Giving Your Child a Love for Adventure

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Find them at focusonthefamily.com slash kids mags. My favorite trip was when my husband and I went to Hawaii and we got to feed the sting rays. So one of the things our family really enjoys is camping and just being outdoors in nature whether that's in the forest or out on the beach somewhere. Over my 11th birthday my family had the opportunity to go spend a few days at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville and if you've ever been there you know it is amazing and it was very exciting.

We went camping one summer at the it's down at the Bug Museum which is across from Fort Carson and the kids absolutely loved the hundreds of thousands of bugs. One of my favorite family vacations was going to the Grand Canyon and I'll never forget when we got to stargaze at the clear nighttime sky it was so beautiful. Well having adventures are some of the best ways to strengthen those relationships within your family and maybe your adventure this summer is going to be a special trip or something as simple as going on a nature walk with your kids.

However it goes for you every day can provide the opportunities for special memories to be made. Today on Focus on the Family we're going to be exploring ways that you can have family adventures in a meaningful way with your kids and your host is Focus president and author Jim Daly. Thanks for joining us I'm John Fuller. Hey John for years you know this my family enjoyed camping trips. Jean and I think that was the best thing we ever did to bond as a family.

It had some funny moments I mean the banging of my head on those slide outs and everything else they're forgetting to shut the toilet valves and then realizing uh-oh and the kids loved it. They howled and laughed at me constantly pretty much and something you alluded to John is that adventures don't have to be big you know you don't have to get that camper. We were able to do that and it was a lot of fun but you can do so many other things to experience a great adventure and we're going to talk today about how you can do that on the cheap really. Yeah and we heard some of the things in that opening clip that are local here the the things that you the Bug Museum.

Yeah that's fun we've been there. There's some great things you can do and Greta Eskridge is going to help us all think a little bit more creatively about the the coming summer. She's an author and blogger and has written a book called adventuring together how to create connections and make lasting memories with your kids and of course we do have that here focused on the family dot com slash broadcast or call 800 the letter a in the word family and Greta and her husband Aaron have four kids and we're so glad to have her here. Greta welcome to Focus.

Thank you I'm thrilled to be here. It's really good to have you uh for the moms and dads in the audience uh four kids how old are they? They're 17, 15, 13 and 10. What a wonderful thing I just think that's great those are good years.

They are it's crazy but it's good. You've loved adventure I think your whole life it's something I believe your parents really instilled in you in fact you mentioned a rather life-changing trip that you took with your dad what what happened? When I was 16 my dad and I went to India for six weeks. Now what prompted that I mean did he just have this desire to do that or was it a missions trip or? My dad's a pastor and he had gone on a previous mission trip to Indonesia and he had an opportunity to go to India and he wanted to bring me along and just change my world and show me Jesus in new ways and it did.

