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Michael Roberts: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

A couple weeks ago, I took my 11-year-old son fishing.

Michael’s son: Why haven’t we caught any fish? Whose fault is that? Dad’s. 

Michael: No it’s not! 

We fish together a lot, but this time was different. It was our first attempt to catch tuna, which where we live in Northern California, requires heading far offshore. We have a small, open boat, and running it twenty-five to forty-five miles off the coast comes with some risk. Now, we took all kinds of precautions, including, most importantly, waiting for a window of calm weather, and heading out alongside another boat, so we could help each other out, if something happened

But still, my boy is eleven-years-old, and in the days leading up to the trip, I seriously questioned my judgment. One night, I woke up in a panic, imagining worst-case scenarios. So I called on some experienced anglers who are also parents and they assured me that I wasn't crazy, that the risks we were taking were quite reasonable, all things considered.

So we went for it. And it was spectacular. 

We didn't catch any fish, but we saw huge bluefin tuna leaping out of the water, groups of white-sided dolphin, and a distant blue whale.

My son did more than take it all in. There were three adults on our boat, but he was always the first to spot surfacing tuna. He was amazing, really. Tireless, fun, a very capable boy who is on his way to becoming a young man.

Experiences like that, can make you briefly feel like you know what you’re doing as a parent. But the questions always return. Am I giving my kids enough space to grow on their own? Too much space? And, most relevant to this show, am I enabling them to develop a deep and lasting relationship to the outdoors?

Lots of moms and dads I know think about this all the time. And then there are people like ���ϳԹ��� Podcast producer Paddy O'Connell, who is recently married and can't wait to be a dad. But also, he's really anxious about getting it right. 

Paddy and wife live in the Colorado mountains, but he was raised in the shadow of Chicago, and didn't start skiing and biking and hiking until he was in his twenties. Recently he came to me and said, ‘Hey Mike, is there like a guide to helping your children fall in love with adventure?’

I said, ‘not really, but I know a couple people you should talk to.’

Steven Rinella: I have three kids, two were born in Brooklyn and one was born in Seattle. When I first had kids, I had this feeling that there was one area in which I was really selling them short. There's one area in which the Rinella clan had fallen, and that was around exposure and ease of getting outdoors. And that weighed on me very heavily. I got a guilty conscience about it.

Paddy O’Connell: This is not what I expected to hear from Steven Rinella when I called on him for advice on how I might raise outdoorsy kids. Steven is both a longtime contributor to ���ϳԹ��� and the host of MeatEater, the hit TV series and podcast. He now lives in Montana with his wife and children, where he is a very committed hunter and fisher and conservationist.

Steven: For my mom and dad, all they had to do is open the door and kick us out the door. Like if you got caught watching TV, you were just going to get chores.

If you went outside, no one's going to mess with you. 

Paddy: Yeah, totally. 

So you just went outside, cuz if you went outside, no one, you never got in trouble. And for us to send our kids outside, they would've got hit by a cab. So you had to, everything had to be really intentional.

Paddy: Before I chatted with Steven, I half-expected to hear that his three kids were sem-feral mountain creatures who'd never held an iPad. Besides having a day job that has him constantly prowling the woods in search of prey that he turns into a delicious meal, Steven has written a couple of best-selling books for families, including "Outdoor Kids in an Inside World" and his latest, "Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars," a muddy-boots activity book.

Steven: When I was a kid, we did the sorts of things that are in my book, catch a crayfish, count the stars, but we didn't do them as projects from a book. They were just baked into daily existence. And what I was doing is, in large measure, collecting up my bag of tricks, and putting them in an organized fashion

  looked at it as there's people like me who have that feeling of ‘man, I'm not giving my kids what I had growing up’ or they look and they say, ‘I didn't have nature in the outdoors when I was growing up, and now that I have kids, I really feel that they need that.’

Paddy: Catch A Crayfish is the outdoorsy workbook I wish I had when I was a wiley suburban lad. It has step by step instructions for things like building a campfire, tracking animals, and even making a blowgun. The book starts with a note to kids about safety and situational awareness and a note to parents explaining that some activities need supervision, but most require the child to be given a lot of independence, something Steven's own parents gave him in spades when he was growing up in rural Michigan.

Steven: Looking back, it's shocking what they let, it's shocking what they let me do, but I'm saying it wasn't out of negligence.

