Sixteen years ago I was beginning the third trimester of my first pregnancy. I’d just quit working (Tony wanted me to enjoy the last few months on my own terms.) We’d just moved into a brand new house that we’d spent the winter having built and I was nesting fiercely. We were painting a nursery and devouring every book on babies and parenting that we could lay our hands on. I even went so far as to invite friends we admired much to dinner so that we could ask them how they made their family so perfect. With great kindness and much grace, Judy didn’t laugh me out of my own kitchen.

Last week when we piled out of the van at a rest stop somewhere in Ohio and I followed my herd as they chattered and jostled each other toward the building, laughing ahead of me I had the realization that my kids are bigger than the Staley kids were when I nervously prepared dinner for the “perfect family” and settled in to take notes from their “perfect Mama.”

The memory made me smile. Having dinner with their oldest son, Sean, who we crossed paths with in Germany a few years ago and who’s now back in the states, made me smile even more. He was Hannah’s first babysitter. Tony babysat for him. He’s an outstanding man, a definite tribute to his mother’s passion and dedication

I’m far from a perfect mother. I still think of Judy often and aspire to her example and that of a couple of other excellent moms that I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the years. We’ve been so blessed to find ourselves in communities of wonderful parents who strive together for the best of our children, collectively. I’m grateful for that.

I have been reflecting, of late, on what I’ve learned so far, 16 years into my motherhood, and what I wish I could go back and tell myself in the weeks before my first daughter was born. Perhaps some of it will resonate with you, or with a young mother you know: (more…)

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I have odd parents, and that is what I love about them.

My father was a Texan geologist turned yacht salesman, and also a professional classical musician. He was the type of man who told the same jokes over and over again, and no one seemed to get them. My mother I’ve given the nickname ‘posh Brit’ because that is exactly what she is: an English woman with a love of the designer clothing and jewelry, as well as great food. However eccentric they were when I was growing up, they still had facets of being very conservative. They were Catholic and my mom has a thing with being super, super clean. She can cook almost anything, and all of us delight in the feasts she spends hours preparing.

I, on the other hand, have never been conservative. I sleep in late, can’t clean to save my life, and never pictured myself being a parent. I had taken on my father’s love of the arts but didn’t want to have the rigidity that the school system pushed. I wanted freedom and choice. And for some reason, I believed that family was a ‘cop out’ and not something that interested me. Indeed, boarding school had made me believe that an academic career was the most important thing I could achieve.

Now that I am a mother, I look back on that image I had and feel saddened. I went off to school in the 8^th grade and basically grew up 24/7 with other kids, in a very strict academic world. We all felt suffocated and on top of each other, with no privacy. Kids were scared to emote for fear of being ridiculed. It had its perks, but the downside was very apparent.

I loved reading, and still do, but eventually that environment lead me to where I am today: an unschooling mother and family activist.

When I was just twenty and had moved to the States, I met my husband and was engaged by twenty one. This was something I had never envisioned, that I could have such intimacy and trust with someone so soon. I pictured myself as a rogue archaeologist, living in a tent somewhere. Instead, I had moved to LA and gotten married soon afterwards. It was the best surprise I could have asked for! We’re inspired by travel and living outside the box and yet we value the traditional family model, in the sense that family is first.

We don’t schedule it in, we schedule everything else around it.

Nowadays, to have such a view is indeed rogue. To not send one’s kids off to day care and then school and pursue a career is almost frowned upon.  Kids have become used to spending little time with mom and dad, and as one homeschooling  mum put it ‘ home is like a hotel, where kids check in and out’.

But things are changing.

Old school family values are becoming trendier (really!!) with mom blogs popping up all over the place, sharing their day to day routine with the world. One blog in particular infuses the radical notion of actually enjoying motherhood above all other pleasures, and it attracts readers who are not only single, but also hard core feminists who for one reason or another find themselves attracted to the image of a happy, smiling, and religious family.