And it's a great thing to do that's one of the things Jean and I attempted to do as many missions trips as we could and I'd encourage parents to do that. What was that impact as a 16 year old girl? What impression did it make on you? Oh gosh it truly was life-changing. I had such a new appreciation for things as simple as a refrigerator, carpet, running toilets, ice cubes. Yeah it was it was just so so simple things to learn to be grateful and to not take those things for granted but also it helped me connect with people in new ways people that that I would seemingly have no ability to connect with because we were so different our lives were so different spoke different languages all of those things but because we could talk to one another and meet each other face to face we were able to forge these bonds and it was really remarkable. Yeah it's something and it's a great lesson definitely. Now that's a big adventure and you know not everybody can do that for all kinds of reasons it can be a little expensive but what's your definition of adventure because that's all over the map for parents. Right well I think one of the really important things to remember about that particular trip was that was my first flight as a 16 year old it was my first time leaving the country it was my first time leaving the state of California where I grew up so prior to that we did small adventures all the time going on bike rides going on hikes near our home even taking a trip to the dump to get rid of junk was an adventure so so the adventures can be small it's not the size of the adventure it's just the opportunity to connect while you're doing it it's getting out of the everyday routine that is the adventure. Let me ask you this because it is simple but it's often outside of our grasp as parents for some reason it's either our schedule we're busy or we don't stop to think about how do we illuminate our kids world a little bit like you said it doesn't have to be expensive so how does a parent get into a better place to think somewhat like a child you know to think going to the dump could be fun I mean by the time you're a parent you're going no that doesn't sound like fun so how does a parent maintain that kind of attitude to say oh that could be interesting if I set it up a certain way. I love what you said about looking at the world like a child it's one of my favorite things about little kids is everything is wonderful everything is fascinating and exciting just yesterday we were here in Colorado Springs and we went to Garden of the Gods and there was a little boy he looked like he was about five and he saw a big rock and and he could step inside there was like a crevice of the rock and he said let's go exploring and he was so excited about a crevice and a rock and if we can have that attitude as parents and we can remember that it doesn't take a trip to Disney World to excite our kids they can have the opportunity to climb on a rock and it will rock their world yeah sorry I had to do the pun yeah that's good I like it I got it that that is an amazing gift to give our kids and to step into that mode as a parent it really I think lightens our load we don't have to plan something extravagant we just need to get down on their level and see what they like and what lights them up yeah it does take an attitude adjustment I think because we get down to the budget and work and all the to-do's we have to do and you've got to kind of pull yourself out of that intentionally and think about what's a way that we could have fun this weekend let me ask you in the book you mentioned this idea of stretching probably both yourself and your kids what were you getting at with using adventures to stretch yourself well I think that discomfort is something that we genuinely and generally try to avoid but discomfort can be a real gift I think discomfort draws us to God because we think oh I can't do this on my own I need outside help I need God discomfort draws us to one another because we realize we have to rely on one another so discomfort is really connecting it connects us to God it connects us to each other as a family we want that so much and discomfort also helps us realize that we can do hard things so discomfort that stretching is a gift and one of my favorite things about all the adventures we take is to embrace the misadventure like you said at the beginning of our talk here about the things that went wrong and they make great stories later that's what we'll say as a family when things go wrong later yes like in the midst we may be like frustrated but we say it will make a great story later and we sort of hang on to that as the hope that we can get through and it always does we laugh about it later and those are like those are the tales of our family right our our epic adventures that were kind of a flop were really bad in the moment but they turn into such great stories and memories later on yeah they really do you had an outside the comfort zone and i this one is really interesting to me the the bus trip in downtown la with other moms and kids yes i was kind of i winced a little bit with that one because safety i mean how do you balance having an adventure and thinking about kids being safe and what did you do on the bus trip well i think for that particular one it definitely was a stretching because we were riding like public transportation into downtown la on purpose on purpose with lots of little kids for the first time what can go wrong with all of us nothing um but we were all together and we were a big group so so i think that that safety helped it wouldn't have been something i would have tried on my own with a five three and one year old and you know um but you had a gang of kids yeah we have lots of moms and we did it all together um it was growing and stretching and uncomfortable at times but also such a valuable learning experience one of the particular things that was difficult was at one moment on the the train it was just us and a person who was clearly homeless and they were um hidden