How Nature Can Protect Your Child’s Mental Health

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is an occupational therapist and a naturalist.

Kathleen Lockyer is also a developmental and behavioral expert, a parent coach, and founder of the nature led approach. She has more than 25 years of experience in child development, mental health, sensory integration, and trauma informed care.

Kathleen is also an author. Her latest book is called how nature protects your child's mental health and and restores yours.

She's also a mother of two and she joins us today from San Luis Obispo, California. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Hi, Leanne. Thank you so much for having me. And thanks for having this podcast for what an exceptional age group to be supporting.

Absolutely. And the topic we're talking about today really does hit home for a lot of parents in terms of modern parenting.

And you describe modern parenting as a race against time. You know, what, what would you say, in your estimation is pulling families away from what children truly need these days?

I've thought about that question a lot over the years, and I. I don't think it's any one thing, of course, but I do think that there is a real lack of a feeling of belonging for most people, parents, and then obviously their children feel that as well. And part of that comes from our disconnection from the natural world, which is what we've been conn since the beginning of time.

And I think that the more we've disconnected from nature, the less belonging we feel, which makes sense because it's been our home forever.

So when you talk to people about that topic in terms of, you know, getting reconnected to nature, what kind of reaction do you run into? Because what I often hear is, yes, I know I should. And depending on where you live, whether it can be a factor or an excuse, it all depends.

But what, what is the typical response you from people?

I think it's all over the street. You know, 20 years ago when I talked about it, the response was very lukewarm.

But today there's been so many headlines and so much work done by Richard Liu, for example, who wrote Last Child in the Woods. And I think that the headlines are now speaking to people, really seeing that this is a problem.

And then people aren't quite sure what to do about It. And that's kind of the most general response I get is, but what do we do about it?

So what do we do, Kathleen? What should we be doing?

Yeah, that's.

That's part of why I wrote Wild Inside, because I really want people to understand, parents especially, that with all ages, but teenagers especially, that it's not really necessarily about. They don't have to go on some big Outward Bound trip. It's not about going super wild.

It's about literally going right outside your door and just remembering that nature is everywhere. Even in Toronto, in the city. Recently, I visited my brother in New York City, and there was a dandelion growing in the middle of the sidewalk.

And there's just so many opportunities to remember our connection. And so it's not really about these big, grand adventures or thinking we have to take our family on a camping trip.

If that's not something we know how to do or are comfortable with. It's. It's literally about just dropping in with the nature through our senses right outside.

Is there any compelling evidence that you've run into recently with respect to the research around this that you think might be particularly relevant and resonant for parents who, you know, maybe have this on their radar but haven't really committed to it?

Yeah, I do talk about quite a bit of the more current research in wild inside. Again, 20 years ago, there was hardly anything.

Now, if you Google nature and mental health, for example, there's just hundreds of studies that come up. But one that I really like to talk about is one that just.

That really showed that 10 minutes, just 10 minutes outside really can shift so much within us, both physiologically and mentally. And so that's a really good one for people to think about because it's that micro dose of nature that is really accessible to most people.

So 10 minutes can support mental health and actually reduce symptoms of adhd, of anxiety, of depression. And so some of the biggest issues that teens are dealing with today.

Absolutely.

Now, as both an occupational therapist and a parent yourself, is there a particular point, like a tipping point, when you realize that something essential was missing from how we support children?

Yeah, that point actually came for me when I was a teenager. And I was a teenager who, at the time, I didn't realize that I was struggling with ACEs, which is adverse childhood experiences.

I know you've had some guests who've talked about that in the past, but ACES is when you have a high ACE score. That just means that you are predisposed to have a lot of health issues later in life, essentially, that's what it comes down to.

And some of those adversities really translate to toxic stress in the body, which I think most teenagers are dealing with. Whether they're from an adverse environment or a healthy environment, there's a lot of toxic stress happening.

And so for me, as a teenager, I was feeling all the things that I was feeling and struggling deeply. And I was constantly felt unsupported or invalidated.

And, you know, people were more worried about if I had done my homework assignment than if I was doing okay. And that was a real striking thing for me as a teenager. So as I grew, I was already kind of looking at that piece and wondering what that was about.

