What do you teach your kids about wilderness stuff and knives ?

My daughter turned 12 last week, she has been "outdoors" all her life. We have an acre pond and has been swimming in it less than a year old. I taught her to build a debris hut when she was 5-6, and she would go and build her own after that. She knows firebuilding. I used to take her out with me hunting when she was 3 or 4. She killed her
1st deer at 10. I taught her to walk through the woods leaving no tracks, how to comunicate silently in the woods. She loves to camp, hunt, float, and be in the water anywhere.
We watch Les and Bear, and critique them. I am shure she has the skill to make it if lost till rescue.
 
That is cool , your girl has skills that will help her for the rest of her life , even if she never uses them , they give a kid a sense of can - do , and self worth , major important stuff for anyone .
 
Thanks,
I tried not to baby her when she was little and she is confident, bordering on fearless.

Once we were out on the Missouri River by the mouth of the Osage when the Asian carp made their way here, running in cicles behind the wingdams getting a kick out of watching them jump like salmon and she took a 8-10 lb to the head.

She was 8 and a buddy was with us, his girl was 10 and his boy 12, we pulled to the bank wiped the slime off her, put a bandaid on a small cut from a fin on her hand and she stopped crying.

We thought this would make good sport, cut some sharp sticks and started spearing them when they landed in the boat. The boy was cowering under the tube in the bottom of the boat and both girls were in the bow with spears out for the kill! (we got 4)

She was wanting to go back the rest of the summer for more, so when I took her she had a bag of stuff. We get on the water and in the bag was her bicycle helmet, gloves and elbow pads! She was ready for war!
 
Myal said:
I reckon it would have to be the coolest thing to have your own kid , from seeing your womans belly swell and the kid grow from baby ...
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In my opinion, that is one of the most underappreciated things in the world. There is an incredible, gut-wrenchingly beautiful eroticism to that--to the sight of your own nine-months-pregnant wife's body as she sleeps peacefully--to the feel of your and her baby moving inside her as you lie with your arm across her. Who said that pregnancy isn't sexy? Why did people ever begin buying this idea? This is womanhood at its most feminine. What's not to like?

And, incidentally, it also has everything to do with survival--in the long term, certainly; in the short term, almost as certainly--because in most survival situations you'd be far better off with a family member (or five) than without. How many countries are there now that are belatedly--and in some cases, desperately--realizing that they are having so few children that they face economic downturns or even societal collapse in coming decades as an aging workforce fails to be replaced? Russia, France, Japan--there's quite a list. (Look for euphemistically-renamed mandatory or near-mandatory euthanasia programs for the ill and elderly to be instituted in several countries during the next few decades, as you get older.) (:eek:)

My kids are 7, 5, 3, and 1. (The mathematically-inclined among you may sense a pattern? Which reminds me--about time to get busy again . . . . ;):D;)) Some years ago, I deliberately set about teaching them as much as they could learn about outdoor survival skills--with the goal of their being able to basically take care of themselves in most of the basic areas by the time they're 12 or so (give or take). The pleasant surprise is how much they absolutely LOVE this. I took them out back and showed a couple of them how to build a lean-to, and now the two older boys are out there building tepees and fire-rings on their own initiative. They love pocketknives--are learning to use them under what I call "super-duper-vision" at this stage, though the oldest is getting nearer to being able to use his pocketknife without adult eyes directly on his activity. Chopping wood with Daddy is one of their favorite activities--done with a mouse tomahawk ("tot-mahawk") or khukuri, with my hand as a guide on the handle, and careful instruction in observing where the axe-head will go if they miss what they're trying to chop. The two older boys have both started cooking fires--again, with supervision--using metal matches / firesteels. They are cutting cardboard rifles from boxes--even the 3-year-old girl insisted on sleeping with her little cardboard gun last night. I give them copies of R.H. Graves' Bushcraft books, the U.S. military survival manual (FM 21-76), and Wiseman's SAS Survival Handbook for spare-time reading, and they're eagerly devouring them all. (One of the clergymen in my church--former marine Recon soldier--noted with amusement that one of my kids was reading the SAS handbook during a church service, saying, "That's a good book!"). I'm also making a point of taking the time to show them how things work, encouraging them to observe things like what sounds the birds are making. Last year, when we had some time to kill waiting for their school day to begin, I pointed out some coyote scat in a vacant lot behind the school, and noted with my eldest son the rabbit tracks and droppings around, and the rabbit-bone fragments and fur in the coyote scat--pointing out how tracks also showed how a rabbit had run across a muddy patch, with deep claw marks showing that the rabbit had suddenly changed direction at high speed. That kid is going to know how to observe his surroundings, I'll tell you. I'm also involving them in planting desert-adapted native American food crops (we live in the Sonoran Desert), involving them in the process of gardening all the way from soil preparation and plant selection, up through planting, watering, harvesting, storage, and cooking. They all love pinole (ground parched corn); the three-year-old daughter is partial to strips of dried squash (a Pima / Papago Indian staple food). I read to them from In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache, by James Kaywaykla and Eve Ball, about the Apache kids' game of "creep and freeze", and soon my kids were learning to creep up on wild birds. More recently, I've read them stories from retired U.S. Border Patrol Agent Joel Hardin's excellent book Tracker: Case Files and Adventures of a Professional Mantracker (almost impossible to find and very expensive when available via the internet used-book sellers--but I found out that Hardin himself is selling autographed copies for $14.95, postage paid--via his website; he's e-mailable at Joel(at)jhardin-inc (dot com)). When I cut myself with a hand-saw while preparing wood for a backyard shelter, I took that opportunity to point out how the splashing of my drops of blood on the ground showed which direction I'd been going, then using the occasion to explain bleeding, point out that I wasn't crying, but just dealing with the situation, and talked them through it as I cleaned, medicated, and bandaged the lacerations. (I also talked them through exactly what I had done wrong--and they often repeat that caution to this day!) More recently, I showed them how to siphon rainwater that had collected in a depression atop a boulder, and different ways of purifying it by boiling. The littlest one is barely taking his first steps, but the other three have all used (and the eldest two have made) atlatls, and they have a basic understanding of how a flintlock works. Someday, when time and parental (and grandparental) supervisors are available, I hope to take a couple of the oldest out to the shooting range for the first time and give them an introduction to that sport--probably starting out with .22s and some lightly-loaded black powder guns.

A Navy S.E.A.L. friend told me that "See one . . . do one . . . teach one" was the motto he'd been taught for training skills--and I'm finding this is consolidating my own woodcraft abilities, with the bugs getting worked out and the concepts more firmly grasped as I actually demonstrate these things to the kids.

Deliberately teaching my kids outdoor and survival and observation skills has turned out to be one of the best things I've done as a father, and certainly among the most gratifying--both for them and for me.
 
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