We felt very honoured to be invited to speak at this year’s Edinburgh International Book festival; this was a wonderful opportunity to spread the word about encouraging more children and young people to get outdoors to experience real world adventures! It was also exciting for us to be part of the festival and to meet other writers.
We were delighted to meet Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood and Detoxing Childhood. We enjoyed her inspiring talk about the multitude of pressures on children and families in today’s fast changing world, and were delighted to find that among the solutions she offered was to give children more opportunities to play outside.
She believes children need physical, emotional, social and conceptual development (common sense understanding of the world) to enable cognitive learning and to grow into well balanced individuals. Today the scales have tipped rather heavily so the emphasis is on academic learning, and children are not getting opportunities for real, hands on play that is creative and imaginative, which provides opportunities to encounter and learn about risk and which lets children become more independent and learn to get along with others.
We could not agree more and want to try and raise parents awareness to the importance of getting their kids off the sofas, away from the marketing bombardment and the screens and interact in the real world.
Sue has very kindly provided a few words of endorsement for our next book Go Wild, we hope people will follow her advice. Thank you Sue!!
"Go Wild" is just what families need to escape from virtual worlds and rediscover the wonders of the real one. It provides the perfect recipe for transforming cotton wool kids into confident, independent, resilient young people. Every family should have a copy."
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