We hunted a ton. Trapped muskrats to sell them. We swam a lot. We had canoes and rowboats, and we lived on a chain of lakes.You could kind of lake bounce tons of woods. And engaging with nature was just baked into daily life.

My parents gave me an enormous amount of freedom and I realized that it was a calculated move on their part.

Paddy: Was that top of mind when you were becoming a dad yourself?

Steven: Oh, big. And maybe I probably overdid it.

Paddy: He's not lying. When Steven's eldest two kids were still young, their family faced what you might consider a serious challenge to having nature experiences. They lived in New York City. But even in the middle of a densely populated urban center, Steven and his wife found ways to get their kids dirty.

Steven: We would go to parks in New York and I would take my kids to the whatever kind of swampy is funkiest back hole of some park, you know.

Paddy: Yeah.

Steven: Overgrown little jungle corners. And we'd just crawl in there and look around, man. My first objective in having kids, I wanted to get it where I could put anything in their hand and they wouldn't drop it. Any kind of living creature.

Paddy: A bug, a fish, a frog, whatever.

Steven: Yeah. I'd put in their hand or I'd say here and I'd hold my hand out and I'm gonna put something in their hand and they don't know what it is and they trust me and they hold their hand out and I put it in their hand.

That was top priority for me. And we’d go over and roll rotten logs, roll rocks, digging the leaves and they would hold on to anything. And that they were obsessed with like moving crawling stuff, and they loved it. And I knew it. And it was a measurable thing. And to this day, if you tell them to pick something up, man, they're gonna pick it up. 

Paddy: Here, sonny. Dad loves you. Here's a gross slug.

Steven: Oh yeah, for sure. We would hunt wild edibles. We'd hunt mushrooms. We'd find berries. We laid the foundation in places where I think a lot of people would look and say that it was almost impossible to do that. And we, we just made it work.

When they were really little, they didn't know that they were getting a lesser version of something.

If I took a five year old down and went to prospect park, and hung out, crawling around by the ponds, or to our fish shack in Alaska and crawled around in the tide pools, they're going to be equally enthralled. That's the thing I found, is the kid is going to be equally enthralled and equally engaged. You, the grown up, might recognize it like, ‘oh, this Alaska experience is far and away better.’ But for them to be with a person that they feel comfortable around and see that person be engaged and excited and learning, that I found to be very, very, productive time spent outside.

Paddy: Steven brings up an interesting dilemma about parenting here. How exactly do you introduce your kid to the things you love in a way that is fun for them and not just focused on your love of that thing?

Steven: I like to fish. Wouldn't it be great if my kids liked the fish? Because I would get the fish more, and I would be able to be a good dad while doing it because I'd be able to be spending time with my kids.

The same way that if a parent was, was a great baseball fan, and then they introduce baseball to their children and in the hopes that they would be able to enjoy games together. I wanted my kids to like and appreciate what I liked. Cuz that's what I want to do. And all the better if I could do that with my family.

Paddy: Why was it so important for your kids to have a relationship with the outdoors?

Steven: Every parent, you know, your kids are a reflection of you. So, whether I wanted it more as some reflection of my value system or more because I think it's just good for people to be resourceful and the outdoors is an arena in which you learn resourcefulness probably more quickly than anywhere else. I wanted them to have it for themselves. 

There's a tenacity that comes from being outside, that comes from dealing with bad weather, difficult conditions, being uncomfortable, problem solving, getting stuck, things being broken and just resourcefulness in a way that people come together to fix things and the euphoria that comes from getting out of tight spots. And I really wanted them to have that kind of toughness and that ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Paddy: But even for a professional outdoorsman like Steven, walks in the park with his kids are not always walks in the park. He, like all parents today, has to convince his children that the effort of getting off the couch and heading out the door is worth it.

Steven: My kids love electronics, man. 

Paddy: Really?

Steven: It's a, we fight about it every day. 

Paddy: You’re like, ‘go outside and flip a rock.’

Steven: Oh, no, you have to exercise your role as an authoritarian in the household when they're young. If you're not willing to do that, it ain't gonna happen. It ain't gonna happen. if you take the path of least resistance, you will probably wind up in your house all day. It's so easy to fall into that. You just got to wake up and be like, man, we're going dude. And there's no saying no. We're going. I don't give a shit what all snacks and diapers we gotta pack up. We're out. We're going. Or else it'll never happen. At least in my case. It would've never happened. We'd still be sitting. I'd be home right now.

