sharing’—oohing and aahing together over the sun shining through the leaves of a big tree, feeling the rough bark and the soft moss on the tree’s trunk, listening to the sounds of birds or squirrels, feeling a soft spring rain or a light winter snowfall on your face.”
Time in nature helps both the child and the parent by building their shared sense of attachment and by reducing stress. “By following a prescription for more nature experience together, families will discover a win/win situation in which both children and adults benefit as individuals, even as they are strengthening those important family bonds that all children (and adults) need,” she says. “Because most of us as adults still have much to learn about nature, these outdoor experiences can be times to learn with our children and from our children. The reciprocity and mutual respect such interactions engender are important elements of close parent-child relationships as children move toward adulthood.” As children grow older, “the possibilities to share both adventures and quiet times in the outdoors multiply rapidly.”
At the very least, such times offer family members the gift of shared memories. Michael Eaton, a father in Springfield, Missouri, recalls such a moment: “One time, after a Christmas dinner in the country with the in-laws, at their farm, my son and I went for a walk in the falling snow.” In the woods, they lay on their backs, “listened to the falling snow, and fell asleep for probably five minutes.” Seven years later he still recounts that time. “Best five minutes I ever spent with him.”
For a parent, particularly if one of the many adults who missed out on nature experiences when they were growing up, taking the first step outdoors may feel awkward. Fortunately, there are lots of places to go for assistance or advice, including guidebooks, Web sites, and outdoors-oriented organizations. Your family can go for a walk when the moon is full, tell stories about past adventures outdoors, spot birds or other wildlife on country drives, learn to track together. And, you even can hike, fish, tent camp, and go on digital wildlife photo expeditions together. You can make the Green Hour (National Wildlife Federation’s recommended goal of one hour outside a day) a family tradition.
Working together in nature works, too. Families that garden together can help feed themselves, and perhaps share with neighbors or donate to a food bank. In urban neighborhoods, they can create a garden on a landing, deck, terrace, or flat roof. Families can also pick berries and other fruit or vegetables on farms or orchards open to the public. (Though the family farm all but disappeared in recent decades, organic gardening and the Slow Food movement hold the promise of an eventual resurgence in family farming and ranching. Linking to that movement is another route to bonding through nature.)
Louise Chawla, one of the leading experts on nature’s impact on human development, whom we met earlier, describes the need for both “special places and special people,” referring to Rachel Carson’s thinking on how to help young people develop a positive relationship with nature. Grandparents can be a great resource. They often have more free time, or at least more flexible schedules, than parents do. Most grandparents can remember when playing outside in nature was considered normal and expected of children. They’ll want to pass along that tradition—and will be enriched in the process. Martha Erickson agrees, from a professional and personal perspective. “I have found over the years that even very short ‘nature breaks’ allow me to calm down and focus when I’m having a particularly challenging day,” she writes. “I carry a couple of collapsible canvas chairs in the back of my car so, in the midst of a busy day, I can seek out a grassy spot (or even a snowy spot during our cold winters) and sit in my chair for a few minutes to breathe deeply and be soothed by my natural surroundings. The reason I have ‘a couple of’ those chairs is that my oldest grandchild has taken up the idea of nature breaks, too, and likes to join me when we’re out and about together.”
Wileta Burch, who lives in northern California and is active in the nature-connection group Hooked on Nature, created a more elaborate grandparenting nature ritual. For five years, she and her husband spent one week a year with their children and grandchildren in a rented cabin at Bear Valley in California. Their three grandkids spent much of their time playing at the nearby lake; the fathers took the children rock climbing, lizard hunting, hiking, fishing. Each year, when it was time to leave for home, she took the three grandkids into the woods “to visit the grandfather and grandmother redwood trees that I had scouted. We sat beneath these magnificent trees in a ceremony of thanksgiving for such beautiful times together,” she recalls. “The children brought with them stones, leaves, or anything they found that was special to them. They participated in the ceremony with great seriousness. I know that the times we had in this place of natural beauty and our ceremonial expression of gratitude have made a lasting impression on them.”
