Families in the forest: guilt trips, bonding moments and potential springboards

Abstract

The article is based upon practitioner research supported by the BIG Lottery funded Good from Woods programme that aimed to develop research capacity in the third sector and explore social cohesion and well-being outcomes derived from woodland activities. The location of the research was the Family Places project run by the UK National Trust, which organized family friendly activities in woodland. Using interviews and fieldnotes, our research found that popular discourse around children's disconnection from nature was experienced as a pressure by some parents who sought opportunities to reduce ‘guilt’. An English cultural tendency to romanticize ‘natural childhood’ may underpin parental references to their own outdoor childhoods and explain some parents’ expressed desires to offer nature opportunities for their children through shared experience. The intervention seemed to alleviate pressure to provide positive outdoor experiences, engendering both self-confidence as ‘competent parents’ in guided events and possibly stimulating independent family engagement with nature.