If we're going camping on a weekend, we don't ask everybody's opinion about it. We're going camping. They have a great time. They have the time of their life. Oh, no, they come back like that was so fun. You know, they're like tired and they're telling everybody stories. But if you just said to him we can go camp or you can spend the entire weekend on your iPad, they'd be like yeah iPad.

Paddy: When you guys go camping, is there like a no cell phone rule? No tablet?

Steven: Oh yeah, no way. You know what my wife started doing now, which is kind of a little bit, probably seems creepy to some kids' parents. When other kids come over, my wife sets a bowl on the counter and everybody's phone goes into that bowl.

She doesn't give a shit, you know, she's like, oh you can tell your mom whatever you want to tell her, if you go over here put your phone in that bowl.

Paddy: That's awesome.

Steven: She's like not even kind of interested in anyone's opinion about it either.

Paddy: Steven is quick to point out that his family's approach might sound a bit intense. But it's not without deep purpose. The point of his very intentional parenting, as well as his books and MeatEater programming, is to build skills and character that last a lifetime.

Steven: If I knew that fifty years from now there could be some kids who became great conservationists, environmental stewards, and they found inspiration for that as a young person through my work or books I did or shows I made, I mean, that would, that would be a wonderful gift. Like, what a cool thing to have happen.

I hope the kids get a curiosity about the natural world and I hope that they develop just like some good old fashioned ruggedness, some good old fashioned toughness.

My daughter, who's ten, okay. Let's say when my daughter's eighteen, she says, I'm going to go to LA and I want to make a life in show business.

And perhaps in this arrangement that she gives the outdoors very, you know, there's no priority to it. It's not where she's going to spend her time. If she did do that, I know that she would go there with certain tenacity, like a certain blood under her fingernails, from things that she did and saw growing up. That there was like, she doesn't need to do it for the rest of her life to have had the impact of those adventures and those kinds of close calls and that living close to the bone activities we engaged in. It's going to be inside of her in some way.

And in the back of my head, I'd be like and you saw some stuff when you were growing up that, that probably lives in you somewhere. You hung out with some people and saw some ways people engage with challenge and ways people engage with obstacles that is no doubt turning somewhere in the back of your brain in a, you know, in a helpful way.

Paddy: Ultimately, Steven's advice seems easy enough to follow. Find nature wherever you are, get your kids comfortable with holding worms, and take your family outside even if they'd rather be watching SpongeBob.

But still, I had more questions. Like, uh, what do with the babies? Is it even safe to take those wrinkly little blobs into nature?

Also, what do you do when you're in the wild with your clan, and it's not what you'd hoped for? At all?

Katie Arnold: We are on the Rio Grande on this beautiful stretch of river. And for some reason we are completely all falling apart.

Paddy: More on that, after the break.

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Paddy: When was it when you were like I am a mother. I am a parent.

Katie Arnold: I mean, when the baby came out of me.

Paddy: This is Santa Fe, New Mexico-based mother, ultra runner, author, and ���ϳԹ��� contributing editor Katie Arnold, responding to my maybe dumb question. I had lots of those.

Katie: Even when the baby's like kicking inside of you and you're basically hiking up the mountain with like two beings your worldview has not been completely dramatically altered overnight. Okay. And your time is still your own. And so it's really when the baby's born and you're like, ‘Oh, my God, I'm responsible for this creature,’ and everything shifts and mother becomes the top of the resume

Paddy: It was six years into her marriage when Katie's first daughter, Pippa, was born. And then a few years later, her second daughter Maise came along. Not too long after that, Katie started writing a rather unique parenting column for ���ϳԹ���'s website called Raising Rippers. She's since written articles on motherhood and raising healthy outdoor kids for a number of publications, as well as a memoir, Running Home. Her next book, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World, is coming out in the spring.

Prior to becoming parents, Katie says that she and her husband Steve made adventure an integral part of their relationship and knew they wanted that to be a core value for their family.

Katie: Doing the adventure life and kind of getting out as much as we could, that was who we were together. We had been drawn to each other because we were both really into doing outdoor things. And we had done tons of river trips when we were together before we got married and had kids. And it wasn't like this passing fancy. Like, oh, it's just what we're doing now. It's like who we were fundamentally. And knowing that we would want to keep that strong, strong bedrock in our marriage when we had children.

From the time they were babies, we've taken them on river trips and backcountry ski trips. This is like what we do as a family. This is how we spend time together. And these are our values is like having a relationship with the natural world, with our bodies in the natural world and with each other. And it just became a guiding principle. Really, like, you know, absolutely fundamental to,, how we saw our jobs as parents.