under layers of blankets sitting in a wheelchair and all we could see was the feet sticking out underneath and um as you can imagine someone who doesn't have access to uh bathing facilities the the odor was strong and it was hard for our kids and we had kids that were five and three and and everyone noticed and and so it was a moment for us to gather with our kids all the moms huddled with their kids and and we helped them have compassion for this person who was obviously living in really difficult circumstances but also as moms we could have compassion for the person and compassion for our kids how do we handle it with grace it was a growing experience but it was good greta let's talk about technology that can be a huge distraction today here at focus we do a lot of programs on technology and the kids use of technology and frankly the parents use of technology and of course you see it at restaurants you see it in your home you know everybody's sitting with their own screen and hardly anybody's interacting how do you recommend we overcome that challenge of connecting as a family and not through our devices that's one of the the biggest driving forces for why i wrote this book because i think that we are so distracted we just live in a distracted and disconnected time and i think a lot of times technology gives us a false sense of connection because we feel like through social media we're connecting with other people but it's not a true connection and so if we can get away from the screens and do something that really um fosters that face-to-face connection we're giving a gift to our kids we're teaching them that it matters and i think that when we invite our kids to do something that is actually engaging we're not just throwing down the gauntlet and saying no more technology but then we don't offer them anything in exchange that's not a very that's not a very engaging opportunity well and that takes effort right but if instead we say hey we're gonna go on a hike today we're gonna go experience something new we're gonna do something different that's an invitation that's exciting in exchange so i think the technology has a powerful lure we need to have a powerful lure with the invitation to adventure and to connect in a new way in your book adventuring together you identified some common parental mistakes that we make you're touching on one right there that we ask them not to do something but don't provide an alternative what are some of the other things that we do as parents that we need to be mindful of well one of my favorites is as parents we often think as our kids grow up they reach the teenage years that they don't want to connect with us they don't want to have that time and i think that that's just not the truth in fact when my kids were little i would often be at the store you know with a five-year-old a three-year-old a one-year-old i was pregnant and people would look at me and they'd say oh enjoy it now because when they're teenagers it will be awful and i hate that right and i rebelled against it i thought that's not going to be my story but i knew i had to figure out a way then to write a different story so as as my kids have grown and i've reached the teenage years now i'm in the midst of them yeah i realize they do want to be with me and they want to be together as a family so as parents with kids who are teens we often think they need their own space they just want to be with our friends we need to give them that but i think we need to pull them into us they want to be with us even if they initially push away they really do want to be with us so as parents we don't need to make the mistake of thinking our kids especially as teens don't want to be around us we need to we need to continually invite them in yeah we're talking today on focus on the family with greta escridge and her book adventuring together how to create connections and make lasting memories with your kids we've got copies of that here at the ministry give us a call 800-a-family or the link is in the episode notes greta one of the great observations you made about parents and you encourage them in the book is don't freak out you know don't kind of over plan and and that kind of thing i really appreciate that because i think we can become formulaic and we think you know okay family time has to be this or devotional time has to be this and you know kids are quick to stale you know they can smell stale if i could say it that way and if you are if you're too regimented in that approach with kids i don't think they resonate necessarily some kids might but i don't think generally kids are going to resonate with a seven to seven thirty devotional time and we're going to read three chapters and then we're going to do this it needs some spontaneity doesn't and some unplannedness if i could say it that way i i love that and i think that that's for me why adventure is such a powerful way to connect because it's different every time and even if you're doing the same trail you've done before it's going to be different every time and in that that differentness it engages our senses it engages us emotionally physically spiritually and that creates that differentness that we need to help them not feel like the drudgery of okay this is what we're doing again instead they're like okay we know that this is going to be something different it's going there's going to be some element of excitement and that is that fun is a great tool it's a great motivator let's get to some practical applications so say you're a mom and dad of elementary school-aged children what are some things i can get started okay they've been too much screen time they do their homework that's good but now they're watching stuff on the screen until dinner and then we have dinner and then they do their own thing and then we hug each other and say good night and i want to shake that up now so how do i get started well i can think of two things um right away for the weekdays or weeknights when it feels harder you think well how could i possibly