What does Nature have to do with effective Parenting?

Introduction

I understand why you might find this title odd. Nature and effective parenting? Isn’t parenting about relating with a child and taking care of them, soothing, stimulating, teaching, educating, modeling, and so on? All of these are undoubtedly true. But this article is about the how not the what. Of course, to raise children we need to do all of those things. But how do we decide how to do them?

Do we follow what our parents did with us, or do we do the opposite? Or do we listen to parenting experts, or follow a certain method aligned with our life philosophy? From my perspective, most things about good parenting or even excellent parenting are to do with our very instinctive and innate connection to nature. Because parenting is all about observing and relating.  Just like animals relate to each other and to their natural environment. We all have it hidden somewhere inside. In this article I will give you some ideas to get you back into your natural state and help you connect with your children.

Nature is like a Bridge to connect with children

Most children and especially highly sensitive children just love being in nature. It revives them, fascinates them, and excites them. Some children who can’t function at school are so happy studying ants or flowers or collecting leaves them seem like a different child. They relax, are settled, happy and responsive. This is because spending time in nature calms the nervous system, clears the energy field, and grounds and nourishes, like a total recalibration to life.

Whilst it is easily apparent how important being in nature is for a totally dysfunctional child who struggles and is transformed in a forest or back garden, fewer adults realise how much they need it too. Or how far their daily state is from one that is healthy for their mind and body and parenting ability! Bear with me, you will see why I say this in a minute.

How Children Experience Nature

Imagine for a moment watching your child discover a baby tortoise in the garden. Their first response is often to run towards it hand outstretched. But their eyes are also wide open, observing, curious, breathing in every detail of what they are witnessing with pure joy and excitement. They just want to connect, touch, and experience.

Why does this matter? Part of the reason why I go on and on about children in nature is because being with children in nature can help parents to reconnect with themselves and their children. What parents tend to do is gloss over the experience as one they already know or are familiar with (eg I’ve seen a duckling before they are all the same so I don’t need to look). Children, on the other hand, actually have the experience of the feathers, colour, beak, movement, etc.

Curious, slow and simple

Watching a child interact with the natural world in this way sometimes reminds parents of the simplicity of just being there, of being curious, open, and engaging directly. It matters because these are the exact skills it also make you amazing and effective parent. They will solve almost if not all issues that may arise throughout the course of your parenting career. So, it might be worth relearning to pay that kind of attention. No two moments are ever the same and you can’t assume that because you’ve seen something similar before it’s the same. This doesn’t work in parenting. You need to really be fully there in each instance or your child will notice you are absent and react emotionally. I don’t say this lightly but most child behavioural issues dissolve when the parent actually shows up. It’s a profound realisation when you experience it with your children.

Why Adults Disconnect

What is it that children have that adults don’t? How do we lose it as we grow up and more importantly how can we get it back? Oh, how the mind loves to know, to find reasons and answers. And yes (dear inquisitive intellectual mind), we lose it because we learn at home and at school to think and analyse, to rationalise and find out why, rather than just to stop and feel. We learn to think about an experience to the point where we don’t even know what it feels like anymore. We literally miss out on the experience of our own lives.

So how we get it back is to set the mind aside and retrain other parts of ourselves. The answers you are looking for are found in sensing your hips, your lower belly and your feet. Find out more about what I am referring to in the link.

Reconnecting

One of the most shocking and effective suggestions I made in a parenting session was to set an exercise for a father where he spent twenty minutes bathing his daughter with one hundred percent focus. I asked him to leave his mobile phone outside. He was to sense his breathing and his body before he started, and to breathe, observe and be fully with her for the duration of her bath. The father reported that he only really managed ten minutes but that it changed his life. He told me that he felt as if he met his daughter for the first time – he gazed into her eyes, noticed her smile, her hair, how she moves, what she likes to play with in the bath. For the first time he actually connected with her (and unusually she didn’t scream!).

He effectively became an engaged and present father through this exercise and was able to learn to switch consciously from work and thinking mode to being present with and relating mode after work. This enabled him to take care of his children and help them to feel loved, fully seen, and heard. An important task especially as he had three daughters deeply in need of an available father.

The Magic of Just Being With

What his experience had in common with that of a child is that children are fully present. They feel. They sit inside their own bodies, where they experience a wide range of ongoing sensations, and they look, smell, hear, observe, follow what interests them and respond in the moment without censoring. The reason why (yes dear thinking mind you haven’t been forgotten) experiencing like a child is such a radical move for an adult parent is that it allows you to actually experience for yourself how your child is, what is going on for them, and what they need. You can see and feel it directly and it is in-the-moment matter of fact, not a suggestion or hypothesis made by a doctor or therapist. It is real, and it is now. And you know it is so because you just experienced it.

More than anything, a child’s growing nervous system and psychological sense of self need you to see, acknowledge and reflect how they really are from one moment to the next. So just being with them meets a large proportion of their developmental need. This enables you to avoid and solve many emotional and behavioural problems (like extended tantrums) which can arise from this need not being met in the first place.

Children don’t need more things, they need more of US

It is sadly the case that the global culture we live in demands more and more working hours from adults and allows less and less time for real interaction. But gifting tablets, phones, and faster computers simply cannot on any level replace the priceless value of real present attention from the main caregiver. Or even from a distant relative. It doesn’t really matter from whom. The gift of being felt, noticed, and responded to in the moment is actually an essential developmental need for the physical body! I have written elsewhere about the developmental needs for emotional empathy that children have aged 0-6 and detailed ways in which parents can practice this.

Slowing down and Being Present helps the parent too

The crucial aspect to understand is that it is essential to your child’s basic development and will save you time and energy long-term. If what you crave is a good relationship with your child with more flow, trust, and understanding and fewer emotional meltdowns and behavioural issues, then keep reading.