And then certainly when I had my own, my first daughter, I found right away, within the birth system, for example, that that invalidation really continued, that nobody was checking in with the mental health of the pregnant mother. They were really just kind of going through the motions.

And so it's just been a theme that I've really been asking that question for a very long time and looking at all the pieces that go into what makes a healthy human. How do we support children and teenagers? And then I had teenagers myself.

And once again, I found myself in the same place where my teens were struggling. And I was really. I felt like I was a little bit alone out there in a desert.

I was the only one saying, okay, yes, homework's important, education is important, but they're struggling in all these other ways. And I felt like I couldn't get anybody to listen to me. So I just. I. I think we deal with it throughout society.

Well, and also, we're dealing with it in vastly different ways than any of us ever experienced.

You know, to your point, as young people, ourselves on a daily basis, when you look at what's going on in the world right now for many families, many parents often see behavior as defiance of or poor choices made by a tween, a teen, a young person. What sensory or nervous system roots are we missing?

Mm. There's this conversation in the occupational therapy world and where occupational therapists are continually asked, is it sensory or is it behavior?

And I don't think it's a fair question, because most things start as a sensory experience in life. We come undeveloped, and we have to develop ourselves through our sensory systems.

And so behavior and regulation, how we regulate our bodies are built skills. We don't come automatically knowing how to behave appropriately to our culture or our society.

And we don't even come with our senses already developed. We come with everything Primed and ready. And so when we see behaviors, often they begin with a sensory origin.

And there's this belief system that most of us were raised with that children should just behave. But if they haven't developed the underlying skills necessary to behave, then all behavior can be sensory because it's developmental.

So I think it's such a big topic. There's so many examples that I. And that's a big piece that I talk about.

In Wild Inside, I cite a number of kids I've worked with over the years who have been labeled as behavioral challenges when, after spending some time with them, I was able to discover that the root causes actually began with some sensory deficits. For example, deficits with our vision. Vision isn't just about seeing acuity. So can I see you clearly? It's about how the muscles of our eyes work.

It's about can we see far, can we see near? Can we organize what we see to make sense in our brain and then know what to do with it with our bodies?

And so when we haven't had the opportunities to develop our. Our sense of sight, then we may behave in all kinds of ways that are really just trying to make up for that lack.

And it can look like behavior, for example. It can look like defiance.

It can look like looking away, pulling something over their head, hiding under a desk, not wanting to come out of a dark room.

So many different aspects that we can look at and say, oh, that's where these behaviors originated, because they were supporting the child in some way.

And then through the process of adults maybe labeling that behavior as negative, they may inadvertently kind of create worse behaviors because they're taking out, taking away those supports that the child has just naturally put in place for themselves.

Yeah.

And then, you know, and then the question then becomes, so when you talk about behavior in that way, how does exposure to nature and the things that you talked about earlier align to that, help that, or support that in some way?

Well, like I said, we come underdeveloped. And these senses that we have, we have eight that OTs, occupational therapists generally talk about.

Depending on what scientists you talk with, there might be hundreds of. But eight for the developmental conversation. And you can think of each one of our senses like an instrument.

And that instrument might look beautiful and be perfectly crafted, but unless you pick up that instrument and do something with it and do something over and over and over, it won't make nice music. And so our senses are like that, but they're not supposed to be played as individual instruments. They're supposed to be played together like a.

Like a symphony.

And so the beautiful thing about nature is when we are in nature, we are stimulated through all of our sensory, through all of our senses and our system as a whole, the way we have interacted for millennia. For example, if we hear the sound of a bird, our brain immediately tunes into that. We might look to see the bird.

We might see the bird behaving in a certain way. That certain way tells us a cat is coming. We look, and so we've made all these associations very quickly.

We might have a feeling in our body the next time we hear that. And so our senses are playing as a symphony together. And nature is just brilliant at helping us develop in that way.

When we take ourselves out of nature, what you find is our senses firing in lots of random, different ways.