Because of the internet, blogging, and social media, people can connect with eachother like never before, and learn from one another’s preferences. Magazines like Bust interview women who ( gasp) love their arranged marriage, despite catering to a feminist, women’s lib loving crowd. We are hungry to learn about other lifestyles, in order to properly discern what is right for our own, instead of shutting the door on anything outside of our comfort zone.

Nie Nie Dialogues is an inspirational read to check out, showing how a maman of 5 balances her desires and her family’s needs, as well as being an airplane crash survivor and burn victim. Her book Heaven Is Here is out of April 4^th and shows her heroic journey of recovery to physical and mental wellbeing, after having been in a coma for 3 months. I feel uplifted reading about her daily life and how she views the role of motherhood, and it certainly drives me to complain less about my own life and responsibilities.

The Wiegands is another motivational blog about a young artistic family of 4 living in Texas. Casey Leigh chronicles her life and the losses and hardships she has encountered on her journey in parenthood. Readers comment on how she makes the ups (her new pregnancy) and downs ( her miscarriage, her son’s asthma) so touching and real. Her writing is accessible and her story shows how we all struggle, but how we deal with it is what matters.

Are you unconventional yet drawn to the traditional? Where do those two ideas collide in your family and how do you make it work? Where do you find your inspiration?

This article was written by Elizabeth Kelsey: Wife to William, Mama to Kaya, currently writing from Phuket, Thailand where her family is living and learning together.

It was a completely new thought for me. It presented itself in the form of a book in an out of the way bookstore in Vermont on a bright Sunday afternoon: Last Child In The Woods by Richard Louv.  I stood for quite a while reading excerpts and considering the premise: that the average child in today’s American society is nature deprived.

I must admit, being raised as I was, that it never occurred to me that some people suffered nature deprivation.

If anything, my parents could have been accused of being nature gluttons and of force feeding my brother and I on a steady diet of pine needles and buckets full of garter snakes caught in the gully behind our island home.

Of course if I had thought for just a minute I would have seen the plausibility of the thought, of course I knew people who’d lived out their whole lives in cities and couldn’t tell a maple tree from an elm, but until last week I hadn’t.

Nature deprivation as a societal condition had never crossed my mind.

The general premise of the book, and other articles I’ve read since then, is that children today are being raised without nature for a variety of reasons: the prevalence of television and video games, being two, but another significant reason the author cited is fear.

He postulates that parents fear what is outside their front doors, violence, kidnapping, accidents and so they don’t allow their children to freely explore as was common one or two generations ago.

Is this fear well founded?

According to the author and the studies he cites, no. The fear is propagated mainly by media. One or two tragic stories of a child coming to harm are played and replayed until every parent in the nation is terrified that this could happen in their neighborhood. One ten year old child wanders off from his family’s vacation rental in New Hampshire one summer and dies of exposure within two miles of his house and suddenly every parent is terrified that the same fate awaits their child if they are allowed out of sight of the house.

I have a whole soap box on America’s “culture of fear,” but I’ll save that for another article. This one is about nature deprivation.

Nature an antidote to ADHD?

Apparently, a regular exposure to nature has been shown to be calming to children, to diminish the symptoms of ADHD, and reduce stress levels in the subjects studied.

To this I add a hearty, “Duh?!”

Maybe one of the reasons that ADHD didn’t show up in record numbers when we were children, or when our parents were children was that our parents were in the habit of locking us out of the house for several hours a day to “go play,” whatever that meant. No kid who has played stick ball in the alley for three hours and been decked into the bricks fifteen times by well meaning friends can possibly have the energy to drive his Mom nuts when he comes in, and certainly he will sleep well that night.

Is your child nature deprived?

Of all of the things my children may well lack, exposure to the natural world is not one of them. This is not due to some great insight on my part or that stellar parenting class we are so grateful to have taken before our daughter was born. No, to me it was just natural to bundle them up and ship them out of doors, for their sanity and mine. It is gratifying to be reinforced in this accidental success of my parenting journey. However, I’m not sure I buy it entirely.

