220: Nutritious movement for your child – and you!

Adrian, Hi, I'm Adrien in suburban Chicagoland, and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child, from tooth brushing to sibling fighting, to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not, that's less than one minute long that describes what's happening, and email it to support at your parentingmojo.com and listen out for your episodes soon.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have been talking a lot on the podcast recently about what children learn from video games, and so it only seems appropriate that we also spend an episode on the opposite side of that topic, a place where I feel much more at home, which is on what children learn using their whole bodies, and especially from taking their whole bodies outside. My guest today is Katy Bowman, who holds both bachelor's and master's degrees in kinesiology, focused on biomechanics, and she runs the company Nutritious Movement. Katy teaches about movement globally and speaks about sedentarism and movement ecology to academic audiences as well as regular people like us. Katy is the author of 10 books on this topic, including the brand newly released as of the day of recording this episode. It's called My Perfect Movement Plan, as well as the book through which I found her, which is Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More. And in Grow Wild, Katy writes that the status of digital natives, awarded to today's children, is unwittingly packaged with its sister status, sedentary native, a body born into a new landscape with almost no movement. So we're going to focus mostly on what children learn from and through their bodies in this episode, because all of these things are connected. All things our families and our communities are connected. Our children learn about moving their bodies from us. So how we move our bodies also has really important implications for how they are going to move, as well as, frankly, for our own health and well being so welcome, Katy, it's so great to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

And I mean, firstly, congratulations. New book was launched yesterday, another big milestone. So I hope you're basking in the carryover glow from yesterday?

Yeah, I feel like I was actually backpacking yesterday. So much of the work happens beforehand and really after as well. But it is feel it's a bit, a bit like a birth, I feel like, from a writer's perspective, once the book is hand like, handed off and officially, like, that's when I feel like it was done. The publication date is just an Amazon thing, maybe even.

Yes, yeah, cool. Well, congratulations. Anyway, and so, so let's start talking about movement, right, and reading with the basics. So, so what is movement? Why is it important for our bodies from your perspective?

Well, I think the broadest definition of movement is anytime your body changes position, or the tissues of your body, probably more importantly, and thus, the cells of your body change position and are loaded in a particular way just due to the orientation that we are. Have to gravity. And why it's important is it's not that different than if you think of like, why is food important for the body? Why is sunlight important to the body? It's because within those mediums, there are other things, you know. So within food, there are calories and there are minerals and vitamins, there are essential things, and movement is the same within about of movement, or when you are changing your body's shape, that larger change of shape is creating inputs down on the cellular level, and our body, just like it needs vitamins and minerals from the foods we eat the when we move our body, what we're doing is we're communicating with ourselves and thus different tissues. You know, we're telling bone how it needs to be, and we're telling muscles how they need to be and how connective tissue needs to be and how nerves need to be. And what that does is create a structure that is able to facilitate or tolerate more movement.

Okay, you haven't said the word exercise yet. I noticed. Yeah. Why is that?

Well, exercise is a subtype of movement. It is one type. So if you imagined a big circle, we called everything of how I defined movement, a change in shape as movement. Exercise is a subtype. It's a smaller circle that sits inside the original circle type called titled movement. So exercise is it has a trickier definition. So for something to count as exercise, it has to use the musculoskeletal system in a way that utilizes more kilo calories, calories, as we're used to calling them. So it has to, like, burn energy is the word that we words that we tend to associate with that and it also, exercise is usually pre planned, so you've pre selected the mode that you're going to do. Like, what are you going to do for exercise? You've predetermined what you're going to do for how long you're going to do it, the intensity at which you're going to do it, and the purpose behind it is exclusively for improving your physical well being. So those are the conditions that get something into that exercise subtype.

Yeah, in one of your books, I loved how you talked about exercise is basically kind of meaningless. It seems that that's a key distinction between exercise and movement, that exercise is kind of meaningless activity and movement is meaningful activity?