So we might be watching something on tv, but we're not engaging our senses other than our vision, for example, or we might be pushing a button and hearing a noise, or we might be listening to a radio.

But those sounds on the radio don't really have context in the greater scheme of life, or there's no order to it other than the meaning of that one song in that moment.

So there's a huge difference between random stimuli, which is what we're actually getting most of these days, and the contextual stimuli of the natural world.

So then what should the baseline be for parents and families in terms of. You talked about, you know, 10 minutes a day.

Like, how does a parent who maybe hasn't prioritized that, or, you know, a tween or teen, they're off doing their own thing. How can you support them and encourage them to. To, you know, get out there and be more aligned with nature on a regular basis?

There's lots of simple daily things you can do. And again, sending our kids outside, Outward bound, great.

But sending our kids right outside the door and doing it with them, because kids are lacking connection in general, and they're craving that from their parents and from other adults. And so there's this great practice we call sit spot in the nature connection community.

And sitspot can be literally sitting on the front step outside your front door or back door, or if you live in an apartment building, sitting outside at the park, across the street, or anywhere you have access to the sunrise, the sunset, the wind. You can feel the wind outside. Anywhere you can get a piece of sensory stimuli from nature is a great spot to start a sit spot.

And at that sit spot, the best thing to do looks like nothing.

And often that's an amazing time to be with your teenager where you can just sit and feel like, you know, at some point, we got the message that just sitting and being with a child was a waste of time. And so this is a great way to remember that sitting and being with a child is not a waste of time. It's a really important use of time.

And it can be like a little brain hack where you say, oh, I'm actually doing something. I'm doing sit spot instead of I'm doing nothing.

And so sitting, closing your eyes, taking a breath, feeling the direction that the wind is coming from, from, and maybe just noticing that out loud with your teenager saying, wow, I never noticed how the wind came from that direction, or I never noticed that there was this bird here. And just starting really slow like that, just with tiny little baby steps, it seems like it's nothing.

But if you do it consistently over time, even once a week, you will likely start to notice your teen coming home and going, you know, that bird was in the tree in the front yard. And then next thing you know, you have this thread of connection between you and your teenager that wasn't before, that wasn't there before.

And you can begin a conversation from there.

Certainly something very simple that all of us can. Can do right.

Right away.

In fact, you know, small steps to. To. To make this a consistent practice. You also introduce the concept of the ecoception. What is that? And how can you.

How can a struggling parent benefit from ecoception?

Yeah, that term came up because as I thought about all of our senses, and that's a term that I made up. It's not a scientific term. I want to be clear about that.

And it's not a researched term, but it really names something that I was seeing happen consistently over and over between children and teenagers and the natural world. And it began when my daughter was about five months old and I was really struggling as a new parent. How do I help this child become a good human?

You know, And I had this moment with her where she literally leaned into the wind, and when she did that, she kind of threw her arms up in the air and she gasped over and over. She was just. And when she did that, I laughed and I thought it was so funny. And she turned to me and looked at me when I laughed.

And then she turned back to the wind and did it again. And then I laughed again, and she turned back to me.

And so this little dance happened between the wind hitting her skin, her leaning into it, turning to me, laughing. And this became this Beautiful dance. And I thought, there's something really important in that thing that's happening right there. What is it?

And so for years, I looked for the answer, what is that moment?

And then several years later, I came across the Harvard center for the Developing Child's work on the serve and return interaction, which is essentially exactly that piece that was happening between her and I. But in my mind, I saw the extension between her and the natural world with the wind.

And so I thought, oh, that's a serve and return between nature and her senses and how essential that was.

And so over the years, I watched that serve and return happen and her build and develop threads of connection with the natural world through that serve and return. And so as I was working on, actually, when I was beginning to write Wild Inside, I just kept asking myself, what was? What can I call that?

How do I explain that? And eco came into my mind because all of our other senses are stimulated.

And I thought, oh, we come with this natural ability to receive and respond to nature's stimuli, so we could just name that echoception. And so when you think about, again, each one of our senses, they are most effectively stimulated with nature stimuli.

So that's what ecoception is and where it came from to name that serve and return interaction with nature.

That is such an interesting example that you share of your lived experience.

