MAPS Group

Too much frustration often results in a child refusing to do an activity again. Know the child's attention span and tolerance for frustration. A little bit of frustration accompanied by discussion, thinking, and resulting success can be a real growth experience.

"Play" primitive skills with little kids. Play hide and seek, camouflage, "house", medicine woman, tea party (with fresh herbal tea), and help them make their own dolls, bows and other toys. Play with them.

Kids like to play whatever their parents are doing, so make smaller working models of the primitive things you use.

Suggestions: a kid-sized packbasket, bows and arrows, buckskin clothing and pouches. Don't be offended if they play with something a little while and then phase out of it. Feel the child out to see if they still are interested in it and just taking a rest from it, and/or if it's okay to give or trade the item away. If you give a child something you made and then they don't want it, you may feel like you should get it back because you made it, but it is still theirs and they get to decide its fate. This is good learning for later in life. It teaches how to avoid clutter, how to share, and how to get good value for things.

Camping should be started very early. Don't try for an immediate full wilderness experience. Make it close to home, such as the back yard, easy to do, and fun. Close to home means that if it is not fun, you can take the child home to his/her regular bed. Most toddlers and small children will be content to fall asleep in a sleeping bag if you are there, telling them a story, doing as much of their normal bedtime ritual as possible. Cooking good food outdoors helps a lot with child comfort. As children get older, you can make trips longer and wilder.

"Hiking" as such, usually doesn't go over too big with children. I find I can't hike any distance because every few feet I find something I really want to look at. Walking just for the sake of covering ground doesn't make sense to me as recreation. If I want to take one or more kids on a walk, I don't call it a hike, but a walk, a ramble, going exploring, etc. You may have a set time you need to get back, but don't let that guide your walk except to tell you when to turn and start heading back. Play games while you walk, such as "flash flood", "Camouflage" or "hide!"

When kids find animals or plants, don't fill them full of facts. Use their questions to draw them into closer inspection, empathy, and getting them to ask even more questions, and answer them on their own. I ask children a lot of leading questions and I often answer their questions with other questions. I like to give preposterous answers so kids know I am kidding, and then we work out the truth. These preposterous answers often become long-remembered family jokes that kids refer to later in life. These are family memories of shared fun.

When taking long trips, remember that kids need to go to the bathroom more often than adults, get bored sooner, and need something to do in the car. My sister came up with a wonderful idea when she was a child. She liked to sit behind the driver, and carried a thick manila envelope she called her "office". She had writing/drawing paper, art supplies, a piece of candy, puzzles and books, whatever she was interested in. You never heard a peep out of her, no matter what my other sister and I were doing, and she was happy and comfortable. When my daughter was little, we outfitted a little backpack with similar "office supplies". One important object was a padded board which served as a lap desk.

Again, start early. It is easier if your child likes to sleep in the car, as mine still does at 19 years old. They wake up at your destination, and voila! You are there!

We played lots of word games and I Spy type games while on the road. We looked at road kills, hawks perched on poles and trees, and we celebrated when we crossed into new states upon seeing the big welcome signs. We commented on which rivers we were crossing and which mountains we could see. It really affected Sarah's geography knowledge, her sense of place, and her ability to use maps. Don't let people tell you that girls can't learn to be comfortable reading maps. There may be gender differences in such learning but all it takes to be successful is early exposure to map reading and to grow up paying attention.

It will help A LOT if your child learns to pee and poop outdoors without making it a big deal. Finding frequent bathrooms is difficult, and many that you find are disgusting health hazards. But if you can get kids to cheerfully and successfully use a little grove of trees as privacy, you have got it made.

A schedule is your worst enemy when traveling with children. You are going to get as far as you get. If you get frustrated and you push children to wait for a rest or a bathroom, or hurry up and get ready, or get back in the car at rest stops, just to meet your schedule, you will all be sorry.