Well, actually the definition that I have in that case is purposeful versus non-purposeful because what is meaningful to you, you get to decide. So I couldn't say that exercise is meaningless for somebody, but the in research of trying to understand why exercise adherence is so low when so many people would like to move, it's like, well, exercise is particularly purposeless, meaning it only meets one condition and it doesn't meet other needs that we have in our life. And so how are you going to schedule something that doesn't have purpose when there's so many other things that it's pushing up against us in terms of your time?

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, obviously we evolved to participate in movement very differently, and we have learned some lessons about movement from our parents, from our culture, and our children are learning these lessons about movement from us right now and from the ways we set up our houses and from the broader culture. Can you talk a little bit about what our children are learning about movement from us in in our culture?

Well, certainly, so there's, there's just a straight up modeling, you know, they look to you as parents and or our allo parents and the adults around them, and they get a sense of what it means to be an adult, and that includes all sorts of information. One of those things as movement, like, what does an adult moving look like? And so they'll see, maybe the own behaviors that you have created within yourself, and that is informing them about what they are to be doing. There are other, I would say, more explicit things that they're learning, and that would be rules in the way that you've set up a container for them, or a set of containers, there are hard fix like fixtures in that environment. You know, it would be the things that they literally bump up against as they are interested in moving, or maybe they want to do a certain movement, and there's nothing to facilitate that particular movement in a container. And then there's also the invisible parts of of a cultural container, which would be the rules or the expectations that we have in that space. And so I think both of those are sort of within the parenting domains. And then there's just, you know, if, if you are moving with them, you know, or, I guess, another way I would say it is another thing that we give children, or another way we influence movement with our kids is in the language that we give movement. There's not a lot of language around physicality. A lot of it refers to exercise, which you might talk more about. But you know, if we talk about food, for example, we spend a lot of times perhaps cluing our children into signals in their body that let them know when they are hungry or full. And maybe that's like rumblings in the tummy or hunger pains, or maybe it's the feeling of being too stuffed, or maybe it's becoming emotional when you don't like when you're hangry. We don't have a real language around that. So by by not giving children a language around movement, it's hard for them to and or for their bodies to communicate with them about their need for movement.

And it seems to me that not only do we not have language for it, but we're we spent, I mean, parents I work with spend a good deal of time trying to stop their kids from moving right, things like, how do I get my kid to stop climbing on the coffee table? How do I get my kid to stop jumping on the couch? How do I get my kid to stop bouncing off the walls? Right? What kind of things are our children learning about movement? And I guess, you know, piggybacking on from that, I've seen the video where you give a tour of your house, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, how we might consider setting up our environments to be more conducive to the kinds of movements that children want to make.

Well, right? And so there's different ages, but if we just think about, you know, let's say toddlers or younger children, from like 0 to 7 or 8, space is a big one. You know, we set up our house to really, sort of in a minimalist way, but, and there's a lot of reasons that people would pursue mental minimalism, but for us, it was really about space, to be able to execute certain movements without one injury to themselves, but to just even breaking things, you know, in the house, just to create, not just a play space, there's a lot to movement, but even a chance to stretch out your legs and work on a low table, really bringing things down to the level of the child. So we had, we got rid of a lot of the seats in our house, you know, plush chair, types of seats. There was still cushions, and different ways for them to build resting structures, but it's very dynamic in the sense of even the shape of our furniture became something that one could fashion based on the mood that they were feeling. By understanding what their body was telling them and the way that they maybe needed to be, you could say practically what that means? Well, that would mean, like, I just made a little photo montage of my son throughout the years, who loves to read. Loves to read. And so when you think about like, what is the reading position? Do you sit at your desk? Do you sit in your chair? Do you lay on your couch? And the answer is, his body would let him actually, he would like to fidget. Sometimes he wants to balance, sometimes he wants to drape on his back. Sometimes he wants to drape on his stomach. And because we had different cushions and puffs of different sizes, and we didn't have a lot of rigidity blocking some of that creativity, he could fashion exactly the seat that he would like to take in the moment. And so the activity one is reading, but the shapes of reading could be endless, creatively speaking. And I could see maybe, like eight or nine regularly used body positions and therefore strengths and flexibilities to do this one behavior.

