Skip to main content

Learning to Free-Range Hike, and an Excerpt from Cootermaroos

I'm working on a book about unschooling and free-range parenting with the working title:
Cootermaroos:
A Dad's Guide to raising Happy, Adventurous, Well-Rounded Urchins
The following is an excerpt from the book.  To provide a little background, the kids who are now 8, 6, and 4 years old have all been camping since before they could walk.  We apply the same free-range principles to camping and hiking that we use in our every day lives.  On our hikes, the kids range from a quarter to a half mile ahead of us with the single rule that if they come to a fork in the trial they can't range out any further until my partner or I catch up.  With that intro, here's an excerpt on how each of them learned to hike free range!

Since we’ve been camping since before the kids could walk, and since we love hiking, we’ve discovered a few misconceptions about what kids can actually do out on the trail.  Just like in town, as each kid begins to take their first steps, I take them out of the wrap so they can hike the trail with me.  I hike more slowly for awhile, for about a year really. 

Our free-range approach to hiking with the bigger kids has made all of this easier.  They’re not hanging near my feet complaining we could be moving faster as each new kid gets their hiking legs under them.  They’re out in front, getting to explore and be even more independent while the newest hiker and I bring up the rear. 

Some of the steps down the trail are too steep at first, and the distance of our standard hike, about three miles, can be a bit challenging in the beginning so I frequently wind up with the newest hiker on my hip, or back in the wrap, but within months… wow!  Each new kid ranges from the wrap to ambling a mile, then to two, and before long, with the exception of me helping them over the bits they’re just not tall enough for, they’re completing the whole hike.  Three year olds can cover three miles, easy!  I just had to have faith, and let them.

The kids don’t get bored while we’re out on these hikes.  They don’t need activities.  There’s so much going on all around them!  They also don’t need guidance from me.  One of the greatest pleasures of being outdoors with the gang is keeping myself to myself, and enjoying all their discoveries—things I would have missed if I was busy telling them what I thought.  They always find the banana slugs, (giant yellowish slugs that look like nothing so much as a mobile dog turd), before I do. They make observations about how the trees fit together, what color the vegetation is on this trip, how it’s changed, what they found in the stream they study at their leisure while I take a break.  The world does my parenting work for me.  I just sit back--metaphorically speaking since we’re on a hike— and enjoy the show.  God, it’s nice!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...
1 comment
Read more

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...
11 comments
Read more

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...
Post a Comment
Read more