Cold! Keeping Morale Up for Adults and Families When Winter Backpacking, Climbing, and Camping

I don’t like giving up on objectives. I can have a tendency to just put my head down and push through all kinds of - frankly - inappropriate suffering in order to achieve a goal.

And while I do not want my kids to inherit something too extreme, I do want my kids to develop resilience, a work ethic, and a healthy tenacity. But like with so many other things in life, it’s about balance. Not everything needs to be pushed through. Physical trainers will, for example, as the athletes they train to distinguish between pain and injury. One is a signal that could mean injury or could mean your body adapting. The other is one of those two results, and is not something to be ignored.

Towards the end of this video, I talk about my needing to be willing to abandon my own expectations of how an outing should go, especially when kids are involved. I firmly believe this while also acknowledging that it’s hard to do. Sure, first of all it’s hard just because we all have goals and such - and like I said, I don’t like quitting on goals. But it is also hard because it is difficult to know when to help push our children just a little out of their comfort zones when you know they are capable of more versus when to back off and give the the sense of control and agency to allow them to shape their own wants and needs.

That’s kind of the big parenting dilemma in a nut shell, right? When do you guide them - in all the forms guidance takes - and when do you just let them go and make their own self-determining decisions.

To me, this dilemma is at the hart of a parallel dilemma about sharing the outdoor adventure “games” with my kids. It is very important to me that they want to be there in order to achieve some kind of intrinsically motivated ends. And that means doing it for them - certainly not to please me. And the only way I’ve found to do that is to have honest conversations about goals and the tradeoffs achieving those goals are going to take. Our kids have to want to be there, so that when I do make the decision to push them a bit, I can be confident that they are wanting to be pushed; sure, maybe not in that moment, but in the long term.

Otherwise, I am imposing goals and desires upon them. So, the less stressful couch times and dinner conversations play a big role in helping empower my kids, too. Those are the times when I know I can hear the truth about their wants and desires. That’s when I begin to plant the seeds of the next adventure, because it will be designed by them - through those conversations.

So, really, it is everything I describe in the video, taken together - the whole package of interactions I have with my kids - that help me draw the lines on this big parental balancing dilemma. If I remove any one ingredient, I can fall into traps of parental imposition.

It’s a practice. I don’t always get it right, but I get it right more than I don’t. And it gets better as they continue to age and express themselves and their wants more confidently.

When I talked about “acknowledgement, empathy, and framed choices,” it gets a lot bigger than just trips in the outdoors; it’s really what listening and guiding as a parent is all about. Isn’t it?