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The great outdoors can be an enriching and scary place. To enable your children to experience the beauty and happiness it offers, you have to teach them skills to deal with the challenges they might face. Here are 11 skills to help them face fear and feel confident when out in nature.
1. Dressing for The Weather
This is a skill that doesn’t just matter in outdoor survival situations. It can help keep your kids healthy and happy in any outdoor pursuits. Teach them how to layer, starting with lightweight, moisture-wicking base layers.
Help them choose appropriate mid-layers and show them how to find the right outer layer for the weather. Youth fishing apparel is an excellent choice not just for fishing, but also for hiking, camping and climbing.
2. Fire-building
Fire-building is an essential skill. The more fire-building methods your kid knows, the better they can survive in an outdoor emergency. Start with a fire starter and matches and then progress to match-only techniques, and from there, to using flint or a bow drill. After they master fire-building, teach them how to cook over a fire.
3. Knife Safety
Young children should be taught to stay away from knives and never to grab an open pocket knife. Older and more responsible children can begin to learn how to cut, chop and slice correctly and safely with a knife.
One way to teach your children how to cut with a knife properly is to teach them to carve. Whittling helps kids learn how to safely use different knife strokes and craft different shapes in wood. This experience helps them to cut firewood, carve emergency tent pegs or chop food in the wild.
4. Setting Up a Tent
Learning how to stake down a tent, set up guy lines and position the rainfly to stay dry is a skill. Fortunately, kids love building forts and enjoy learning how to set up a tent.
Consider starting in the living room and getting them used to setting up poles and sleeping in a tent with the comfort of the television or their favorite books.
Then, take them out in the backyard to teach them how to hammer in stakes and use guy lines.
Demonstrate the importance of a good rainfly, or waterproof layer, to your children and let them know this helps to prevent water and condensation from leaking into the tent. Show them how to set up a tent’s footprint, which prevents moisture, dew and mud from seeping into the tent from beneath.
Don’t be afraid to use backyard camping trips as a learning opportunity. Kids love these types of small-scale adventures.
5. Building a Survival Shelter
Teach your kids how to build a simple shelter by making a small, low frame out of fallen tree branches and leaning sticks and branches up against the frame to create walls. Next, pile leaves, twigs and small sticks against the sides to create a natural, insulating barrier against cold and damp.
If you live in a location that gets snow in the winter, teach them how to build safe snow shelters, just in case they get caught out in the wintertime.
6. Finding Water
Water is essential to survival, so it’s critical to teach your kids how to spot safe drinking water sources and how to filter or purify the water they find. Teach them different methods: boiling, filtration bottles, purification tablets and the survival mode skill of filtering water through a bandana
7. Navigation
These days, many people think of trail apps, Google maps and GPS phone apps as navigation. While these are helpful supplementary tools, they are not navigation. Phones can become too cold to function, screens can crack and batteries can die. To keep your children safe in the outdoors regardless of phone battery life, teach them how to navigate with a topographical map and compass.
Children under the age of eight can be taught the basics of map reading–spotting rivers and streams, finding the tops of hills and differentiating between the points of the compass. Teach them how to hold and follow a compass bearing. Once they’re older, they can learn how to take a compass bearing, triangulation, estimate elevation gain and calculate the distance traveled in poor visibility by counting strides per 100 meters.
8. Using a Camping Stove
If a child is old enough to use the oven at home, they can learn how to use a camping stove. Teach them how to set it up correctly, light it and cook with it safely. Use your backyard as a classroom and show them some basic camping go-to recipes.
9. First Aid
First aid skills are essential to confidence and competence in the outdoors. For young children, start with basic, colorful first aid books for kids. Teach them how to clean cuts, apply antibiotic ointment and notice signs of dehydration or hypothermia. Show them how prevention–in the form of warm, dry outdoor gear–can stop hypothermia before it starts and save lives.
Children over the age of eight can progress to learning how to treat blisters, telling the differences between heat stroke and heat exhaustion and recognizing hypoglycemia. While these might seem like big words for little minds, children are naturally in touch with their bodies and understand what it’s like to feel hot, sweaty, tired, cranky, hungry or cotton-mouthed.
Teens can be introduced to adult-level cpr certifications, first aid and wilderness first aid methodologies.
10. Foraging and Fishing
Foraging is the ancient art of finding plant-based foods to eat in the wild. It’s the gathering half of our hunter-gatherer history as a species. If you’re a forager, teach your kids what you know about the local area. If you’re new to the outdoors, consider taking a foraging class at your local nature center or park. You’d be surprised at how many common weeds are incredibly tasty and nutritious.
Fishing is another potentially life-saving wilderness skill. Demonstrate how to use fishing gear and make fishing equipment in the wild. To promote warmth and safety on your fishing adventures, invest in high-quality youth fishing apparel.
11. A Positive Outlook
Many parents make the mistake of thinking that positivity should be innate and that kids who whine, cry or protest just can’t be taken outside. While some kids naturally smile or laugh more than others, maintaining a positive outlook is a learned skill.
As one sports psychology study suggested, a positive, can-do attitude is fostered by excellent self-talk skills. If you teach your kids how to reason through challenges, use logic and tell themselves they can do it, some of their anxiety or fear will be replaced with confidence and self-efficacy. These self-confidence building skills are not just useful in the wilderness, but can also be applied to their daily life.
Lay The Foundation
The outdoors can feel new and intimidating to children. However, with a little bit of love, patience and guidance, you can teach your kids to be confident even in the face of challenges. With these 11 skills, they will be ready to face nature, and the world, with boldness and a can-do attitude.