And I wonder, you know, how influential was that experience at 5 months old with your daughter in terms of how you parented and with respect to your own lived experience that you shared earlier as a young person? And then the whole piece surrounding nature and how you view that.

Mm. How influential was that? Gosh, I would say that was everything. It was everything.

Because life for us got really complicated as a child grown up into an adult from an aces background, not realizing the effect that that would have on me as a parent until I was already deep into my parenting nature.

And that ecptive moment was always that simplest, simplest thing that I could distill everything down to and be present for a moment with my children and show them how to be present for a moment and let all the stress of the world go away for as much time as we need it over and over and over, to the point where my daughters built such an ability to tune in like that that when, you know, their dad and I went through a divorce, it was a really tough divorce. And I remember going out to the backyard one day and the story is in Wild Inside. And I had another moment with my other daughter.

She was actually preteen at the time, and she was sitting in this sling like swing that we had hanging from a tree in the backyard and she was just spinning around and around and I could see that she was so sad and having such a hard time time. And I said, I said, what are you doing out there, honey? And she goes, I'm just listening to birds, mama.

And she was entering that serve and return, that ecoseptive experience.

And so yeah, I would say that that has been a defining piece for me, not only in my parenting, but working with so many children over the years and helping them distill their own engagement with life down to that simplicity so that again, they can go find that wherever they are, whether they have a supportive adult in their life or not, they at least would have access to that experience.

And we know that those experiences do reduce stress, they do reduce anxiety, depression, and they're often lead us to moments of awe, which there has been a lot of science around in how that helps us find belonging and again reduce ADHD symptoms, depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms.

Kathleen, you know, when you talk about anxiety and depression, dysregulation, all of those things are rising. As we know we're in the midst of a global epidemic as it relates to youth mental health.

You know, challenges what and how would you go about describing what is happening in a child's mind, brain and in their body to drive this as we continue to see these numbers rise?

Yeah, once again I do see that there is a big sensory piece for our, especially when you look at the teenage years. We now have a population of children in those ages that have been raised in a mostly indoor centric life.

So they've lacked, and there's no fault on parents here, it's just our culture and how, how things have evolved. And so, but when, when we have good information, then we can do better. And so I just wanted to say that there's no judgment on parents.

I've, I've certainly had my fair share of challenging situations.

But so when you have our senses that we're supposed to develop in this concerted way in the symphony of experience, where there's context for us and our brain can then predict what is about to happen. Because as Lisa Feldman Barrett, I don't know if you know her work, she's a brilliant neuroscientist.

She's my favorite neuroscientist and she helps us understand, understand that our brains are not wired to respond or react to the world. They're actually wired to predict.

And when we have well developed sensory system that can see the world in context, then our brains get better and better at predicting what's next, and that reduces anxiety.

And so the more we can engage our senses and help our brain understand the bigger picture of the world around us, literally the world around us, then the less anxiety we will experience.

So nature, again helps us connect in, develop those senses, create a contextual experience for our children, and then at least be able to have touch in moments throughout their day where something makes sense neurologically to them. Again, the sound of a bird outside. All of a sudden it goes from a random noise when you start tuning into it to an experience that is calming.

It's so true, as you're talking about that I'm just thinking about, you know, what happens when, when you do hear birds outside or you just hear natural noises outside.

It.

It does give you a moment of pause whether you, you know, react to it right away or not. Kathleen, what would you say was the impetus for you to write Wild Inside? Mm.

I have a little line on the back of the book that says a parenting book for the rest of us. And that just.

That really encapsulates why I wrote it, because when I became a parent, I was really a research reading junkie at that point, because I knew enough about myself to know that there was a lot I didn't know about raising a healthy kid. Even though I put myself through college and learned a lot there, there was still a lot.

And so I was reading all these books and I felt like most of the books, although there was lots of good information, I didn't find a book that spoke to this big arc of being a parent.

This not just the emotion or not just the young child age or the teenage years, but what does that look like in the bigger person perspective, in the whole story? What's the whole story? And what do you do when, you know, there's books about what to do when and when you're expecting? And I wasn't expecting.

