As parents, we often desire to seek creative and meaningful ways to connect with our kids. It’s an aspiration to share new, fun, and important things with young minds to help them excel and find joy in their growth. That’s the aim.
Teaching practical life sustainability skills is one of many ways we can bring up our children to be capable while showing them love and care throughout the process.
We live in an era that affords many luxuries and comforts. The more technology progresses, the less we find we need. But there are still fundamental needs that we must be able to access if technology should ever fail us. That’s why the act of showing survival skills to your kids can promote closeness with them and also round them out to face any possible hazards and emergencies.
Let’s dive into some of the ways you can grow closer with your child while simultaneously equipping them to be independent and helpful.
Share With Them The Importance of Learning Survival Skills
In order to impart helpful tips and practical methods for surviving, you first need to do a little attitude probing with your child.
Sit down with them and explore their survival aspirations with them. What excites them about learning to survive? Is it the thrill and satisfaction of foraging, hunting, or growing their own food? Is it understanding first aid? Is it knowing how to build and maintain temporary structures and shelters?
Gauge how aware your child is of different categories of disasters, hazards, and injuries they could face, and then fill them in on anything they appear to be lacking. Filling their mental library of survival needs will help them understand what they need to ask you for help with, and it will help them recognize what useful skills or knowledge they need to know more about.
Once they can get a grasp of why they need to learn about certain topics like shelter, food, clean water, first aid, which plant life and animals to avoid, how to recognize certain illnesses, and other basic fundamentals, they will understand the consequences of neglecting them or not being sufficiently prepared for them.
For example, not every child will associate dehydration with a loss of cognitive thinking ability and slowness. They might at first just think that dehydration means you’re thirsty. But there are numerous setbacks to dehydration that can lead to increasingly worse outcomes if they don’t anticipate it and prepare ahead of time to stay hydrated.
Posterity Through Teaching Survival Skills
Part of the duty of a parent is to coach and guide their child to learn new things. Teaching them practical skills will not only help prepare them for emergencies and independent living but will also show them that you care about their well-being.
This, in turn, will illustrate to your child the object of harnessing survival skills with you. If they can recognize your effort to show them what you know and what they need to know to survive, it will signal to them that their life is meaningful and worth preserving (i.e., surviving). It can also equip them to help preserve others that they care about when they are in need.
It becomes a chain of extending help and survivability to not just your own children but to your possible grandchildren, their children, and so on.
Engaging Them Through Practical Examples and Applications
Some children thrive by practical application and tactile examples. A way of reinforcing survival skills is to walk them through the tangible steps of each topic you share with them.
In other words, get out there and walk the walk.
You can connect with your child on a much more sensory level by having them watch, touch, smell, hear, and taste different survival methods:
- Water: Finding and purifying water is one of the barest essentials one needs when attempting to survive. It’s the lifeblood of the human organism and needs to be the number one priority above all else.
- Shelter: Show them how you would construct a shelter using whichever systems you know. If you’ve never constructed an outdoor shelter before from scratch, now’s the perfect time to learn together.
- Food: If you already know how to hunt, then sharing that hobby/skill with your kids can be a huge bonding activity that also yields practical results for food and clothing, but in the case that hunting is a foreign topic for you, begin guiding your kids to how to forage. Help them understand which plants, berries, and fungi are safe to consume and which to stay far away from. You might also teach them the basics of gardening and sowing small crops in contained spaces.
- Fire: going hand-in-hand with shelter is knowing how to make fire and the various methods to do so. The help of some tools can make the process easier, but try teaching your kids to make fire from the scarcest resources they can find in the wild, such as splintered wood and sticks.
- First Aid: Neither you nor your kids need a medical degree to be able to address basic injuries, illnesses, and emergencies. Practice identifying possible illnesses and what remedies can be applied to treat those illnesses. Practice suturing open wounds on a stuffed doll with needle and thread, applying a tourniquet, and treating burns or bites.
Establishing the Basics of Resource Conservation
One way you can help grow with your kids is to teach them the benefits of conserving resources as much as possible. There comes a sort of satisfaction when you manage to accomplish something while utilizing less. That same pleasure can be shared with your kids when they realize they can be just as functional at something while consuming less at the same time.
