What if the secret to raising calmer, healthier, more resilient kids… was as simple as getting outside more?
In this eye-opening conversation, Wendy sits down with author and outdoor advocate Linda McGurk to explore the Scandinavian philosophy that’s changing the way families think about childhood, nature, and everyday life.
Linda shares her journey from Sweden to the U.S., and the culture shock she experienced when she realized just how disconnected many families have become from the outdoors. From canceled recess to fear-based parenting, she began to see how modern life is quietly pulling kids away from one of the most essential parts of being human… nature.
They talk about the concept of friluftsliv (open-air living), why there’s truly no such thing as bad weather, and how outdoor play, even the messy, risky kind, is exactly what kids need to thrive.
This episode will gently challenge the way you think about safety, structure, and what it really means to support your child’s growth.
And it just might inspire you to open the door… and step outside together.
Episode Highlights:
- “There’s no such thing as bad weather,” only different ways to prepare and engage
- Outdoor time isn’t optional in Scandinavian culture, it’s a daily, essential part of life
- Kids who spend more time outside tend to be healthier, calmer, and more resilient
- Risky play (like climbing, exploring, and roughhousing) builds confidence and real-world awareness
- When kids are trusted to explore, they learn limits, problem-solving, and self-regulation
- Dirt, mud, and exposure to nature actually support stronger immune systems
- Free play, especially outdoors, is one of the most powerful ways kids learn and grow
- Over-scheduling and constant structure can crowd out the kind of play kids truly need
- Connection to nature helps kids understand they are part of something bigger, not separate from it
- Building a “village” (friends, schools, community) makes it easier to prioritize outdoor life
Resources Mentioned:
Find Linda on Instagram
Linda’s website
Unable to listen, or prefer to read along? Here’s the transcript!
Wendy Snyder:
Hello families, and welcome back to a new episode of The Fresh Start Family Show. We’re so happy that you are here.
Today I am thrilled to welcome Linda McGurk to the show. We’re going to be talking about how there is no such thing as bad weather, and the Scandinavian secret to helping your kids spend more time outside.
Welcome to the show, Linda. Thanks for being with us today.
Linda McGurk:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really happy to be here.
Wendy Snyder:
Yeah, I am thrilled. I’ve been admiring your work for years now. Our podcast is five or six years old, and I’ve been wanting to get you on the show for many, many years.
Your body of work is something I really admire. Will you start us off by telling us a little bit about your story? How did this idea come to you? Your book is one that I refer to so often when we coach our clients on the concept we’re going to talk about today.
Tell us a little bit about your story, how you became passionate about this topic, where you live now, where you lived before, how many kids you have, all that good stuff.
Linda McGurk:
Yeah. If somebody would have told me 15 years ago that this is where I’d be today, talking about and writing about outdoor play and supporting parents who want to get outside with their families, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.
It was not something I planned.
I grew up in Sweden in a very nature-loving culture, and nature was always part of my life growing up, both at daycare and at home. We were outdoors all the time, hiking or camping in the summertime, skiing cross-country and downhill in the wintertime, ice skating, all of that.
Then I moved to the U.S. when I was in my 20s. I married an American, and I had two daughters there.
Already when my first daughter was born, I noticed that the attitudes toward parenting were very different in Indiana from what I was used to growing up in Sweden.
I noticed the kids were indoors a lot. Especially in the wintertime, it seemed like nobody ventured outside at all. Recess was always canceled or indoors. There was a very strong focus on academics, which is very different from Sweden and the Nordic countries, where kids don’t really start formal schooling until they’re six or seven years old.
Those years before school are considered sacred, and the emphasis is really on outdoor play.
So there I was, a new mom in Indiana, and I had people questioning my choices. They questioned my choice to take my kids outdoors. People called me brave for being out in the snow. Others told me I was reckless because they thought it was dangerous for my little kids to be out in negative temperatures.
I even had people take pity on me. They would stop me as I was walking my daughter in the stroller and offer me a ride because they thought my car had broken down.
Wendy Snyder:
What?
Linda McGurk:
It was very interesting, and it was a bit of a culture clash.
Of course, everyone was doing the best to their ability, and we all want what’s best for our kids. But it was so interesting to me that things I had taken for granted, things I had even considered universal parenting principles, turned out to be anything but.