Paddy: Katie reassured me that wanting to be an outdoor centered parent but knowing absolutely zero about it, is just fine. Feeling totally lost at everything is just what happens to new parents. But during Katie's very first visit with her family doctor, she was given a bit of advice that has stuck with her ever since.

Katie: I'm holding this tiny baby. I must have had that, like, glassy eyed, like, exhausted, slash, like, petrified look in my face.

And I think I'd asked him a question like, can I take her to the pool or something? And I had these very like,

Paddy: Is this thing okay to get wet?

Katie: Is it like, what do I do with this? And he said, ‘take her everywhere with you.’ So don't be fussy. You know, don't think like, oh, she can't go here. Follow her lead. She's gonna let you know what she needs. It's not saying give her free rein, but just, you know, if she wants to learn how to free ski, give her that chance. But don't foist things on her. 

And then the last piece of advice was don't look anything up on the internet. Which, just brilliant, right? Because that middle of the night, you're like, why? What is wrong? The internet's going to tell you the worst.

And so I've lived those, you know, as best I can. I really, like his voice is in my head and, and it's not age dependent. Like those three things, apply to all ages and stages.

Paddy: But, wait. Does that really work when your child is just a teeny, tiny human? According to Katie, hell yes. When Pippa was just ten months old Katie and her husband took her on a five-day river trip on Utah's San Juan River, from Mexican Hat to Clay Hills. They were completely out of cell service. And Katie says she was super relaxed about it. Just kidding. She was freaking out.

Katie: I was scared shitless. I got to the put in and I was like, I'm hyperventilating. Cuz I'm thinking, what are we doing taking this baby? Like, what have we done? The river's, you know, dark and moving fast.

It was the remoteness that worried me. Like what happens if, you know, X, Y, and Z happens. And, a family comes in and they're taking off from the upper section,

And there's this woman and her partner and they have two kids in the raft and one is probably two years old and the other looks exactly like Pippa's age. And I practically like fall over myself with relief and I'm like, ‘Oh my God, how was it?’ You know, like just like terror in my eyes, like, please tell me.

And this woman is so calm. She just looks at me and she's like, it was fine. She's like, this is his second river trip, meaning the baby, like he's 10 months old. He's already been on one. And I was like, okay, we're fine. We're going to make it.

Paddy: Yeah. We're not the only ones.

Katie: I'm not insane. I'm not insane. And so there's like a moment where my heart settles and I feel like sort of vindicated. And I'm like, it's going to be okay.

We go under the bridge, you know, where the highway turns to go down to Monument Valley and you're like, that's it. No more civilization for five days.

Pippa starts crying instantly. And it's like ten, fifteen minutes of crying.

And I'm thinking, Oh my God. She could cry the entire way down river.

In that moment, you're just like, this is totally new for me. I don't know what to do. And I think I even said to Steve this could be the whole way down river.

And he's just like, maybe. And then not a minute later, she just does that thing with babies do they just like fall, you know, conk out. She's completely asleep.

So, you know, we got through it. But I think it took that moment of being like, oh shit. I don't know. I don't know how it's gonna go. But it's too late to go back upstream. You know, it's a good metaphor. It's like, you just gotta keep going. You're on the river now.

Paddy: Katie wrote about this trip in her Raising Rippers column for ���ϳԹ��� and offered readers tips on paddling with a baby, like packing a portable play crib and when to walk around rapids that might flip your boat. Most readers loved it, but some gave Katie flack, arguing that it was reckless and selfish to bring Pippa, who would never remember the experience anyway. Not surprisingly, Katie saw things differently.

Katie: It's training for us, my husband and me, to know that we can do these things. And it's hard and it kicks your ass and like the baby's crying or you're nursing like dirty river water on your breast and you're nursing.

So you're training yourself to be like, if I can change the baby on the tent floor or like zip tie the tent shut so my toddler doesn't crawl out, if I have these skills when I come home, oh my god. It feels easy.

This is what I found a lot when we were going out early when they were really little you're training yourself so that they can have a relationship with the natural world and so that it can become their normal baseline way of being. To raise like empathetic, curious, engaged humans. I believe that it goes into her. It's like an absorption.

Paddy: When it comes to parenting, I've often wondered how to walk the line between that stereotypical crunchy granola mom or dad who has zero boundaries and the overbearing helicopter parent who won't let their child out of their eyesight. When I asked Katie about this, she suggested that the same skills we use in the outdoors are actually highly relevant.