fit in and venture into that i think adventuring through books is a fantastic way to engage the whole family and you don't need to you don't need to pick a book that you think is going to teach them a lesson you needed to pick a book that everybody's just going to enjoy how did you know i was thinking that already um so because that right all parents right that's right we've got to make it meaningful and purposeful and it is meaningful and purposeful but the the purpose and the meaning might simply be that we're connecting and so pick a time that in those evenings when you feel like how could i fit in an adventure where you read together and you go on an adventure through a book and i'm telling you it's a powerful connecting tool to read books together and adventure through books and then when you have a little more time say on a weekend or you've picked um it may be a day off of school whatever it is you could plan something else i think one of the most simple affordable and unique ways to connect is to hike with your kids we hike together weekly almost as a family and like i said before you'll find it's different every time and it seems so simple but there's a really wonderful thing about hiking together one you're often away from cell service so that takes the technology out the out the window you don't have to worry about it um but you're also able to connect in a way that is different because you're walking shoulder to shoulder and i find a lot of conversations happen in those moments sometimes our kids are not so ready to talk about those deep things when we're sitting face to face and they feel certain pressure but when you're just walking side by side and you are engaged with god's creation your heart is open and it just allows for conversation so those are two simple things you could do with elementary school students age students and you can have adventures easily yeah and again it we can over complicate it which is the thing that probably then discourages us from doing it right rather than just go with something simple you also mentioned growing your adventures which i think fits in here nicely if you start simply with a hike how do you grow adventures what does that mean and then how do you apply that to your own children now well i think um you go from a hike to say a weekend camping trip okay and you invite them to learn how to make a campfire or set up a tent sleep in a tent i would say even push beyond taking out the camper go in a tent we did that oh we paid our dues that is an adventure just waiting to happen yeah in fact what changed us was a bear outside our tent then we said let's get some hard walls that was mama's quick decision for that situation i agree and then yeah so just take it up a notch it doesn't have to be you're camping and you know a bear infested woods you could simply take them camping at the closest campground and say bear infested yeah your sense of adventure was off the scale if there's one bear it feels bear infested i think i'm a horrible bear so maybe start in the backyard with the fences and fences and no bears definitely um but but i bet that that bear memory stands out yeah the kids slept right through it right if there's a misadventure it's all the better so i think growing yeah and and invite the kids into that say what would excite you how can you take our family's adventures to the next level what do you dream of doing and again i think for parents i want to defend parents a bit because our plates are full and we get that but we're encouraging you to crack open the ideas and the routines we can get into a routine though even on these adventures you can get into that rut that i alluded to what suggestions do you have for parents to avoid the the routine of the adventure i love looking for new places to go places we haven't been before so that create that requires energy from you and you got to look around right you got to get on the internet or whatever research you get to talk to other parents but i think that that finding new places to go even if they're not far from home but it's one you hadn't been to yet or challenging yourself saying oh man that's a three mile hike and we usually only hike one can we do it or going to a museum i know lots of parents we feel like especially when your kids are small like a museum sounds terrifying because if your kid touches that priceless piece of art and all the alarms go off and they look everyone's like they did it it's scary to take your kids to a museum but what if you create an environment where you're just there for an hour and you're giving your kids the opportunity to experience a new thing and that will be stretching for both of you absolutely jeane and i took trent and troy when they were little it was some kind of tarantula place i don't think they were dangerous now that maybe i should have asked but i mean they were like you know they let the kids crawl on their arm and they're only three or four children had to go to the hospital i'm kidding i'm kidding but uh it was a lot of fun and the boys remember that to this day that was one of their big adventures that's like you know hands-on kind of application that idea of tradition and i what i love now and what we've experienced as a family doing the things that we've done is now that when we sit and have dinner together this is the conversation do you remember when and that was so much fun when that happened and i think that's the payoff for the parent right and in that context you're creating memories right that last a lifetime literally and one of the the benefits i've felt and of course trent and troy are not married yet we don't have grand grandchildren yet but it it particularly trent has really expressed how he wants to create those kind of environments so you're really creating legacy adventure when you do this because your children are going to grow up they're most likely going to get married they're most likely going to have children right and they're going to carry on those traditions right yes i love that