When I came to Indiana, it was a whole different world. As a result, I felt pretty lonely in my parenting experience.
I didn’t know where to turn. My first daughter was born in 2008. I had no network. I was new. I hardly knew anybody in the town we moved to. I had just signed up for Facebook, essentially. I didn’t have much of an online community either, and Facebook groups weren’t as big back then.
So it was hard. I felt lonely. That’s where the idea came to me that I needed to reach out to others and see, because I figured I couldn’t be alone in this.
I had also heard from older Americans that kids used to be outdoors all the time until the streetlights came on.
Wendy Snyder:
There was a time in America.
Linda McGurk:
Yes. So I knew there was a story there. I knew that in the U.S., kids used to be outside playing. But somewhere along the way, childhood moved indoors.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Richard Louv and his amazing book, Last Child in the Woods.
Wendy Snyder:
Is his work about nature deficit? Is that him?
Linda McGurk:
Yes, nature deficit disorder. He coined that phrase.
He really describes this shift from the play-based, outdoor childhood to the indoor, more screen-based childhood. That book came out in 2007, before iPhones, iPads, tablets, and all of that. So that became foundational to my philosophy.
I took that, and I also leaned back on my upbringing in Sweden and the Swedish nature-loving culture, which we call friluftsliv, or open-air life.
I realized I had to become very intentional about raising my kids the way I wanted them to be raised. I had to be intentional about taking them outside because there was no support in the culture or in the schools.
That’s where the seed for my books grew. I started a blog a few years later called Rain or Shine Mamma, and it just kind of snowballed from there. The blog grew, and then I wrote my two books.
And here we are.
Wendy Snyder:
So cool.
I’m most familiar with There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather. What is the other book again, Linda?
Linda McGurk:
The other one is called The Open-Air Life. That’s my second book, and that really delves more deeply into the friluftsliv culture.
I do talk about friluftsliv in the first book as well, but the second book is more geared toward everyone, not just parents or people with children. It’s more of a general guidebook.
Wendy Snyder:
I can’t wait to grab that.
I’m feeling this so deeply now, more than ever. I’ve heard from people that it seems like we’re in a bit of a revolution period of humanity right now, for many reasons.
That can feel like things are imploding. It can feel like death and collapse and all the things. It’s just really hard here in America.
Linda McGurk:
Yeah, it feels like an unraveling. It really does.
Wendy Snyder:
Linda, please, can I come live with you? Can my whole family just come live with you for a little bit?
I want to get back to when you moved back to the Nordic countries in a minute. But I’ve seen so many amazing people speak to this idea that this is what happens when systems and tables turn. When systems flip and humanity begins to heal, it gets chaotic.
It feels like this information revolution or technological revolution is upon us, with AI and all these things. There is goodness there, for sure, but I feel like it has never been more important for people to understand what you teach.
I believe we will perish as humanity if we don’t partner with the earth, plants, the outside, and nature. It feels like, more than ever, the nature deficit is upon us and it is wreaking havoc on society, and for sure on children.
I first started to really have this conversation when I interviewed Lenore Skenazy of the organization Let Grow. Jonathan Haidt co-partnered in founding that organization, and he has created such an incredible body of work around why these kids are growing up as the most anxious generation there has ever been.
But it was fun to get to know Lenore because hearing her story, and thinking about Richard Louv’s work, helped explain why that happened.
When information became so exchangeable, parents became more aware of things to fear. So they worried more about their kids, and the free-range life became constricted. Parenting started to become, “If I keep my kids close and controlled, that’s what will keep them safe.”
Lenore’s work is so beautiful because it has proven that what helps kids flourish and thrive is being able to be free, make mistakes, and take risks.
And then when I combine that with your work, it’s like, “And it has to be outside.” They have to adventure.
So we’re just going to soak up your wisdom today, because it all blends together.
Linda McGurk:
Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that because nature connection was also one of the key motivators for me to get my kids outside and get outside with them, to discover together.
What we’re going to need in the future, more than anything, is children who know how ecosystems work and understand that they are part of nature.
Nature is not a destination that you travel to. We are also part of nature.
That is an important tenet of friluftsliv as well. We are part of nature. It really builds on getting outside in your nearby nature so that you experience it in your everyday life.