Just because I am a primitive skills instructor doesn't mean I have to be the one who teaches my child the skills they want to learn. As Sarah was growing up, we attended a lot of gatherings where the kids were free to roam around. All of the adults watched out for the kids' safety, and a number of the instructors and participants were happy to have kids visit with them and try out some skills and crafts. These adults were wise enough to not demand a specific level of completion by the kids, but allowed them to dabble in the activities, just getting a taste of them. Sarah would visit grownups whose company she liked. It mattered much less what the subject of a workshop was; she picked her activities based on the people. At night around the campfire, everyone would be gathered listening to music and storytelling, and the young children would fall asleep on a blanket or on the lap of a grownup friend/mentor. I would have to carry Sarah, fast asleep, to the tent and put her to bed.

I did keep an eye open to see that Sarah was choosing the company of adults that I trusted as much as she did. Her judgment was usually very good, and only once in all the years of attending gatherings did I feel it necessary to steer her away from someone. It was gratifying to have another adult come to me while this was happening to make sure I knew that there was a potential situation, in case I missed it.

I made a special point not to steer Sarah's learning agenda when it came to skills, and even her other interests in "regular" life. She would often come to me and ask me how to do something, and I would help her. But if I asked her if she wanted to learn something and she said no, thanks, I dropped it. One important effect of this was that she got to see a number skills done many times over a period of years before she decided to try them herself. She was uninterested in friction firemaking until she was ten years old. I was tuning up a bow drill when she came up and asked me if she could try it. She dropped down into perfect position and produced a coal in about 20 seconds. Her experiences with this helped me to understand some things about how native children learned in the past:

• They didn't expect kids to learn everything from their parents.
• Compatible grandparents, uncles/aunts and other interested grownups formed mentorship relationships with kids
• All the members of the community watched kids to see what aptitudes and predilections they showed, then helped them to find someone to learn from.
• Kids watched skills many, many times before they tried them. They knew a lot about them already.

The experiences Sarah had learning from other adults kept our relationship fresh and fun. At rendezvous, once the day started, I rarely saw her all day except when she was hungry, needed a sweater or had a problem. When I did see her, she was happy, excited and full of stories about her experiences.

Bringing her to gatherings often meant that I had to take her out of school. Her mother was usually okay with it, especially since we checked on absentee policy, and got the homework assignments she would miss from her teacher. Most teachers were cooperative and willing to write them out for her, and even excited for her educational adventure. In the middle elementary grades, she was often asked to keep a journal of the trip, in which she made drawings and wrote day by day entries. These journals are a treasure and I keep them to this day, 10-11 years later. It shows me what Sarah thought was most interesting about the trip, and they were usually not what I would have thought!

It is comforting to our "primitive" or "natural" children to include their friends in these experiences. Otherwise they can quickly be labeled by their peers as weird, and be ostracized. Often, our kids like to keep their distance from most mainstream children. They learn about sensible, wise, grounded, loving, community-minded behavior at rendezvous. When confronted by immature, irresponsible peer behavior, they can be critical of it. That doesn't mean that they don't crave friendship and acceptance like everybody else. During my summer primitive skills day camp program, the kids are often very serious about nature and outdoor activities. I like to reassure them that they are among true peers who understand, respect and appreciate their interests. Sometimes I see kids relax visibly and open up after discussions about shared values and respect and community. It is very frustrating for them to be doing things that are satisfying, sensible and real, only to be criticized by socially powerful kids who have no clue. It feels like coming in from the cold to find oneself in like company for the first time.

Sarah had her own contributions to this essay:

Go do stuff! Don't just mean to go out and look at things, or play, or take a walk or attend a gathering or feed birds; actually go and do them.

When your child asks questions, don't let the answer "I don't know" be the last word on the subject. Discuss the question and explore how we could find out together.

• Go to the library
• ask someone who knows
• design an experiment which will yield the answer

How to handle fears:

• Supply information about the feared object
• Separate respect for danger from fear
• Teach about actual dangers and which ones are possible where you live (Are there bears here? No.)
• Don't project your own fears onto kids.
• Have a relationship with ticks, mosquitos, poison ivy, etc.
• "Bugs really run this world; they're just nice enough to let us live here with them." -Unknown
• Storytelling is better than lecturing.
• It's not personal fingerpointing
• We are wired to want to hear stories
• Use hero stories and those with kids as main character to reduce fear.

Parenting a Natural Child by Jeff Gottlieb, MS, Copyright © 2010. Used here with permission.

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