I don’t remember when this started but at some point I started looking things up before we went.
The name of the tree at the end of the path. The bird that visits the same spot most mornings. What that fungus is called, the one on the log they always walk past.
I was ready. I had the information. I was going to share it at the appropriate moment, naturally, as though it had just occurred to me.
They were never at the appropriate moment. They were always somewhere else, interested in something I hadn’t prepared for.
I didn’t realise yet that knowledge wasn’t the point – but they did.
There is a version of nature-based parenting that looks a lot like an outdoor classroom
The field guide in the bag. The species chart. The gentle steering toward the interesting thing. The question designed to produce curiosity. The fact delivered at the right moment to make the experience educational.
I know this because I tried most of this. Not because I read about it – just because it seemed like the obvious thing to do when you were outside with children and wanted the time to mean something. Make it educational!
But… the children were consistently uninterested.
Not in being outside. But in being taught while outside.
Those are different things, and it took me much longer than it should have to understand the difference.
What happens when you stop explaining
The first time I left the field guide at home and just went, nothing dramatic happened.
The eight-year-old found something in the mud and spent a long time with it. The six-year-old joined him and they build some bridges and created some stepping stones. They found a beautiful flower in the middle of their creation, to which they could now easily cross, and then came across another fungus on a log. They made it a marking spot. The four-year-old, too, crouched over something, turned around and got interested in it.
And nobody asked me what anything was called.
But the eight-year-old came home and told his father about what he’d done. With detail and the specific quality of a person reporting on something that had been genuinely important.
That’s the point I’m trying to make here: he didn’t know the flowers name. But he knew the flower. He didn’t know or care for the fungus name. But he could describe it easily.
My children aren’t failing to learn. They are learning in a way that doesn’t look like learning – slowly, through attention, through returning to the same places and noticing what has changed, through picking things up and putting them in pockets.
Not information coming in from outside, but something building from inside.
What my job actually is
There is a role in all of this. It’s just not the one that involves knowing the names of things in advance.
It’s closer to being alongside them when they find something.
When the four-year-old finds something and holds it up, I look at it. Really look. Not with an explanation ready. Just with the same attention she’s giving it. Sometimes she will tell me what she thinks it is. Sometimes she puts it in her pocket and moves on and that’s the whole interaction.
When the eight-year-old asks – and sometimes he does ask – what something is called, I tell him if I know, and say I don’t know if I… well… don’t. This is one of the better lessons: that the adult doesn’t have all the information, and that not having it is fine, and that you can find out together or not find out at all and the not-finding-out doesn’t diminish the thing.
The six-year-old almost never asks. She operates on her own system, which I observe without fully understanding yet.
What all three of them have built, over many ordinary walks in ordinary places, is something a curriculum couldn’t have given them. A familiarity with the world as it actually is – specific, seasonal, full of things that reward attention. A quiet confidence that outside is somewhere they know how to be.
They didn’t get this from information. They got it from nature, and from time.
And then, when I’m least expecting it, the eight-year-old says the name of something correctly. Not because I told him, mind you. Sometimes I’m not even sure where his information came from – a book, a passing conversation, something he heard once and filed away. The six-year-old knows more bugs than I do. My four-year-old last week happened to correctly identify a plant we’ve walked past a hundred times without noticing.
And sometimes my children ask. Not because I prompted them, but because they really, genuinely want to know.
The fungus on the log, by the way. Turns out the six-year-old named it herself. Not with the correct taxonomical term. It’s now a “fairy’s nest”. She has consistently used this ever since, and is frankly better than any name I could have given her.
I know the “right” name. But I have never once needed it.