It’s non-motorized, non-competitive. It’s all about being outdoors, finding joy in the little moments outside.
And as you say, we are at this pivotal moment now. We’ve been there a few times before in history. This nature disconnect didn’t really start as recently as we may think. It’s not just the screens. It started way before that.
We could even go back to when we shifted from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian society. When we were hunter-gatherers, we were still living in step with nature. We only took as much as we could use. We followed the seasons and the animals.
Once we started farming the land, we started controlling nature and seeing it as property. That’s when the first disconnect happened.
Then much later, the Industrial Revolution came. Science played a part too. We made great discoveries, but that also led to a more controlling view of nature, wildlife, and animals. Animals were seen as machines, and nature was seen as natural resources for us to exploit.
With industrialization, that attitude was supercharged. Then we had urbanization, where people moved into cities and lost touch with the contact they still had with nature as farmers.
Now, with digitalization and the information society, we are more and more living in this artificial world. We’re indoors, under artificial light, hooked up to screens, and the kids are too.
It’s not good for us, and it’s definitely not good for the planet.
Wendy Snyder:
Yeah.
Linda McGurk:
There was one study that came out recently that said we’ve lost about 60% of our nature connection in the past 200 years.
They said that one of the key drivers for everything from global climate change to the loss of biodiversity is that we are disconnected. We are so disconnected.
One of the solutions would be to make sure that nature connection starts in childhood. That’s where we need to focus our efforts.
There are some good signs. When I first started writing about nature connection, almost nobody knew what a nature preschool was or a forest school. There were maybe five of them, or a handful, in all of the U.S.
Now there are more than a thousand, but the U.S. is a big country, so we’re still far from everyone having access.
Wendy Snyder:
That’s kind of how I feel about my work with firm and kind, connection-based parenting.
We help parents replace punishment with compassionate discipline. We get rid of hypocrisy in homes. We see humility as a superpower.
We’ve made such great progress, and then we look at the world and we’re like, “We’re still the pinky nail of society.” The general society is still raising children in an authoritarian system. It’s heartbreaking.
But you keep doing your work. You keep meeting other like-minded souls who are spreading the message that there is danger if we don’t follow this path. We need to bring awareness and education.
It’s such a journey to hold both. It’s dark when you look at what’s happening and the effects of raising children this way, thinking it’s not a big deal. And there is also so much hope because of people like you who are dedicated to helping people understand that we can change. We can create different ways of raising children.
Before we get into the three points we’re going to cover today, will you tell us when you moved back to Sweden?
And am I right that in the Nordic countries, when it comes to raising children, it seems like you don’t really have autocratic parenting as a thing there?
It seems like connected, firm and kind parenting, compassionate discipline, and teaching life skills is just how you all parent. Is that right? Or are there still pockets of people who are like, “Nope, you’ve got to hit kids. You’ve got to put them in their place. They need punishment. I have to raise my voice to make this kid listen.”
Or is connection just naturally part of your culture?
Linda McGurk:
There’s a lot to unpack there.
I moved back in 2018 when my kids were seven and ten. There were a few reasons, but one was that I really wanted them to experience the full Scandinavian childhood before they got too old.
About the parenting, yes, you’re right. That authoritarian parenting style, you may find some cases, but the vast consensus is that gentle parenting or positive parenting, however you choose to phrase it, is really the predominant way.
Part of that is because it is almost the law. Spanking is illegal. If you spank your kids, you’re going to be in trouble.
Wendy Snyder:
That makes me so happy.
Linda, I have a 30-year goal. By the time I’m 80, I will have highly contributed to ending legal corporal punishment of children in America.
So you don’t know how much it means to me to hear that it is illegal there. You guys have done it. Please keep speaking. I just had to say that.
Linda McGurk:
Yeah, I would love to see that.
Sweden banned spanking back in the 70s, I believe, and we were among the first countries to do that. I think it’s banned in all the Nordic countries.
That’s kind of the foundation. You essentially had the government sending a very strong signal that this is not how we treat children. Children deserve our respect. They’re human beings.
If you look at official documents that guide parenting, schooling, and childhood in Sweden, they emphasize children as individuals deserving of respect and as part of our democracy.
