Cultivating a Love of Adventure in Homebody Kids

As parents, we all want to instill a sense of adventure in our kids and a love for the outdoors. But, what happens when your kids would rather stay home? What if you’re a homebody, too? What if you know you should be getting outside, but the struggle to get out the door is more than you want to deal with right now? You’re not alone. Today, we have the amazing Angie Warmington, Wisconsin mom of three boys, sharing her family’s struggle to get outside and how she’s cultivating a love of adventure in her homebody kids. I think a LOT of us can relate to this. Enjoy!

The struggle is real

Let me be perfectly honest. I am a homebody to the extreme. There is nowhere else on this earth I feel most at ease than in my own home. My three young boys are homebody kids and my husband is right there with us.

My love for home is so deep that it makes me very proud of how comfortable and secure my children feel within the four walls that we’ve provided for them. But I also want them to feel comfortable and secure outside them!

It is no understatement when people say that there’s a big world out there. And I so desperately want them to see it.

The problem is, sometimes they really don’t want to. And the struggle to get my homebody kids out there exploring can be stressful, to say the least.

From homebody to explorer

Let me start at the very beginning of when our love of adventures began. About two years ago when my youngest was old enough to really enjoy being outside we decided we were going to start going on adventures. Ok…I decided we were going to start going on adventures.

At that time, I had been a full-time stay at home mom for about three years. The four walls that created my safe sanctuary were driving me insane. I needed out. And so did my kids.

I knew the importance of children getting fresh air. I knew they needed wide open spaces to explore, to run and burn some crazy off. The benefits of getting outside to their personal growth and development were many. How many studies do we need to read to hammer that home? 

And so we made some changes. We started adventuring! I got my homebody kids and self out of the house and we explored new places and tried new things. And for the first summer we did this they loved it! They were begging to go on adventures daily. We went all over our little part of the world and adventured to our heart’s desire.

Adventure strategy

Fast forward a couple of years…all of a sudden, my adventuring kids are back to being homebody kids. They were not so excited about our adventures anymore. In fact, most times they’d really rather not. 

I don’t know what happened. Maybe, with this past year of spending so much time in our house the idea of leaving feels foreign to them now? Maybe they’re anxious? Or perhaps they just forgot how much fun we had? I’m not sure. But whatever’s going on, it’s made getting my homebody kids out of the house so hard.

However, I refuse to give up on our adventures. Over the last few months, I’ve developed some strategies to try to help keep their excitement for adventures alive. Here are a few tips for how we’re doing it and how it’s going. 

Mix it up

I keep a running list of all the places that we’ve explored that I know my boys love, as well as a list of places we have yet to see. This helps remind me of all the fun places we could adventure that we already know we love, as well as all the places we want to explore. 

There’s a wonderful app called All Trails that I use when I’m researching new areas. It has been so handy this past year. It lists all the hiking trails in our area depending on their length, difficulty level, how heavily trafficked they are, as well as if they would be considered kid-friendly.

I build my list right there in the app and I make it a personal goal to cross a new place off at least once a month. We aim for two new places a month, but I figure beggars can’t be choosers, so I happily settle for at least one!

When scouting for new places, I look for areas and features that I know my boys would enjoy. We are fortunate to live along Lake Michigan, so any place that brings us close to water is usually a hit. That doesn’t mean that we always go to the lake. But, when I search for local nature reserves or hiking trails, I try to make sure they run along a lake or river so they have that water play to look forward to.

Tried and true

If trying out a new place just isn’t appealing, I let them pick our adventure from a list of places we’ve tried and enjoyed. Do we want to go throw rocks in the lake? Do we want to go to run through the sand dunes or find all the bridges at Seven Bridges Park? Letting them choose where we’ll go explore a lot of times leads to a great trip.

Eventually, if the trip goes well, we add the new places to our list of favorite tried-and-true places. Those new places that we were so uncertain about in the beginning find their way to our list of awesome adventures and just get added to our rotation. This helps my kids realize that trying new things leads to finding new favorites. 

Encourage make-believe

We live the nerd life. We are mad lovers of all things Star Wars, orcs, trolls and yetis. Pretty much all magical beasts top our list of awesome creatures. Sprinkle in some zombies and my boys are in heaven. They have found magic and adventure inside our home. But, I absolutely love it when they find it outside, too.

So, when they ask if we’ll find Big Foot’s house or they tell me that these woods look just like the ones where the Ewoks live, I encourage it like crazy. My boys’ imagination is one of my favorite things in the whole world. If I can get them excited about finding some strange mystical creature on one of our walks, I am all about it! It adds an extra element of fun to our adventures. We’re always hunting for yetis and keeping an eye out for crocodiles. 

No shame in the bribery game

Sometimes, the fight to get out of the house and adventure can get very intense. In those cases, I’m not above bribery. In fact, I embrace it.

They’ll walk a short trail with minimal complaint in exchange for a chance to go play at our favorite playground? Done.

They’ll go to the lake if I let them bring home as many rocks as they can fit in their pockets? Deal.

Any wizard staffs (aka giant sticks) that we find on our adventure must come home with us? If it fits in the van, it’s yours.

Any reasonable promise (heavy emphasis on the reasonable) I can make that will get them to happily go on an adventure? I am all over it. If you need to get your homebody kids out of the house, don’t feel bad about using bribery. I’ll help you come up with the bribe, if you need it! 

When in doubt, keep it short

If my guys are truly just not feeling it but we really need to get outdoors, we’ll keep it as short as possible. I would rather do multiple short trips a week then drag them out for hours someplace that they would rather not be.

We initially started going on adventures because we wanted to have fun! The last thing I want is for my homebody kids to dread our adventures any time I bring up the word. If twenty or thirty minutes is all we get, then so be it. I’ll make every effort to do that 20-30 minutes a couple of times a week and make it as fun as possible.

But if that doesn’t happen? It’s ok. It really is. I promise. There are days when I have to make the judgment call that maybe that day just isn’t a good day for an adventure. I’ll be honest. I get a little heartbroken when I hear grumbles of not wanting to go explore. But sometimes it’s not worth forcing them to go.

But for every negative response, I usually get an excited one! It really can be a balancing act, so I make every attempt to be as flexible as possible. There are days when my boys will ask me if we can go on an adventure before I have to chance to bring it up! Those are the best days. We’re getting fresh air; we’re having fun checking out a new amazing place nearby or visiting an old favorite. Not to mention, at the end of the day, they sleep so wonderfully!

A lifetime of adventures

My hope is that these small steps will help my boys grow up craving adventures. That someday they’ll come to me with ideas of places they want to explore. My hope is that we’ll eventually be able to go on an all-day trip where we hike across as much ground as our feet will cover. And that they’ll fall in love with getting out and seeing all the amazing things the world has to offer.

Are you or your child a homebody?
How do you encourage adventures?

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