Katie: Being a parent is assessing risk, but that's also so in alignment with being an outdoors person.

Every time like you give them more room like you are having heart attacks like all the time, right? But your job is to have the heart attack and not keep them from doing what they need to do.

Early on, we wanted our kids to have an independent experience with going to school because I grew up in the suburbs in New Jersey and I walked or rode my bike every day you know. My imagination grew on those walks to school. Like, I became a writer when I was out exploring the neighborhood. So we wanted that for our kids, but you don't just start one day like in second grade being like, okay, find your way home.

I liken it to, you know, the training I do for my running. It's like you have to take these little steps and you have to put the time in and break it down.

And it's the same thing with like skiing. We would ski the bunny hill we spent, you know, endless eons on the magic carpet, and then they finally graduate and then they're on the groomers and so on and so on.

And then it's like, oh, they want to go in the trees. And did I want her to go in the trees? No, not really. I would have been real happy if she stayed on the groomers. But there's this little tree shot and I remember she's probably six years old. And I was like, shoot, thinking to myself, like, she's ready. It's time for her to do the trees and I just need to suck it up.

And then a little milestone has been reached. And then each little milestone, you're sort of, you're building your confidence as a parent as much as they're building theirs. I think that it's happening in tandem.

Paddy: Just like Steven Rinella, Katie believes that time in the outdoors positively shapes a child's character.

Katie: The wilderness and nature and having that relationship with wild places is like a ballast for them. Right? And it's a place where they feel at home and they know they're strong and they've met with adversity and kept going.

Paddy: The outdoors also teaches kids how not to be.

Katie: You can't be an asshole on a river trip. You just can't. You can't be a mean girl, because it's just not going to fly in the group.

And so my kids have this enormous capacity for kindness and for inclusivity that I sort of thought foolishly raising them here and watching them grow up and in our kind of pod of outdoor families, that that was the norm. And then you get into the wider world, and even not that far beyond, and you realize, like, there's a lot of mean kids, and a lot of kids who are exclusive, and who aren't kind, and who won't see someone who's different from them, and say, hey, come on over, you want to play, you know, frisbee? Or do you want to, you know, wallow in the quicksand with us?

One of the things we always say when we're going into the back country is like we give our little safety talk like feet downstream.

If you, you know, if you follow the boat and all that stuff. But we, the main thing I always say is like, you have to take care of yourself out here, like, aka don't do stupid shit and get yourself hurt. But, and you have to take care of each other. And that's such a profound lesson.

Being in nature, it's like a reset button. And we go out together, we're in beautiful places, we help each other. We are helped by others, you know, and, and those just life skills and lessons are completely transferable to everything.

Paddy: After speaking with both Steven RInella and Katie Arnold, I felt I had a pretty clear road map to raising inspired and passionate dirt-footed tumbleweed nature kids. But about a week after my conversation with Katie, she sent me a voice memo from the Rio Grande, in New Mexico, where her family was on yet another river trip.

Katie: We seem to be in the middle of a parent jinx. Lo and behold, I was, you know, on your show bragging about how awesome it is to be on rivers with families. And, um, right now it's kind of a hellscape. We are completely all falling apart. We are in one long extended low point. I think it's the mosquitoes.

My daughter's threatening this is our last river trip, you should know that as a soon to be parent. The parent jinx is real. That's not to say anything at all if it's going well.

Paddy: Wait, wait wait! The parent jinx?!? Oh, no. Now I'm worried all over again! That's totally happening to me, I know it.

But then, a day later, Katie sent me another voice memo. This one was reassuring. Yes, she said, things go sideways out there in the wild sometimes, but like so much of parenting, if you can laugh about it, you and your kids will probably be fine.  

Katie: Hey Paddy, I wanted to say one other thing. You are going to be an awesome dad, I just know it. You have everything it takes. And most of all, you have an awesome sense of humor and that is going to be your best tool. So you've got this.

Michael Roberts: You can learn more about Katie Arnold's writing and other work at katiearnold.net

Steven Rinella's latest book is Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars. He is also the host of the MeatEater television series and podcast.

This episode was produced by Paddy O'Connell and edited by me, Michael Roverts. Music by Robbie Carver. Special thanks to my middle child for being such a rad fishing buddy.

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by ���ϳԹ���+ subscribers. Learn more about all the benefits of a subscription and subscribe now at outsideonline.com/podplus