It’s very focused on children’s well-being. We’re a very child-focused society, and I think all the Nordic countries are.
I think it really helps set the foundation for happiness. When you look at those international rankings of happiness levels, the five Nordic countries are always top ten and usually top five or six.
I think there is definitely a connection there.
Wendy Snyder:
There for sure is a connection.
I need to come visit you. I want to come to these Nordic countries because I have to experience this. It’s part of my next body of work.
My next book idea is The Rise of Democratic Firm and Kind Parenting. My subtitle is a little ragey, so I’ll probably change it, but it’s something like, “How to Rage Against the Machine of Authoritarianism to Raise a New Breed of Human Beings.”
But you guys have done it. The happiness levels, the peace levels, the murder levels, everything represents the way you raise human souls from the time they step foot on this planet.
I am just so grateful this has been done before. As I push for this and eventually progress into the legal system, that’s going to be a whole next body of work for me over the next 30 years. But I’m so thankful there is a model, and the data is clear.
Linda McGurk:
That was another shock to me when I came to the U.S. and started looking for a babysitter for my daughter.
One of the women I visited had a policy where the parents had to sign off on a piece of paper saying we accepted that she would spank the children.
I said, “There is no way. Over my dead body am I sending my child to this woman.”
But it was so accepted and normalized, and that really shocked me.
I even had some friends tell me, “Well, I was spanked as a kid and it wasn’t that bad. I would do it to my child.”
Wendy Snyder:
As you say, in your world it is a rarity to find someone practicing authoritarian or autocratic parenting. In America, it’s a rarity to find someone practicing connection-based parenting.
We call our work Powerful Parenting because it puts the parent in true power, which is very different from pseudo power or power over. We teach power with structure, shared power, safety, and mutual respect.
But it really is the rarity here. People think it’s not, but it is. Eight out of ten people are still punishing their kids, raising their voices, shaming them, using guilt, intimidation, and humiliation to motivate.
It really is the norm in America. So it makes sense how we got here.
Thank you for explaining all that.
We have three points we’re going to cover today, and we’ve already been integrating them. But will you tell us one more time this beautiful word you keep using and what it means?
Linda McGurk:
Yeah, the word is friluftsliv. It doesn’t really have an equivalent in the English language, but it translates to open-air life.
It’s essentially about living simply with nature, finding joy outdoors, finding balance, and boosting your physical and mental health outdoors.
It’s not specifically a form of therapy, but it has that effect.
In the Nordic countries, it’s a philosophy and lifestyle that you carry throughout life. It starts early, already in infancy.
You may have heard of the babies napping outdoors. Every winter I see it trending on social media, these viral posts about strollers sitting out in the snow with babies in them.
Wendy Snyder:
Bundled up in the cutest gear, I’m sure. Just little cheeks hanging out.
Linda McGurk:
Yes.
So we see getting outdoors as essential, not optional. If you have kids, you also get them outside every day, regardless of the weather. That’s an important part of it too, finding something to like about every season and trying to get outdoors every day.
At preschool, we have government-funded or subsidized preschool, and it is actually in the national curriculum that children have the right to play outdoors.
Wendy Snyder:
Yes, talking about children’s rights. Say it for the people in the back. I love it. The right to play outside. God, I love your country.
Linda McGurk:
Even at a traditional preschool that wouldn’t call itself a forest school or nature-based preschool, the kids would typically be outdoors for hours every day.
As they get older, recess makes up about a fifth of the school day, and the school days are shorter too in Sweden, at least in the lower grades.
At home, a lot of parents just like being outdoors and taking their kids outdoors.
In Norway, they have something called søndagstur, which roughly translates to Sunday trip. They reserve time every Sunday to go outdoors as a family. It could be a hike with a picnic, or a cross-country ski trip.
A lot of times, you also spend time across the generational divide, so it’s a way to spend time together as a family.
A lot of Nordic parents are also pretty protective of their children’s free time. They are careful not to overschedule them, which was another problem I often saw living in the U.S.
It almost seemed like parents were worried their kids would be under-stimulated or fall behind if they didn’t schedule every minute of their time. You won’t really see that in the Nordic countries, not to that extent.
A lot of parents want to reserve that time because they want to spend time outdoors with their kids. I think it creates a foundation for healthy habits that you have throughout life.