Yeah, yeah. You're actually reminding me. When I was researching this episode, we were in Flagstaff, and my daughter got an ear infection, and we had to go to urgent care to get some medicine for it, and while we were waiting for them to see us, we actually brought the iPad, because we had no idea how long it was going to be, and she was in pain, and I was watching her sitting on the table right as we were waiting for the doctor to come in, and she's moving her body around as she's using the iPad. She's moving from like being on her stomach and propping herself up to sitting up with one knee up and then moving the other knee up. And I was like, this is it. This is this is how it works. And so it was really cool to see it happen in real time. And and also, I'm thinking about how children learn in school, right? Which is where you kind of have a desk, and you kind of sit at the desk. Can you talk a bit more about what children learn about movement in school that you see?

Well, there's different types of, you know, schooling available so, but in that conventional, you know, room where there's a high volume of sitting down, I mean, certainly what they're learning about movement is hard to pull out from everything else that they're learning. But it might even be that to learn is to sit, to produce is to sit. That that is a you know, in addition to just simply learning how to sit, they're starting to tie together this idea that creativity, producing is all happening in a still container. So that's a big thing. Then there are also, you know, there's often movement spaces within schools. Physical Education is one of them. Recess is another one and they should be they're very different in their intentions but unfortunately, research, sorry, recess has been slowly waning a bit in many schools, although, like in the state that I'm in, they just added legislation to bring back a mandatory amount of recess, because it really does serve not only the physicality. I mean, that's the thing. I think we're used to thinking, Oh, PE and recess, that's for the body, and the rest is for your mind. The realize it's like, it's all for the mind, it's all for the well-being of the whole child all of the time. So that's, you know, what can often be picked up in school.

Yeah, yeah. I hated PU. I was always one of those kids who was picked last, and it was, you know, it was just perpetual humiliation from the sports team aspect. And then I was really bad at the actual, you know, running around on the field stuff anyway, and, and, yeah, I thought that's like, I didn't have any concept that movement and exercise weren't the same thing anyway. But it's like, why would I do this when it's so miserable? Yeah, and that probably set me up for a decade, really, of not moving very much.

Unfortunately, I would say that many people their sole exposure to movement, especially if your family culture also didn't come with a lot of movement, then really the only portal for movement is this, PE games, athletics avenue, and then you're, I mean, you're already in a sort of a vulnerable kid space. And then when you're in this, you know, picking teams and having to all put your skills on display and some children have really been nourished through those skills, and some children are coming to them completely as a novice. It's very it creates a psychology around how we relate to movement. And one of the reasons that I've spent so much time I think redefining movement outside of exercise is because I think exercise is also sort of can align to PE in that way where the same people who sort of resist or resisted physical education. PE feel that same way towards exercise like again, you're stepping into, oftentimes, spaces where other people are more familiar, more practiced. It's there's a culture around it that you might not be part of other again, because your family culture, or maybe you just had a family that gave you that sports culture, but you really find some other types of movement meaningful. People often discover them later in life. Love for moving through nature. But we it needs to be very broad, because we don't need exercise. We don't need PE. We need movement. And so to make sure we're carving out these other ways that we can get it, so that we can get those, those nutrients inside of it that we do require.