Burch adds this personal note, which lends extra dimension to the idea of family bonding through nature. Once, while sitting quietly in her garden, Burch experienced “a distinct feeling of being with family”—the fruit trees, the flowers, bushes, and grass were all parts of an extended family “whose energies were available if I would open to receive their supportive presence.” Her husband has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “He will often sit outside to receive the sun’s warm rays and the healing gifts from his garden ‘family.’ He doesn’t expect to be healed of Parkinson’s, but he does calmly accept this to be but another stage of his life’s journey.”
Families can also bond with nature by banding together with other families. In 2008, I received an e-mail from Chip Donahue, a father of three and a second-grade teacher in Roanoke, Virginia. After reading Last Child in the Woods, Chip and his wife, Ashley, contacted me and told me how they had begun to spend most weekends on family hikes and other outdoor adventures. One day, their five-year-old son asked, “Why are we the only family having this much fun?”
Over Christmas break, the Donahues sat down and mapped out a monthly adventure schedule for the coming year, and they decided to invite their neighbors to join the first adventure. To his surprise, five families that he had never met showed up for the first event. The weather was so cold that day that the gathered parents decided to do an indoor craft project and read nature stories to the kids. Once again, a youngster—a four-year-old girl—had a better idea. She walked up to Chip and said, “Hey, mister, when are we going outside?” The families bundled up and went on a hike. Now they go outside, rain or shine. “After word of mouth and two local newspaper articles, our membership has grown to over six hundred families,” Donahue reports.
Families on the list contact each other by e-mail, Web site, or phone to set up what are essentially family outdoor playdates. Some adventures are devoted to just having fun outside, others to volunteering for nature restoration projects. Chip and Ashley formalized their club, calling it Kids in the Valley, Adventuring! (KIVA). “We send out a monthly e-mail newsletter that lists recommendations for places for families to play and books to check out,” he says. The nature outings and newsletter are free. For safety and family bonding, he emphasizes one absolute requirement: parents or guardians must stay with their children at all times. “We say, ‘Stay and make a memory with your child.’ “There are many other reasons—that work for adults as well as kids—for participating in a family nature club:
• The club approach can break down key barriers, including fear, since there is perceived safety in numbers.
• The clubs can be created in any neighborhood, whether inner city, suburban, or rural; they build community and a sense of place.
• The clubs can be joined or created by any kind of family.
• There is the motivation factor—it’s much more likely that you and your family are going to show up at a park on a Saturday morning if you know there’s another family waiting for you.
• Shared knowledge: Many parents want to give their kids the gifts of nature, but they don’t feel they know enough about nature.
• And, importantly, there is no need to wait for funding. Families can do this themselves and do it now.
The Roanoke venture, which received national attention on NBC’s Today show, isn’t unique. Nearly one hundred such clubs now exist in the United States. One, in Rhode Island, has created a smartphone app to make it easier for families to connect. Parent volunteers from the Orange County, New York, Audubon Society, concerned about how empty local trails had become, initiated a free family nature-study club called Nature Strollers. Lorin Keel, a participant in Nature Strollers, describes the experience, one that can be contagious: “When I am showing my children the footprints in the snow and asking them who they belong to, I am teaching them awareness… . Traversing streams takes courage and good planning. Offering seeds to the birds when everything is covered in ice is an act of kindness. Observing a wasp fill underground cells with food for its young exemplifies devotion. Digging the deepest hole requires strategy and strength … knowing how to start fires without matches is security, as is being able to safely identify wild edibles.”
Debra Scott, a longtime member of a parent-and-child nature club called the Active Kids Club, in Toronto, Canada, was once skeptical that nature time was all that valuable. “When I first learned about the importance of being outdoors my first reaction was to dismiss the idea. If it wasn’t in all my ‘good parenting’ books and research, it couldn’t possibly be that important.” She joined Active Kids Club with her daughter, who had befriended the club founder’s child, and Scott wanted to encourage the relationship. “So we went outdoors. It wasn’t bad for us, so why not? We went outside in all kinds of weather once a week. And I noticed on those days my daughter slept better and had a better appetite. I noticed I slept better as well and was in a better mood.” Especially in the winter months, stressful things seemed less important, to both Scott and her daughter, after being outside. “Being outside is now a priority for us. My daughter has gained confidence in herself and her abilities. I only wish we had started earlier.”