A lot of kids in the U.S. play sports, but most kids don’t play after high school, so there’s nothing to fill that gap. Whereas with friluftsliv, it’s this habit of going outside that stays with you.
I grew up like that, and now I’m trying to pass that lifestyle on to my kids. I see them adopting it too. They’re 18 and 15 now.
Wendy Snyder:
Mine too, Linda. How cool. We have the exact same ages.
You mentioned the sports thing, and it’s beautiful to feel how our family naturally knew that, without anybody teaching us.
My daughter Stella is a beach volleyball player, and she’ll be playing high-level athletics in college, which is her dream come true. We’re still pinching ourselves. And it’s a healthy environment, not like some of the intense Division I athletic programs in the U.S.
Her coaches could not be more amazing. Their whole pyramid of coaching strategies is around joy.
Linda McGurk:
I love that.
Wendy Snyder:
Yes, because in other programs, it’s all about winning.
But the point is, I know she will have that for life. My dear friend, who was my parenting educator for 10 years, is 74 now. She stopped playing beach volleyball around 72 because her knees started acting up. Until then, I would see her on the beach volleyball court every week in our town.
My son’s main sport is surfing. Here in America, kids often beg to play football, but the head injuries are so concerning, and for us it was always a no.
We live by the beach. We’re a California family, so we encouraged him toward surfing. We wanted him to have a sport he could do for life, and surfing will never go away. He will surf for the rest of his life.
When you’re a surfer, you just adjust. I had shoulder injuries and knee injuries. When I had knee injuries, I became a body surfer. When I had shoulder injuries, I used a paipo, which is like a surfboard.
There’s such an important concept here. How do we help our kids develop passions in sports and outdoor activities they can do forever? Skiing, cross-country skiing, snowboarding, surfing. That’s an important one.
Linda McGurk:
Yeah, I’m not anti-sports. I think there are great things about sports. I’ve just seen it done in ways that I don’t support, where parents are pushing three- and four-year-olds into competitive sports when they don’t even understand the rules. Then there’s no time for outdoor play.
Wendy Snyder:
And they get in trouble when they can’t sit still.
That was Stella’s story. She was at gymnastics class when she was little, and we were just trying to give her something to do for an hour. But she used to get in trouble constantly for tackle-hugging.
I would sit there and think, “She’s going to get in trouble.” But she was too little. The organized, intense sports were too much.
If we can give kids the longest runway to just be free, that’s powerful. Go down to the neighborhood field and play soccer with ten of your buddies. Then later, the organized, strict, “sit on the bench and wait your turn” sports can come in.
If we can hold off a little longer on those in America, I think it would be good for us.
Talk to us about this second point around allowing children to get muddy, run wild, and engage in risky play outdoors, and how that makes them safer and healthier in the long run.
Linda McGurk:
This is something that has always come naturally to me as a Nordic mom. We don’t really think of it as “risky play.” That was a term I hadn’t heard until I moved to the U.S., even though it was coined by a Norwegian researcher.
Ellen Sandseter has done a lot of research on the topic, and she defined the eight categories of risky play.
Those include play at great heights, play at great speeds, playing with dangerous tools and dangerous elements, impact play, a chance of getting lost, rough-and-tumble play, and vicarious play, which is when a child watches another child engage in risky play.
These are activities like riding a sled down a hill, climbing a tree, swinging, or jumping on a trampoline.
Wendy Snyder:
Cutting vegetables with a knife. You know, that kind of play.
Linda McGurk:
Exactly.
I write about this in There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather, when my daughter joined the Swedish Scouts. Back in the U.S., kids were always told, “Kids shouldn’t play with fire.”
Well, yes, but there is a time and place for everything.
At Scouts, they were actually allowed to play with fire because they had all sorts of games and competitions where the whole point was for the kids to learn how to handle fire.
Just like you want them to learn how to handle tools like axes and knives, that is a natural part of raising kids in the Nordics.
Wendy Snyder:
Just last week I came home from a retreat where we were doing all this fun circle work, and I got sent home with a bag. There were some crystals in there, but there was also a piece of sandalwood.
I showed it to my son, who’s 15, and I said, “Look, I brought home something for you to burn.”