It was a surprise for me. I was like, well, what about me? And so over the years, I still couldn't find that book. And so I thought, I'm just going to write that book.

And I wanted to write something to speak to parents who maybe didn't have the best childhood, but also didn't want to blame or shame, wanted to understand why that was and.

And how that actually created their habits and their roles in life and their choices and how they might even change that and support their own kids in changing the trajectory for themselves. So kind of, how do you heal when you're growing Humans.

Yeah.

And so on that note, what would you say is one small step that a parent can make, that a family can make right away today with respect to what we're talking about here, especially if they are struggling, especially if they have a child, regardless of age, tween teen, young adult, who might be struggling with some of the issues that we've outlined here, anxiety, depression, etc. What small step can a parent take to kind of, to your point, change that trajectory?

The first thing is to breathe. To breathe.

I think it's important for parents to understand that they do have a voice and they can trust it and listen to it when they give themselves a little space to do it. And so, although there's lots of great professionals out there, I consider myself one.

You know, your child is telling you all the time, they're giving you signals. And that's where nature led came in too.

It's not necessarily about being child led, but about looking at how did we develop to get to the point where we're at, how do we evolve? What are our evolved needs? And because that's a million year old evolution and program running in us, it's strong.

And so children will tell us through things that look like behaviors, what they need.

And so instead of placing a thought that it needs to be changed or fixed in the child to actually be curious about it and to just sit for a moment in curiosity and wonder what is this about for them? You know, what are they, what's going on here is. And, and to remember that it's okay not to know. I like to say nature knows.

And when we go outside, we're often really shown through nature what the child needs. They might seek out something to climb on and that might be an indicator that they need more movement.

They might want to just sit still and do nothing.

That might be an indication they need some cool quiet and they need some space to follow their lead a little bit and to trust that there's this million year old program running inside them.

What you just outlined there really is rooted in large part in parents slowing down themselves in order to support their child in different ways. Like what does that look like in everyday practice? Because it's different for different people.

But you know, sometimes it's hard to stop that wheel that you're on. You're just, you know, in that hamster wheel, churning it out, you know, running, running, running.

What can you offer to parents in terms of how to actively, intentionally address that?

Well, I think you spoke to it just now really well. It's it's really important that parents begin with themselves because children regulate in relationship to everything outside of themselves.

So, for example, if it's hot out, their body wants to downregulate to cool itself off. If it's cold out, it needs to upregulate.

If everything around them is stressed, the adults around them are stressed, then it's going to affect the child. They're going to be stressed.

There's a concept in the natural world called entrainment, and it really speaks to us neurologically how we kind of our neurological system lines up with everything going on around us.

And so to first find a moment for themselves, and that could literally be a moment where they just feel a calmness that they might not feel in the rest of the day. So some parents, I. Some parents, I say step outside and brush your teeth if you're, you know, if you're in a house where you can get outside easily.

If. If you're in an apartment, open a window and brush your teeth and just listen. See if you can hear wind in the leaves.

See if you can see this where the sun's rising.

Just see if you can touch in with one element of nature at one point in the day and begin there, because as you do that, then you will naturally be able to then start doing that with your child or even just modeling it for your child, because children learn through modeling. And I'm sure you've talked about that with a lot of your guests.

Absolutely.

Finally, Kathleen, if there's one message you want parents who have watched or listened to this interview that you'd like them to take away from it, what. What would that be?

I'd like parents to remember because it's in all of us. I'd like them to really remember how nature isn't just a nice to have. It's a. It's a necessary. It's a. It's an essential element of our being.

We're embodied creatures and on the earth.

And so when children get to tap back in with that embodiment and with the natural world, then they begin to feel a sense of belonging in the world again, regardless of the craziness going on out there in modern times. And so if there's one thing that you can do for your child, it's help them reconnect with the thing that made us human in the first place.

A wonderful, optimistic, hopeful note to end on. Kathleen Lock here, occupational therapist, naturalist, and author of Wild Inside. Really appreciate your time and your perspective today. Thank you.

Thank you, Leanne. I appreciate yours, too. Thank you.

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