 A lot of people today are afraid of nature and they teach their children to be afraid of nature and they tell them never eat anything from the land. Today I'm really excited to have Kenton and his family on the channel who are a foraging family and they are going to share 10 tips for foraging with children. Here they are. Hello, I'm Kenton. I'm Rebecca. We're the founders of Rewild University and we're parents. Yep, definitely. One of our favorite things to do with kids is to go out foraging, to find free, delicious, amazingly nutritious food right in your backyard. It gives us a lot of time together as a family, time outside in nature and we get to cook some incredible meals together. Here are 10 tips on how to get started foraging with your family. Number one, make the whole experience child led. This is because it's great to get kids excited and involved. We want to motivate them to want to do it. Kids have a natural curiosity about the world and if we can cultivate that in them, then it just grows and grows. A lot of times we can knock that curiosity down by just being a little bit too grown up about things. If we go out and we say, alright, here's a plant, I do not want you to come back inside and tell you you have memorized the Latin name, the chemical constituents, or... Boring. I think it's far better to ask the kids, what do you think this plant is? Do you know the name of it? What can you tell me about it? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? If they know it's edible, what does it taste like? Help them get into their senses to really experience that plant firsthand. Then when you add a name onto it, you're already intimate with it. If you do this well, kids are going to have such a love of foraging that they may be dragging you outside to go foraging with them instead of the other way around. Number two, when you first start foraging, start with some plants that are yummy. There's a lot of plants out there that are marginally edible, not toxic, but they don't really taste very good. Start with some that are delicious and you'll have kids hooked. For example, would be wood sorrel, that's tart, easy to identify. Another one that's excellent to start with are edible flowers. If you want an easy starter flower, dandelion steps right into that roll. If you take some dandelion and separate it from any of the green, it's going to have a sweet flavor. If you put two or three of those bunches in your mouth, it becomes a sort of dandelion chewing gum that a lot of kids really enjoy. Number three is forage as a family. Get as many of your family members together as possible and all go out at the same time. Be conscious about this, that it's a time of togetherness and exploration out in the woods. So make it something that's special and fun. Number four, part of foraging is taking the plants home and cooking with them. If you make children part of that cooking process, then they get even more involved with the whole foraging to table experience. Make sure to cook things that taste really yummy with wild foods. A lot of times lemon and a little olive oil or some sea salt is fun, but each thing has its own special flavor and it's fun to taste that after you've gathered it. And then of course, be sure to say thank you to your kids for helping make the whole meal possible. That empowers them with the sense of having brought food to the table, which is ancestrally and today a really powerful motivator. Number five, one of the biggest things that people worry about is safety, which makes complete sense. Is your kid going to go out and eat something and die? So with really young kids or certain children that just have a tendency to really explore their world, you might want to pay close attention, but I haven't ever seen older kids go and randomly grab and eat things. They're usually coming and asking questions. That's part of that child led experience where they want to know something before they just ingest something. And it's important that you share with your kids what the toxic plants are and learn how to ID them, but not to be fearful of them. Be respectful and learn about those plants as well. Each of those toxic plants is actually an important part of its environment. So as you learn about the different toxic plants in your fields and forests, learn what pollinators rely on them, how they contribute to soil health, or the general ecology of the area and share that with your children. A lot of medicines these days do come from some of these plants, so it's interesting to know that they are helpful, just not necessarily edible. I want to know how do I make sure my child isn't going to eat something that he or she shouldn't be? What we have done in our family is just ever since the girls were little, we've gone on foraging adventures together. We've pointed out the things that they shouldn't eat, and we've pointed out things that they can eat. And we've always asked them to start by bringing us a leaf or a flower and showing us and remembering what plants it came from. For example, if they bring a leaf, we often might say, hmm, this is only part of a leaf. Which plant is it from? And then they point to me, see, oh, that is actually a dandelion. Yes, you can eat that. Over time, they become comfortable with that. And over time, we, as parents, see, oh, my child really does know what a dandelion plant is and what a dandelion plant is not. And at that point, we start to feel more comfortable, yes, you may eat a dandelion. We've made it something that we are intimate with. Intimacy is what it's all about. You probably feel confident that your child can identify a carrot. The carrot comes from one of the most toxic families of plants that there is. And for foragers, if something's in the carrot family, we're often saying, oh, we want to be really familiar with it. And yet, again, it's something that your child is familiar with and can positively ID. We can become that intimate with any plant. We just do it through repetition and making the plant part of our diet and really just getting to know it by taste, by texture, by smell. Make all plants friends and then you know which are used for which thing. Number six is use foraging as a gateway into the natural world. Our youngest daughter, Liliana, when we go into the woods with her foraging, she often will get quite distracted by, say, a toad or chasing a snake or a butterfly or a dragon fly. Yeah, running after a baby rabbit. Who knows what? This is part of number one, which was making things child-led, is to remember that as we take children out foraging, it's not just about getting a certain amount of greens and bringing them back to the table. It's about togetherness. It's about developing a connection with nature. Tip number seven is become regulars. Make this something you do every day and it doesn't have to be a huge long expedition, although it could be. It could be something as simple as going to gather some wild mint to make a cup of tea in the morning. One wild food a day gets you learning your plants, gets you that intimacy and makes it a regular part of your life. The amount of nutrition packed into these wild plants is incredible because most of them are growing in soil that's really, really healthy. So even just adding a couple leaves to a salad or to a stew or a few wild berries, it's going to add this huge boost of nutrition to your family's diet. Number eight is to have one or two or three really good ID guides and teach the children how to use those ID guides. In addition to that, it's great to encourage kids to learn about people out there who are using wild foods as part of their job and their everyday life. You have forager chefs like Alan Bergo and people like Rob Greenfield who are using wild food all the time and so you can really learn a lot from them because they are completely immersed in it. Tip number nine is once your kids are comfortable with some of the plants they know and you're comfortable with their ability, let them become teachers. Have them show a grandparent how to add a few dandelion leaves to a stew or pick a violet flower and notice its flavor. It's a great way for them to be able to continue to learn more about plants. As you probably know when we step into the role of a teacher, we often become better students. So when a child is showing somebody how to identify wood sorrow, they're going to have to really pay attention to the details in order to communicate those details to someone else and that sets the knowledge in even deeper. Number ten is realize that these plants have many other uses besides just being foods. So do some other things with them. Make some cordage. Go look for those bugs that thrive on the plants. Milkweed, look for monarchs at all different stages of their life. The painting you can do just using, well you have a blank sheet of paper and dandelion. Yeah, it grabs some violets, blue grass for green, so paint with nature. There's all sorts of different things that plants allow us to do in our lives and it's so fun. It opens up a world of possibilities for you and your family to have some really fun, free and enjoyable time together. And here's a bonus one. Just do it. Get out, do some foraging, taste some different plants, get to know them. You're going to have fun as a family. You're going to add nutrition to your diet and just have a great time learning together. These types of activities foster a love of nature in our children. And that translates directly into the ethics that a lot of us would like them to see. For instance, we can teach them about when they go out in forage to do so sustainably, but as they develop that love of nature and that awareness, they'll start to think of that themselves and develop those nature ethics as an extension of all this nature fun that you're having together as a family. Kenton and his family are truly wonderful people and it's so great to see their connection to the earth. It is so genuine. I have had the chance to go foraging with them myself and the kids were just so in love with being connected to their food and eating the food that they foraged themselves. So I hope you got a lot out of this video. If you did, make sure to subscribe to their channel where they have a lot more inspiration and education. And make sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already, where I will have many more videos to come to help you live more happily, healthfully and full of sustainability. I love you all very much and I'll see you again real soon.