Although it may feel like a chore to an already overworked tired person, switching to just being present, being there, being with can also be a relief. It means you don’t actually have to do anything specific – you can drop the pressure and the lists. You can slow down, breathe, drop into yourself and come home to yourself. Just by noticing how you are and noticing your surroundings, you are already becoming available to your child. And then you can mostly let them lead and just follow.

They lead, you follow

Children move at a slower simpler pace, and things happen fully and immediately, one thing at a time. When your daughter shows you a drawing or an object, look with interest. Respond genuinely. Wait for her follow-on. When you allow yourself to function in this way in order to relate to your child, you may find it refreshingly relaxing and even playful.

I am not a full-time parent. Yet I do get glimpses into the intensity of full-time parenting when people leave the children with me for a few weeks in order to observe and deal with some problematic issue or other. I can last the duration and not snap because I know that eventually, I can hand them back. So I really do get it. And being a single parent must be even more exhausting because you simply never get to be off duty. However, I have observed that being fully present is the path of least resistance when it comes to having a small child around. Anything else (distraction, thinking, phone, resistance) just creates more problems when the child acts out because their basic needs are not met.

Rehumanising ourselves and becoming available parents

Many adult parents are deeply resistant to just being with their children through no fault of their own. Absurdly it’s the way many people think they should behave and the way that society expects us to be around children. Adult, functional, efficient, engaged, multi-tasking, and bionic! Yet everyone has a personal choice. To feel, to allow tiredness, respond to the need to eat, exercise, and rest at natural intervals are not really popular mainstream concepts. Complementary practitioners may mention these  once your health has seriously failed, and medical doctors don’t know how to make you better. Is it any wonder given the fast pace, loud volume and relentless overwhelm of images and information that the modern world expects us to be able to deal with?

Small steps are enough

The shift to a natural and self-attuned way of living is a huge leap. It will look different for each individual. And yet we can approach this in small steps. There are always modifications we can make. We are undoubtedly animals. We are part of nature. If you observe a small child this will be  abundantly clear. Before they learn to speak and think, they have bursts of energy, collapses of deep sleep, wailing hunger and thirst, giggles, tears and more – just like weather passing through. They are really alive and unpredictable, uncontrollable to a large extent and uninhibited. To meet them as an adult parent, we are giving ourselves permission to experience all these wonderful and liberating aspects of human existence. That the modern, efficient and monetised grown-up world frowns on them  but they are essential parts of life.

Coming into alignment with nature is crucial to raising healthy children

The further we get from nature, the further we get from our children, and the more sick and distressed they become. I don’t say this lightly or flippantly since I have spent most of my life observing and researching this topic. I have been through all the aspects of connection and disconnection, depression, addiction, and alienation through to conscious voluntary reconnection and re-integration into the natural world. These suggestions are entirely from my own lived experience. 

The silver lining to this discussion is that even if modern technological life is increasingly detached and mental, each adult human is intrinsically part of nature. Which also means that in essence none of us are ever far from nature if we know how to drop into ourselves and tune in. Because I choose to live my life very close to nature – that is simply where I feel most at home – it’s easy for me to teach others how to do it too, quickly and simply.

If you’re interested in learning the simple steps to be present in your own life you can find out more here. I developed the tools to reconnect that I use in working with parents from my caniosacral work, meditation, dance practice and directly from my own daily physical life on my farm, where I observe and tend a huge variety of plants and animals, and never stop learning.

Our true nature is more than enough

I recently had my ten-year-old niece to stay on her own for a month, and when I slowed down to her pace we principally looked at and appreciated nature, outdoor activities like walking and swimming, fresh food preparation, and creative activities like building, poetry, painting, and so on. She is unusual in that she doesn’t have or want a mobile phone. And yet it was amazing to find that just being in nature was enough to fill up a whole month and to experience the wonder of life through her eyes.

There’s always more to learn by looking and following. This gives me hope because in the world of parents and children every single relationship is unique, and the myriad of factors that make up one child’s development simply cannot be generalised in a book. However, when parents learn to observe directly and experience the child, they do have all the responses on hand that can make that child feel very secure, loved and supported. And if there are two parents then they can compare and contrast their experience and cover each other’s blind spots into the bargain.

Conclusion

In terms of raising healthy children, there are many levels on which we need to find a balance between the complexities of modern life whilst coming back to the simplicities of actually being with each other. Here we have looked at how nature is important for children, and how it is equally important for adults, and supports their relational abilities as a parent. Another aspect of these relational abilities might include extended family living – with grandparents playing cards, gardening, cooking, baking, and telling stories.

What happened to drawing, painting, making things, and just mucking about? These are the activities where children and adults really get to relate.  Being healthy and happy is about balance and choices. We are sold the idea that we need more (money, bigger house, stuff, holidays) for our children to be happy. In fact, most of the time what they need more of is US. Our time, our attention, our understanding, and our just being there. Then they don’t need all the stuff.

To do that we need to get out in nature, and also back inside our own physical nature. Maybe bear in mind as you go about your days that whether you live near nature or not, whether you like plants or not, you are an animal being. And the physical embodied qualities that make you an animal are exactly the same ones that can also make you a great parent to your unique child. It takes being aware and critical not to buy everything that everyone else is doing, and to do what feels right for you. It also takes courage. If you learn to be present and available with your children, they will not only thank you for enabling their emotional and mental well-being. But you will also make sure that you don’t miss out on actually experiencing them growing up.

To turn around when they are thirteen or fifteen and realise you missed their whole childhood because you were lost in work or worried about the future is heartbreaking. And yet many adults don’t realise until it is way too late. To start being here just takes a moment, not a university degree, so it’s something anyone can start right now. What choices are you going to make for yourself and your children?