Supposedly nature deprived persons are more stressed, less attentive, and at some sort of emotional and spiritual disadvantage.

I am the first to tout the therapeutic benefit of nature in treating these symptoms within myself, however, does that mean that a person who has been raised, say, in lower Manhattan is a warped soul for not having kept snakes in a pail or fished tadpoles into a quart jar? That is painting a rather broad stroke, I think.

I know plenty of folks raised on television and subway stations that seems to be perfectly balanced persons and who are not medicated for stress or attention deficit related conditions. So what’s the point?

Evidently this idea of nature deprivation, although new to me, is not new to a whole lot of other people who are far more knowledgeable in this field than I am. The fact, alone, that a book of several hundred pages could be written on this topic and become a reasonably popular read among parents as diverse as tree huggers in California and the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (who have endorsed the book) says that there is a need and that the book resonates with a wide variety of people across our culture. You can spend the twenty bucks or so and read the book if you like, or you can put the twenty bucks toward a season pass at your local state park.

One of the things that my parents, unquestionably, did well was to let us get dirty.

I remember playing out in a driving rain with rivulets pouring off the ends of my braids, and water filling my boots as we waded in the gully full of rushing water. Taking a page out of my mother’s book, I try not to get too bent out of shape when my own children come to the door carrying their boots (which they had to excavate from the mud) with black socks after losing to the sink holes in the “fire swamp” as they call the mucky region of our forest just below the driveway.

I repeat the mantra of this season of motherhood with almost religious diligence: “Mud is good. Dirt makes them happy. Pine needles pass through the digestive tract.”

Sure. It would be easier to put tidy children in front of a movie all afternoon four or so days a week. There would be a lot less laundry and I’ll bet I could even get away with bathing them only ONCE a day in the summer if I did that. But is there any substitute for a thoroughly filthy girl with bangs stuck straight up with mud instead of hair gel, mud smeared evenly across her cheeks instead of makeup and dress patched with sand stains pine tar, eyes shining telling the story of the fort she’s built under a fallen tree in the hollow? She’s even learned to tie together pine branches to make a sort of thatch.

I’m not going to read the book.

I already agree with him on all of the practical levels, I could tell that from reading the jacket. However, I’m grateful to the author for causing me to consider the “why” of what is already second nature. He has caused me to be a little more intentional and cognizant of my reasons for wrapping these kids up and pitching them out the back door for half of every day. Just think, they’ll be so well balanced when they grow up!

So what do you think? Are kids in general “Nature Deprived?” Are yours? What can we do about it?

Hank Debruin & Tanya McCready have been married for 17 years and started their husky family before starting their child family.

They now have four children, Logan, 12, Dustyn, 10, Michaela, 6, and Jessica, 4 years old. They live in Haliburton, Ontario, Canada, in a stunning wilderness area full of lakes and ridges and hills which sits on the doorstep of Algonquin Park and their life revolves around dogs!

We first profiled them in Dec. 2010, just before Hank ran the Yukon Quest race, in Canada in early 2011. Right now, as this interview is republished, Hank is out on the trail running the Iditarod! You can follow the race and his progress at the official race site.

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The arrival of a new sibling is a time of many mixed emotions. Parents are forced to spend most of their time and energy tending to the newborn’s basic needs. This can be difficult for older siblings to deal with. Many children experience a regression and begin acting like a baby again in order to receive more attention from their parents. Therefore, it is very important to prepare your older child to know what to expect and help them adjust to the idea.

There is no ‘right’ time to tell your child about your pregnancy and the impending arrival of their new sibling. But it is important for your child to hear the news from you, instead of from someone else. So whenever you decide to tell your friends and family, be sure to tell your child as well. When you tell your child, acknowledge and discuss any feelings he or she may have. And never deny or discount those feelings. (more…)