He was like, “For me? I can burn this?”
I said, “Yes, you can walk around the house with it. We can have fun. I’ll research more about what we do with this.”
He was so excited because he’s constantly trying to light stuff on fire. The traditional American response is, “Stop it, stop it, stop it.” But it makes sense why he’s curious about this element.
So let’s find a way for him to explore fire in a way that teaches him what makes fire grow, what makes fire shrink, and what is safe.
He has an area in the backyard that he’s taken over as his fishing area. Half of our yard is now Taryn’s yard. There’s a skate ramp and a fishing area.
I came back one day last week, and he was trying to light the edges of the orange tree on fire. It wasn’t going to light, but I said, “Buddy, I love that you’re curious. Let’s find something else for you to experiment with fire. But not that, dude. You can’t light a tree on fire.”
Linda McGurk:
The whole idea with risky play is to let kids learn about themselves, learn about others, test limits, and learn about the world around them.
That’s the whole idea.
It’s something kids have always done. Just because we gave it the name “risky play” doesn’t mean it’s a new concept.
Play is how children learn. It always has been. They’re wired that way. It’s evolutionary. We need to let it happen because that’s how they learn, grow, and evolve.
In modern parenting, one of the issues I have is that adults always seem to think they can improve on children’s play and make it more educational or enriching. But free play is perfect the way it is, when it is freely chosen by the child, directed by the child, and done just for fun, not for some higher purpose.
They are still learning. That’s where it goes wrong a lot of times. Parents don’t always understand that children are still learning through play.
And it’s not just parents. Society really undervalues free play.
Wendy Snyder:
That’s true. There’s so much great research about the power of play. It unlocks creativity. It makes stronger leaders.
I love how the idea of risky play also involves mistakes. That’s what’s so tough about the American authoritarian way of parenting. Mistakes are seen as shameful. They’re bad. Someone’s going to get hurt.
Yes, if you go too fast on your bike, there is real danger. Parents have to reconcile that. Everyone is trying to protect their children, and you don’t want the head injury.
But so many times, the mistakes are small things. They’re the little falls. They slip. They get a scrape. They rough-and-tumble too hard, and someone gets a red mark.
What we teach parents is that mistakes are opportunities to learn. That’s all they are.
It seems like you all bake that in. With risky play, when something goes too far or someone gets hurt wrestling or slips and gets scared because they almost fell out of a tree, it’s not met with, “See? I told you so. This is what happens when you don’t listen.”
It’s met with, “What did you learn from this?”
Life does the teaching. That’s what we teach with compassionate discipline. Natural consequences are always the most preferred because life does the teaching. You don’t have to double down on the lesson.
Talk to us about getting muddy. Is it the idea that getting dirty and yucky is part of the learning? And then learning how to clean your clothes afterward?
Linda McGurk:
Yes. I think the Nordic way is to stand back and allow your child, to a great extent, to explore and discover on their own outdoors, or with parents nearby for the smaller children.
It’s about giving them pretty free rein.
In our culture, we see children as being closer to nature or a little wilder. It’s something we almost romanticize, that children should be a little dirty at the end of the day, or maybe they didn’t play enough.
That’s a cultural difference too.
Now there’s also a lot of great research on the benefits of being exposed to different microorganisms.
Wendy Snyder:
That is part of it, right? The barefoot thing.
I’ve been studying aromatherapy for the last few years and learning about the science behind aromas, the limbic system, nervous system regulation, and all of that.
I remember learning that some of the biggest pores on our body are on our feet. A lot of times people say, “Put the essential oils on your feet.” At first I thought, “Really? These hardened things?”
But then as I learned more, I thought, well, that makes sense because the earth is filled with nutrients, microorganisms, and all this amazing stuff that is supposed to work with our body.
Our hands and feet and skin can absorb what the earth and plants give us. It just makes so much sense.
Linda McGurk:
Definitely. And also for their immune systems. They need that exposure to microorganisms.
This research is fairly new, actually, about how we are connected with our microbiome in our gut and how that is connected to bacteria in the soil.
There was a study in Finland where they replaced the gravel in the yards of several daycares with forest floor. Then they measured different immunity markers in the children and compared them to a control group.
