At some point, going outside started needing a reason.It wasn’t just “let’s go for a walk” anymore. It turned into something that sounds like it might fix you. Forest bathing. Nature therapy. Reconnecting with something. Something people write books about. Guides, even. The whole language of it suggests a level of calm that is not…
If you’re a bit like me, this might sound familiar. Your child is stuck on something. You can see exactly what the problem is. You could fix it in about four seconds. So you do. It works. Things move on, everyone’s happy. Except something small just happened that you probably didn’t notice. The watering can…
My children are bored quite a lot. I want to be accurate about this because sometimes when parents say their children are bored they mean their children are pleasantly pottering around with a look of mild contentment. That is not what I mean. I mean they come and find me and tell me they are…
If you spend a lot of time outside with your child, you’ve probably noticed this without quite being able to name it. Something is different out there. They last longer. They try harder. They sort things out in a way that doesn’t always happen indoors, and you’re not entirely sure why. Here’s what’s happening. What…
You notice it on the way back in. They’re not necessarily quiet. Often they’ll be loud – full of something, wanting to tell you about it. But there’s a quality to them that wasn’t there before they left. Less brittle. Less waiting for something to go wrong. Something has shifted. I used to think this…
At some point in the morning, there is a window. It’s not labelled. Nobody announces it. But it exists – a gap between the end of breakfast and the point at which everyone has settled into something that will make them furious to leave. The window is small. If you don’t take it, the afternoon…
There is a quiet kind of guilt that creeps in when you read about childhood and nature. The sort with children barefoot in moss, whittling sticks beside a fire they definitely didn’t light alone. You look up from the page and see your own reality: a small patch of grass, a balcony with three pots…
My child used to eat everything – until one day she didn’t. What followed was months of trying to get her to eat vegetables, and eventually learning something unexpected about pressure, control, and letting go. She used to love carrots. That is the detail that made everything harder than it needed to be. As a…
I used to worry my son was “too much.” Too loud, too energetic, too visible in places that expected children to be small and contained. Raising a high-energy boy meant moving through a world that often expects children to be quieter, smaller, easier to manage. My boy was never going to be easy to take…
It happened so many times a day I had stopped hearing myself say it. Good boy. Good boy for eating that.Good boy for getting your shoes.Good boy. It was a reflex. Something that came out automatically, the way careful does when a child runs near something hard. I didn’t think much about it until one afternoon when…