There are at least two joys in life that are still free for everyone.
One is a walk in the bush on a balmy autumn day.
The other is a balmy autumn bushwalk with children.
A walk in the bush with children is always deeper, longer, truer.
Of course, when you have 68 years’ worth of experience and knowledge to impart, bushwalks are the perfect chance to deliver sermons on the meaning of life through the lens of nature.
Naturally, as the elder, you are the one to discover and reveal these secrets. But not always.
My middle grandson is eight years old, and he can name every tree species he walks past. Milo can also educate you on the life cycle of the paper wasp and the bee. My elder grandson, Errol, is approaching his 10th year. He can play Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer note-perfect on the piano, as well as make a gumnut disappear from his palm with a flick of the wrist. The youngest is Hektor, who, at five years old, still lives in the magical world before the arrival of reason and the written word. So, his first task is to find a good stick, and his second is to become Jason and set off to find the golden fleece hiding just beyond the next turn in the path.
How do they know all this stuff?
Milo and Errol both read voraciously, and miraculously, they have all grown up without screens. They are home-schooled — a demanding life for parents who take on the challenge.
The benefit of a childhood without access to a personal laptop, tablet or mobile phone is a difficult thing to weigh because I’m not a child psychologist and my subjects are my grandchildren, so any observer would say quite rightly that bias is built into this study.
I remembered spending this past Christmas with our extended family, which included six youngsters under the age of 12. It was an eye-opener for me because the group did not include our grandchildren, who spent the day with their own family. Dominating the loungeroom was a giant screen playing cartoons and movies used as a pacifier for the kids while the grown-ups got on with the serious business of drinking and swapping anecdotes about holidays, cars and business. During the rare times when the TV was off, the kids retreated to personal tablets. One four-year-old wouldn’t eat his lunch without a tablet playing his favourite cartoons next to his plate. I can’t remember a single conversation I had with any of these kids. Each attempt I made felt as if I was interrupting something.
Anyway, back to the balmy bushwalk. The stream of overlapping chatter about Greek gods, the gathering of honey, magic tricks and how clouds form dried to a whisper as we came across a burnt-out car at the edge of a flooded depression. It looked ugly and sad in the middle of this blue, balmy day. The fire had been so intense the door handles and windscreen had melted to pools of brittle glass and flat spoons of metal. The blaze had blackened a 50sqm area of grass and trees around the wreck. There was still a faint odour of smouldering ash in the air.
The boys, for once, were speechless but fascinated as they picked through the scattered blobs of metal, glass and wire.
They asked who did it and why. I said it was probably bored kids.
“Wow — they must have been really bored,” Errol said.
It’s easy to be judgmental and self-congratulatory when it comes to raising children, and there are no silver bullet methods for producing happy, well-rounded adults. But there are a few reliable pointers that have stood the test of time.
Being engaged and present in your children’s childhood is one of them.