One of mine by my social surrounding tends to be considered “a lot”.
I say this with complete love and at times I used to say it with almost complete exhaustion. During those times, in moments, I considered him “a lot” too.
And he is more, in every direction. More feeling, more noticing, more reacting, more present in every situation he enters. And it took me a while to realise that the volume he brings to ordinary life is not something he can turn down. It’s not something he’s doing on purpose.
He just feels everything at full volume, he always has. Indoors, this can be quite challenging.
The transition from one thing to the next is a negotiation. The texture of a fabric is a genuine problem. The way something was arranged, or said, or served – these things land with a force that seems disproportionate until you understand that everything lands at that force for him. And I’m sorry to admit that I spent a long time trying to manage him. But at some point I realised that outside, I stopped needing to.
The first thing I noticed was that he lasted longer. Not because the outdoors asked less of him – of course it didn’t. But because the things it asked matched what he was already bringing along. The outside world is full of things to notice, and he notices things. It is full of things to feel, and he feels things. It is full of things that don’t follow a schedule or require him to move on before he’s ready, and he is someone who is never ready to move on before he’s ready.
The intensity that exhausted everyone indoors had somewhere to go when we went outside.
He would find something and actually stay with it. Not for the thirty seconds an ordinary child might. For a long time, with the particular quality of focus that only children who feel things deeply seem capable of. The kind that makes you quietly step back and watch, because something real is happening to your child and you really don’t want to interrupt it.
What changed outdoors
The traits that made him hardest to be around inside became his greatest qualities outside.
The perceptiveness – the noticing of every detail, which indoors could spiral into overwhelm – made him the first to spot the thing nobody else had seen. The feather in the specific place. A bug. Some movement in the hedge. He knows the names of more birds than I do.
The intensity – which indoors could arrive as the force of a dispute about nothing – became enthusiasm, commitment, the specific joy of a child completely inside an experience. Running faster than seemed sensible, staying longer than everyone else wanted, feeling the wind like it was the best thing that had ever happened.
The sensitivity – which indoors sometimes meant the wrong sock could derail an entire morning – meant he noticed beauty with a specificity that stopped him mid-step. Not performing it. Actually stopped, looking at something, genuinely moved.
These were not new qualities. He had always carried them along.
Being outside just gave the right conditions.
What I learned to give him
The thing that most transformed our outdoor time with him was not an activity or a place.
It was time.
More of it than I thought was necessary. More than the walk required. More than felt practical.
He needs to arrive at the pace he arrives at. He needs to stay with something until he’s done with it, not until I am. And if there’s pressure, his expectations need to be set in advance. He needs to not be redirected toward the thing I thought was interesting, because he has already found the thing that’s interesting to him, and to be honest his judgment on this is consistently better than mine.
What he needs from me outside is less than what he needs from me inside.
Not because he’s easier – he isn’t always easier. It’s because the environment is doing some of the work. It’s meeting him where he’s at. It has the scale and the richness and the lack of imposed structure that his nervous system is built for.
Outside, I’m not managing him. I’m just there.
There’s a version of my child that I worried about for a long time.
The version that was too much for others. That felt things too hard and reacted too loud and made ordinary days difficult in ways that I couldn’t always explain to people who hadn’t seen it. The version people might judge, even outside in controlled environments, to be honest.
And then there’s the version I see outside today.
The boy who names things nobody else noticed. Who stays with something until he understands it. Who immerses into his surrounding with a rich imagination I can only dream of. Who comes home with mud and observations and more energy than he left with, despite having used more of it than anyone. A different kind of energy than he left with.
These versions are both the same child.
Outside just shows me the second version more clearly.
Which has made the first version easier to understand.