Activity Name: Hike ‘til You Can’t Hike No More!
Time Required: Varies greatly depending on age and physical limitations of your kids.
Ages: 5+
Introduction: This activity is both a physical activity and an activity to teach resilience. You will essentially be hiking with your children in order to create a lesson opportunity based on their experience.
What you need:
- Hiking route or plan
- Everything you’d need for a safe and fun hiking opportunity. This could be a hike through parks, mountains or forests, or even an urban hike through the city.
Instructions: The most important instruction for this activity is to always use safe hiking practices. Know where you are going and have a plan for the entire trip. You will need good hiking shoes and appropriate clothing, as well as the right amount of water and food. Depending on the age this may be a short 15 minute hike around your neighborhood or if you have older children and you are experienced hikers, it may be a day trip. Either way, you are wanting to go on a hike to push your kids to experience both the mental and physical fatigue of hiking as well as the achievement of finishing. This can be a powerful metaphor to teach them rock-bottom resilience. Many times when we hike we hit a stage where we are very tired and our mind will try and trick us that we have gone as far as we think we can go. You want to watch your children closely for these moments and use them to fuel them forward. Encourage them and help them reach the planned goal. They will experience some powerful emotions you will discuss afterward. Boost them up and help them finish pointing out that they stuck with it even when they wondered if they could go any further.
Discuss:
Were there times during the hike that you thought you were too tired to go any further?
How did you push through the difficult times and finish?
How did you feel when you finished?
Why is it worth it to achieve something even when it is hard?
Rock Bottom resilience means to keep going or bounce back even when you think you can’t go any further. Are there any other moments you’ve felt like you couldn’t do something or everything was going wrong, but you stuck with it and kept going?