thank you for saying it because i think we need to as parents have a full vision of what our relationship with our kids can be it's not just for when they're little it's not just for when they're teenagers it's into adulthood one of my most cherished parts of my life is that i still have a relationship with my parents i love to be with them i still adventure with my dad two years ago my dad invited me to go on a trip to greece with him for two weeks i want to go with your dad you should it's a lot of fun he seems to go to good places we have a lot of fun i hadn't been um out of the country since my kids were well before i had kids i hadn't gone away from them in two weeks and for that long i'm sorry i hadn't been away for my kids for that long of a time for two weeks it felt like a lifetime oh yeah but he and my husband encouraged me they they both said you need to have this adventure and even as adults we can connect with our parents and i i just think i want that for my kids too let's have a full vision as parents of connecting with our kids throughout their lifetime you know greta i i keep and we're right near the end here but i keep coming back to the attitude of the parent and this is what it's all about and there are things when you do these adventures that will trigger you and you've got to relax on that stuff i remember i would just get really intense about setting up the camp and getting things done you're the camp manager you know we but we get of course we started late getting out of the house pulling the trailer so by the time we got to south dakota to pull into you know whatever camp it's already seven o'clock jean's antsy about dinner we got to feed the kids so can can i get in the trailer and get going okay i'll open up the trailer which i would do connect all the lines and then invariably you know i'd bump my head on everything come back with lumps and bleeding and and uh but you gotta relax is the point i'm making you gotta make that fun even in the the misfortune of things that will happen flat tires hitting deer i did hit two deer that was another whole fiasco with the trailer and but you've got to just take a deep breath and say okay lord help us to have a a good time even in the midst of chaos and that's what you're learning in that and the kids are going to learn from your attitude there too so i guess i'm coming back at the end here to say speak to the parents heart about their attitude and what you have to do to maintain a good godly attitude in adventure there are so many opportunities to show our kids that number one we turn to god in times of struggle and there's nothing too small or too big to turn to him so it might just be we missed our exit and i gotta figure out how to turn around and get back and say kids can you guys pray in that that could be terrifying yes let me tell you i've experienced that so so there's just so many opportunities for us to invite our kids into relationship with god and in interrelationship with us and one another as siblings while we are out on these adventures and we're creating a habit of connecting to god in those moments we're creating a habit of connecting with one another and fostering a relationship of togetherness and in that context probably the best place to end is how in all of these great adventures do we bring god into it in a way that the kids will respond i can't think of a better place to get to know god than out in his creation you see his power you see his creativity you see his love and his care for us he's an artist and over and over again i have said to my kids we get to know god by as a creator we get to know our creator by experiencing his creation so i think we can adventure anywhere but i have to say i have a special spot in my heart for adventuring outdoors because it draws us so close to god i agree greta this has been so good it has inspired me for this summer i haven't come up with many creative ideas yet so i'm going to be working on it over the next few days i hope they involve bears yeah yeah no bears i'll try to miss the bears and do other things but thank you for being with this wonderful book adventuring together how to create connections and make lasting memories with your kids and it's true i'm on the back end of it now with two boys 20 and 18 this is what our family experience was built on and i'm so glad you put it into a book for others to learn from thank you and we encourage you to get that book we've got that here at the ministry the details are in the episode notes or give us a call 800 the letter a and the word family and then we do have a free resource for you on the website it's a parenting assessment it takes a few minutes for you to fill out and it'll show you where you're strong as a parent and maybe an area or two of growth perhaps adventure is one of those areas you need to grow in uh stop by the the website to find out the seven traits for effectively parenting your kids and how you can grow in that greta what a great book adventuring together how to create connections and make lasting memories with your kids what a wonderful resource and right here at the beginning of summer we want to get it into your hands and if you can make a gift of any amount we'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you for joining the ministry here if you can't afford it we believe in adventure so we'll get it to you and trust others we'll cover the cost of that just get in touch with us today and again our number is 800 the letter a and the word family well coming up next time on this broadcast ways to orchestrate greater peace in your life and that is probably one of the most powerful statements to hit to the why why is somebody being rude why are they honking at you if we can go to the why then we can see the humans involved in it and lead with compassion on behalf of jim daley and the entire team thanks for joining us today for focus on family i'm john fuller inviting you back as we once more help you and your family 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