Take saving water, for example. Adults know that it’s wasteful to keep the water running while they brush their teeth or in taking excessively long showers. One could simply just tell their kids not to waste water by not doing those things, or you could express to them why they should desire not to waste that water in the first place.
Maybe it’s first by explaining that not all regions of the world have the same level of access to fresh water that others do and that it’s a privilege to have ample amounts of water. Or perhaps it’s by communicating to them how many gallons they can save each year by not leaving the tap running while they brush (upwards of 10 gallons per day for a whole family)!
You can also teach your child the importance of eating modestly not just for dietary health benefits but for longevity’s sake as well.
Encouraging your kids not to overeat will help them appreciate food more and abuse it less. That way, in situations where food is sparser than they’re used to, they’ll be mentally prepared to indulge less.
You can do this by challenging yourself and them at the dinner table to eat what they’re given but resisting the impulse to grab seconds. You can also experiment by taking out certain accents to the dinner table, like salt, pepper, or butter.
You might already be challenged by getting your kids to eat everything on their plate in the first place, but presenting it in a way that its an accomplishment to be able to eat sustainably while consuming smaller portions could be motivating for some children, provided they are still eating a sufficient amount to stay properly nourished.
You might even explore the idea of fasting for survival with your kids for twelve hours to train them to overcome hunger over long durations. This exercise can be physically challenging and may lead to a disgruntled mood here and there, but taking on the challenge as a family can be a great way of expanding your mental fortitude boundaries together. After all, it can be a bonding technique simply by sharing in the same trial together, and the sense of shared pride and accomplishment will be remembered by each member of the family.
Bonding With Your Kids Through Hunting
Hunting remains an incredibly popular sport, if not just a means of providing food. Thankfully, it’s one of those skills that can have practical use when trying to live self-sufficiently.
Not every child will enjoy hunting, but it can still build their character if you choose to take them hunting. Even if it’s not their preferred choice of hobby, you can still share meaningful memories with them while on a hunt.
Teaching your child to safely respect a firearm and the wildlife you are hunting are the pillars of being a responsible hunter. It can be a hugely meaningful activity that you share with your kid as it becomes a stage for them to grow in self-discipline, such as patience and vigilance. It can also provide solace by embracing nature and its elements. When your child can watch you become calm and tranquil in waiting during a hunt, they can learn from you the value of patience and the reward that comes with it.
Connecting Through Their Preferred Hobby
One of the best ways you can connect with your child is to identify what draws them to want to learn, What motivates them?
If your child enjoys camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, boating, or anything related to survival, don’t neglect it! Steer into what they enjoy, even if it wasn’t a hobby you might have chosen for yourself initially.
It’s ok to share your own interests with your kids, but it’s important to share the attention with what resonates with them as well. That includes spending time doing what they enjoy doing. Maybe it’s not your first choice to spend time learning survival strategies, but if it’s something your kid enjoys, don’t miss the opportunity to share it with them.
After all, survival never has to be a solitary thing. Part of what makes survival palatable for most is sharing struggles with others. That’s how you can support your child in their hobby; by sharing it with them.
Building the Bond
A lot of what helps children bond with their siblings and parents is to be both the giver and receiver of respect.
Part of helping kids establish the meaning of survival readiness and bonding with them in the process is to understand why they want to survive and how they can contribute to their own survival and help others to survive as well.
Kids want to be helpful, and they want to feel useful. That’s why teaching them survival skills can equip them with practical knowledge to help others when needed.
By letting your kids be involved with disaster readiness and prepping their own home, they can feel like a part of the puzzle that helped to build the safety net they need.
In so doing, they will feel closer to each other person that also put effort into being ready. Much like preparing the house for company, the entire family will pitch in to clean the house and prepare a meal. It’s not far off from how children want to be utilized when they go camping off-grid. Kids will be eager to help their parents in any way they can, and it’s important to recognize and respond to that eagerness.
Putting The Pieces Together
I hope that you can see the bounty of opportunities available for families to bond through surviving together.
Remember to maintain gentleness with your kids. Don’t give them the impression that survival tactics are doom and gloom. Help them to understand that the ability to anticipate hurdles and challenges and knowing how to handle them is an attractive ability to have.
Remind them that they should want to one day be able to look after and care for others the same way they’re looked after and cared for now.
In the end, surviving together won’t feel like surviving anymore — it will inevitably become thriving.
[Note: This was a guest post.]
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