Creating a Soulcentric and Ecocentric Family Lifestyle

Give your children lots of exploration time in wild places; helping them to cultivate their relationships with their bodies, imaginations, and emotions; and tell them stories rich with virtues, values, ecocentric moral lessons, and imaginative possibilities.

Cultivate in your children an awareness of and appreciation of all emotions yours and theirs. Each emotion, when felt, respected, expressed, and explored holds a treasure, a gift, for the whole family.

Hold regular family meetings to discuss important family issues meetings in which authentic dialogue can take place. Learn and use a council format for these meetings.

Spend time in nature with your children: Learn the different leaves, needles, seeds, fruit, and barks of trees; identify types and parts of flowers; draw or paint flowers, trees, animals, lakes, streams, forests, mountains; or make up songs and dances that celebrate natural things. You can also watch birds and mammals (with and without binoculars); visit uncrowded beaches, forests, canyons, deserts; play hide and seek in those places; camp; or fish. Or you might collect feathers, bones, or stones where this is environmentally tenable; gather plants or fruit; or plant and tend a garden.

Nothing substitutes for frequent unmediated contact between children and wildlife in natural habitats, contact that is spontaneous, intimate, and visceral. The emphasis should not be on the rarely seen, aloof animals, but rather on the often smaller, more common wild beings a flock of ducks, a swarm of termites, an army of leaf-cutting ants, a community of ground squirrels. This way, the child experiences the magic in nature everywhere, not merely in the exotic and rare. Also beware of traditional zoos that cage and traumatise animals, treating them as mere spectacles for human entertainment.

Invaluable are nature stories told by elders with a lifetime of intimate relationships with the local plants and animals.

If you have limited access to untamed nature, the next best thing might be naturalised playgrounds at schools, which use the landscape its vegetation and materials as the play setting, and are designed to be as wild as possible and to stimulate children's natural curiosity, imagination, and wonder. Basic elements include water; indigenous vegetation; small animals; ponds and their aquatic life; butterflies and bugs; sand; natural places that children can sit in, on, under, lean against, and climb, and that provide shelter and shade; places that offer socialisation, privacy, and views; and structures and materials that can be changed and manipulated by children, including lots of loose parts.

Encourage active life-making rather than passive life-watching. For example, support kids in making music rather than just listening to it.

Find opportunities in the community for the family to volunteer its time and talents in support of other people, animals, or habitats. This helps children feel good about themselves because they experience their usefulness and connection to a bigger world.

Create ceremonies and rituals that celebrate your family relationships, significant human passages, the seasons, dawn and dusk, your home bioregion and its more-than-human-community, and Earth more generally.

Develop ongoing relationships with sacred places, specific ones, both natural and cultural. Visit those places regularly as a family.

Formal education: Over the past three or four decades, some public and private schools have remembered that the word education actually means to draw out (rather than fill up). These schools appreciate and accommodate different learning styles, invite children to think critically and creatively, emphasise project-based and place-based learning, and provide plenty of opportunities for feeling, imagining, and cultivating the senses. If you have the economic resources as well as the educational options in your community, carefully select the schools to which you send your children. If there is not yet a desirable school in your community, seek out other parents who would join you in creating one. Some parents are able to provide part-time or full-time home schooling.

Cultivate a true community with like-minded neighbours, a community that includes people in as many stages of development as possible. Gather with others and explore the roles of education, politics, religion, food, ceremony, mythology, and cosmology within your community. Only through community and united action can we create a more ecologically sustainable and culturally sound world.