Following eight exhausting months trapped inside with their offspring and attempting house-training, a Greenwood couple has reportedly begun preliminary discussions about moving their son into the yard and transitioning him into an outdoor child.
“You know my wife caught him chewing on the couch last week?” Benny Gallagher said of his five-year-old son, Ollie. “Yesterday I had to step away from a Zoom meeting because he put crayons between his fingers and wrote on the walls like Wolverine. I think providing himself with an outside habitat will help set some healthy boundaries for behavior—he’ll probably prefer it anyway. We’ll build him a little house out there, and if it gets too cold he knows he can paw at the door any time he needs to come in. We’ll even get him microchipped in case he jumps the fence and gets loose.”
Without public school or daycare to share the job of watching their children, the Gallaghers aren’t the only ones exploring what many parents now refer to as ‘child rewilding.’
“There are many benefits to rewilding your child with a healthy sliding glass boundary between your sanity and their endless shrieking,” said child psychologist Henrietta Towns, author of Young, Wild, and Away From Me: A Rewilding Guide. “If your child is bursting with excitement, clawing at any slightly open door or window, it’s probably because they want to be an outdoor child. Families worried about the move outdoors are encouraged to install a ‘kiddie door’ to ease in the transition.”
UPDATE: Following publication of this article, a dull rumbling was heard nationwide as every baby boomer in the nation simultaneously rushed to their keyboards to inform the nation that back in the 70’s every child was an outdoor child, you didn’t come home until the street lamps came on, and now they’re “fine, just fine.”
