Reviewed by Lee Rinehart
Wild Inside:
How Nature Protects Your Child’s Mental Health and Restores Yours
By Kathleen Lockyer
Otter Play Publishing
October 2025, 351 pages, Paperback, ISBN-13: 979-8986593234
Readers bring their own ideas and experiences to the books they read. That, I have come to understand, is how authors and readers initially converse. Kathleen Lockyer, in her powerfully written work Wild Inside, prompted me to consider one of the most important questions society is facing. Why are we so disconnected? And here, I mean big picture disconnect – individually and socially we are severed from place. We are uprooted. We find ourselves straining for the sun like a dandelion freshly emerged from a half-inch crack in a city sidewalk.
A cracked sidewalk is not the evolutionary heritage of a dandelion. Oh, it will grow. But it is not likely to thrive. Same with humans. Our evolutionary heritage is rooted in the natural world, not the world of screens and regimented institutions. In a society where children are mostly managed instead of being habilitated, Lockyer encourages parents to instead introduce our children to their natural habitat. To invite them to “weave themselves back into the web of things. To become a listener. A feeler. A meaning-maker. A part of the landscape.”
The colonialism that resulted in the separation of native peoples from their ancestors now runs in the veins of every person on the planet, in every place that has been touched by an economic philosophy that places profit, ownership, and individualism as its summom bonum. As the economic system grew, it subsumed our biological heritage, it altered our habitat, and what has resulted is a debilitating mental illness that is manifested by loneliness, depression, and meaninglessness. This disease infects the young in the fragile years just after birth when their brains and bodies are reaching out, seeking sensory input, putting experiences in context, and making lifelong connections with the world of which they are an integral part.
Wild Inside is a thoughtful, gentle call to parents to be present with their children from their earliest years, to make “meaning of our childhoods and our parenting journey” through the “most ordinary moments” of tactile, intimate engagement with the natural world. This is because what people do, what they are occupied with, wires their brains. Through tactile, visual, and auditory experience, we learn to make predictions, make connections, and bring our observations into context. This learning starts when a baby first opens her eyes and reaches a hand to her mother’s face. Lockyer suggests, with references to scientific literature but also to her lived experience, that the natural world of trees, birds, rivers and creeks, dragonflies and coyotes hold everything humans need to become habilitated, or to be capable of living a meaningful, fruitful, happy life in the fullness of community with nature and other humans.
The problem is, “our culture is out of sync with the evolved needs of children. We’ve normalized disconnection from nature, fractured communities, overstimulated nervous systems, and chronically under supported parents.” This is where nature can help. The natural world “offers the sensory signals our neurology is waiting to respond to.”
With this wonderful design, fine-tuned by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, we humans inherit great potential. The better we do in habilitating our young, the less rehabilitation they will need later, and the healthier our society becomes. The natural world has an important role to play in this.
Lockyer’s engaging work was born of observation, reflection, and the deep empathy of an occupational therapist. But, more importantly, a parent and a human. Her narrative is punctuated by stories of children she has worked with which deliver a powerful testimony to the efficacy of listening and being present with one’s natural environment. When a child misbehaves in school, well-meaning teachers and parents try to control the situation, usually with rewards and punishments.
Their behaviors weren’t irrational. They were responses to systems that overwhelmed their senses and failed to recognize their alarm signals. When I say their distress was ecosystem feedback, I mean it literally. They were, like birds, trying to survive. And they were trying to tell us something.
Lockyer recognized that the children she worked with, including her own daughters, needed anchors and landmarks, a place where they could orient themselves to the world and learn how to navigate risk and challenge, to develop curiosity and empathy. These are the characteristics of a fully formed human. Lockyer introduced one child to coyote tracks, and later when the animal appeared, it became fused in the child’s mind. There were context and connection. Much like climbing trees and wading in the current of a cold creek, through trial, error, interaction, and correction, a child becomes more deeply connected with their body, they understand their place in the world, resulting in a more confident adult later in life. The child is enacting formative questions through movement and observation – “What does this mean? Am I safe? Is this important? Will this help me survive?”
I found Wild Inside to be more than a parenting guide. As a parent of grown children I found myself reflecting on my early interactions with them through Lockyer’s guided exercises. But I also saw how reconnecting with nature is helpful, necessary even for adults. Society, Lockyer writes, has severed our feedback loop with nature. We can reintegrate ourselves with our bodies, our minds, and our community through the intuition drivers the natural world offers, drivers that we have been wired to respond to over thousands of years of evolution.
Lockyer relates these concepts with beautiful, rich language. Her tone is genuine, grounded in praxis and offered with empathy. Her narrative easily transitions from respectful, pragmatic guidance to reflection, often told in a poetic prose that catches your breath:
… hush of a winter forest — alive with subtle signals, yet deeply at rest.
And maybe, like the maple, we carry an inner wisdom – an ancient rhythm – that knows when to hold on and when to let go.
I watched as more seeds twirled from her limbs and descended, each in its own time. Some of them fell fast and straight others danced left and right still others seemed to linger on the wind, making time irrelevant. I whispered, How do you know? How do you know when they are ready for release, Mama? Tell me your secrets?
Wild Inside is a call to “remember what helps us feel whole” within a “culture that has lost its ability to listen deeply.” Here, Lockyer seems to place the blame, if any, on the system, not the parents, and certainly not the child. We are all seeking, many of us without knowing it, access to our “original source code.” Lockyer invites us to the woods, where healing begins, to a point of connection with a child, or with someone who has been colonized by the artifacts of a disconnected society, by “placing your hand in an eddy of water [that] breaks the circling and sends it flowing into the downhill stream again.”
About the reviewer: Lee Rinehart is an educator and writer whose work examines the disturbing intersection of extractive land use policy and ecological wellbeing. He works at a national nonprofit providing educational programs that assist farmers transitioning to sustainable practices. Lee is an MFA candidate at Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.