The kids whose schoolyards had been replaced with forest floor showed improved markers for immunity after about a week of playing in that environment.
The control group showed no change.
It just goes to show that our bodies are so intimately connected with the world out there. The way we live our lives today, we’ve really become separated, and I think it’s affecting our health.
You may have heard of the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that we’re so clean today. A lot of that is a good thing. It’s good to have hygiene. But it has gone a little overboard.
When our immune systems don’t get regular exposure to dirt, that can weaken them. Our immune systems can start reacting against things that aren’t actually dangerous. That’s where you get autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, food allergies, peanut allergies, things our bodies shouldn’t really be reacting to.
We’ve become so clean that it’s not good for us.
Wendy Snyder:
That is so fascinating.
It makes me thankful that I grew up in a farmhouse in Maryland, on the East Coast, out in the country. You grow up and realize, “I’m so thankful for where I grew up.”
I was constantly in the woods and in the river. It’s so funny how many people, especially some of my neighbors, would say, “Ew, you swim in that river?”
And my family and I were always like, “Are you weirded out by a river? Yes, we swim in the river.”
My dad would always scoop up a cup and drink the water. If I had friends with me, they’d be like, “Ew, that’s so gross.” And we were like, “What? It’s literally the river. It’s good for you.”
Amazing, Linda. You are such a wealth of information.
Finish us off with this last point. Friluftsliv, did I say it right?
Linda McGurk:
Friluftsliv. There you go.
Wendy Snyder:
Friluftsliv. That it takes a village to raise a nature-loving child.
End us with that point, and then I want you to tell everyone where they can find your book and learn more about your work.
Linda McGurk:
I always say it takes a village.
What I mean by that is that in the Nordic countries, parents have such a strong support system. I think that is really key to being able to do this.
That’s what I would like to see in the U.S. and elsewhere, that parents could get more support.
I really encourage parents who feel stretched for time to build their village. Reach out to extended family and see who else can help take your child outdoors.
Can you team up with other parents? Maybe start a nature play group. Take turns watching the kids outdoors. If they’re playing in the neighborhood and safety is an issue or you’re concerned, team up.
Also talk to your preschool or school and try to work the system from within. I’m sure you’re going to come up against old habits and resistance, but you never know what can happen.
Wendy Snyder:
When you advocate for what you want, right?
Linda McGurk:
Yes, exactly.
Even your city council. If you need more green spaces or a new park for the kids, try to make it happen if you have the bandwidth.
It really helps when you build that village.
Wendy Snyder:
Linda, thank you. Thank you for being here and for taking the time.
Tell listeners where they can find you, get your books, and learn more about anything you offer.
Linda McGurk:
My books are available anywhere books are sold online. There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather and The Open-Air Life.
I’m on Instagram as Rain or Shine Mamma, that’s “mamma” with two M’s, and also on Facebook.
I also have a newsletter on Substack called The Open-Air Life. That’s a way I really like connecting with readers.
Definitely look me up. I love talking to readers and chatting, so reach out.
Wendy Snyder:
Beautiful.
I’m going to go get The Open-Air Life because I don’t have that one yet. I’ll subscribe to your Substack. I love your Instagram. It’s so fun to see your way of life over there and the real-life snippets.
And one day, I’m coming over there. Maybe 2027 or 2028. I need to be in the culture for a few days to support my next writing piece. Maybe I could do a two-week retreat alone over there. I feel like I need to be immersed in the culture.
Linda McGurk:
I organize hikes over here. I’m just starting this summer. I have two groups coming in July with Americans and Canadians coming to hike with me. It’s about a week.
Wendy Snyder:
Okay, I’m going to look into that because maybe I could do some book writing on that, or just bring a journal.
Amazing. Linda, thank you for being here. We are so grateful for your voice, your wisdom, and the advocacy work you do for children. It means so much to me, and we are just so grateful.
Linda McGurk:
The pleasure is all mine. I enjoyed being here.
It’s people like you who keep the book alive. It’s been almost 10 years now, and it’s amazing that it still gets so much attention. I think it speaks to the fact that it’s still needed, now more than ever.
Wendy Snyder:
Now more than ever.
I really do consider it required reading for our students who come into our program. You can count on me. I will keep recommending it.
All right, Linda, thank you.