Most organizers of family nature clubs emphasize that the primary focus should be on independent play—on experience, not on information. But doesn’t the very concept of a “club” work against independent play? Chip and Ashley Donahue don’t think so. When they first started taking their kids out for nature adventures—before they started the club—the kids would often whine and cling to them. But once other families began to join them, the children disengaged from the adults, quit whining, and started having serious fun on their own.
Bethe Almeras, another parent who has balanced the need to protect with her children’s need for independent play, considers herself a “hummingbird parent” rather than a more controlling “helicopter parent.” “I tend to stay physically distant to let them explore and problem solve, but zoom in at moments when safety is an issue (which isn’t very often).”
In San Diego, Janice and Ron Swaisgood, inspired by the family nature club trend, created their own club: Family Adventures in Nature (FAN). Since then, FAN has spawned subclubs throughout the city. Ron describes a scene when several families first met at a eucalyptus-filled canyon near their suburban homes. Within minutes of leaving their cars, the families left the trail. “We were by the creek, visiting the chaos created by a recent storm—downed trees, upturned roots (creating wonderful little muddy caves underneath), and piles of debris left behind by the rushing waters,” Ron recalls. The Swaisgoods’ oldest son “took great pains to ensure that there was no patch of clothing clinging to him that wasn’t caked in mud.” The kids built dams and used sticks to excavate dirt. “What struck me was the sense of community, communication, and common purpose that quickly emerged. Parents stepped in to help or coexperience nature with all the kids, with little regard to whether they shared DNA with the child.”
One of the most attractive features of nature, he adds, “is the social glue it provides”—the way it brings adults together in a way that may not often happen at a typical gathering.
During the family nature club outings, he is impressed by the quality of adult conversation. In other settings, when families get together socially, “either parents talk grown-ups’ talk the whole time and virtually ignore the kids, or they just focus on the kids and don’t get to have some good adult conversation.” Adults converse differently during the family nature club outings. “What struck me was how the conversation, standing under the eucalyptus, moved easily back and forth between kid-focused enjoyment of their experience and ‘intelligent’ adult conversation. I have found time and time again that I get to know people better in the woods than at a cocktail party.”
Children are not required in order to experience the relationship-bonding power of nature. Like the Swaisgoods, Jonathan Stahl and Amanda Tyson have strengthened their relationship with each other, with friends, and with their community—one step at a time.
Before meeting Amanda, Jonathan was already acquainted with the bonding properties of nature. “As a nervous first-year student from New Jersey who had never been backpacking, I took my first steps with a group of strangers who had several things in common,” says Stahl. “Mainly, we all wanted to make new friends before starting college and we all generally liked being outdoors. At the time, I didn’t realize the profound and lasting impact that the University of Vermont’s Wilderness TREK program would have on me, not to mention its influence on my career path.”
Precollege outdoor orientation programs are intended to ease the transition from high school to college for new students, Stahl explains. “About ten of us, including our two student leaders, hiked, camped, and worked as a team for five days while exploring the northernmost section of Vermont’s Long Trail.” Later, at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, he coordinated the school’s SUMMIT wilderness orientation program, which fashioned outdoor adventures to help students acquire “the skills they’d need to successfully navigate their way through the wilderness and a large public university.”
Along the way, he met his fiancée, Amanda. As “our engagement adventure, or ‘wilderness orientation to marriage,’” as Jonathan puts it, he and Amanda decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. While on that trail, they took time to reflect on what they had learned—particularly about their relationship—and posted their thoughts on their travel blog. Among other lessons, they learned that meticulously thought-out plans will constantly change. They learned “to tune in to our bodies and know when to say when (water, rest, food, pain, etc).” They learned to “share … everything!” They learned that “many foods that are meant to be eaten hot are actually not that bad cold … with Amanda’s exception being freeze-dried eggs.” Amanda learned to keep track of her possessions and not “lose them in the moonshadow.” And while they searched for a new place to lay their plastic tarp each night, they learned that wherever they are, “as long as we’re together, we feel like we are home.”
Trekking two thousand miles isn’t every couple’s idea of a great date. Room service offers its own romantic charms. But the gain that came from the long journey, the strength it gave to their new marriage, was worth the discomfort. Whether or not they have children one day, they look forward to the trail ahead, says Jonathan, and to learning more “about ourselves, each other, and the earth.”