Yeah, okay, so let's talk about how to make that happen, right? Because I can imagine listening to this parent thinking, yeah, when am I going to have time to do that? And this sort of speaks to how I started digging into your work, because my daughter had another doctor's appointment. This one was a few months ago, and it was just a regular well child checkup, and the doctor's like, how much time do you spend time do you spend on screens? And she gives her amount, which is higher than most people would normally recommend, but still well below, sort of you know, how much time kids spend sitting in school. And the doctor is looking at my daughter, but I can tell she's really talking to me, and she's like, you should get more exercise. And I'm like, Hmm, well, she doesn't really love team sports. And, you know, I'm just like, this doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't feel right to kind of push her into something that she doesn't want to do. And then I found your work and and I know one of the big ideas you talk about in Grow Wild is this idea of stacking. And so I wonder, can we start talking about like, how we can broaden our movement potential, particularly broaden it in nature, without adding three hours of work a day to what's already on our plates?

Yeah, I think a big another part of the messaging that I have around movement is we do see it as something separate. You know, again, that's an exercise repeat phenomenon. Sort of, all of our needs are parsed neatly and have a tidy box, and then they happen in isolation and and in series, one after another. And that's not really the way to get all of your needs met fully. You know, we're so time oriented culturally, so stacking is this idea of looking for a task that ends up meeting multiple needs at the same time. How old is your daughter, if I may ask?

10. And she just turned 10, right.

Okay, so, so a way of stacking would be, what are interests that she does have? Or you could do this for anyone listening. This could be for yourself, you know, like, what are interests that I have, and what are dynamic expressions of some of those interests? And then is there a way to not only fit movement to her interests in that way, but also bring in other things that children or and all of us, really, humans, really need, like community. So is there a group that does this where, you know, maybe it's horses, you know, and so horses is a time to be outside and moving. And then, is there a way, is there something that you could be doing during that same time with them that also is meeting your particular need, and when you start to try meet multiple needs at the same time, you find that you need less packages of time because you're meeting multiple needs, like a skewer through through one segment of time in that way.

Yeah. Okay, so I'm thinking of an example, and I'm wondering if you can maybe give an example from your life as well. So I'm thinking I organize a group of parents and kids who goes out. We go about once a month when we're at home, which we're not at home right now, but we go to do some sort of nature-based activity. Recently, we've been doing a lot of things around things like digging clams. And so we will all work together to dig clams, and then, ideally the tide table works out with dinner time, I'll pre-prepare some clam chowder, and then we'll chuck the clams and toss them in the chowder, and we'll sit and eat chowder on the beach. And so we, if I, if I'm sort of getting this right, I'm looking at your categories that you list in, in in, in your book, Grow Wild, and the categories I see are rest, family, play, nature, food, work, community, movement and learning and so if I think about what I'm getting there, I guess I'm getting mental rest, right? I'm not getting physical rest, but I'm getting mental rest from the kind of work I do regularly. Obviously, it's family time. I would consider it kind of playful. Definitely, it's nature, it's food, it's work. It's, you know, it's that evening's meal. It's absolutely community. It's how I'd like to spend time with people. It's definitely movement, and it's also learning as well. Because the kids are kind of running around, and some of them are digging, some of them are jumping around in the sand and kind of trying to find quicksand, and how can they get stuck and skimming stones and all that kind of thing. So I can see how I'm hitting, like, the vast majority of these categories, by doing something that I find fun. So that was an immediate example that stuck out for me as you're talking through that I'm wondering if you can give an example from your life as well, that parents can start to see more of, you know, maybe a less, you know, I want to take four hours and go and do this thing at beach and more of an everyday thing.

Yeah, I was going to give you, I mean, yours is quite elaborate and beautiful. And one of those ultimate stacks right where the time investment is worth it, because you're meeting so many needs all at once. Something a little bit more every day would be to take homework at the end of the day. You know, if your kids are have this stack of homework, they've already been sitting, perhaps in school for a long period of time, or even if they're at home school, they've been in school space, they've been inside, and they've had a particular way of relating to that material. And we would take it out on a walk. We would do math facts on a walk, play lines on a walk with the family, taking turns. You can gamify it in a little bit of where you could say, All right, take a break from that. Okay, there's gonna be a race up to this hill, you know, where you're throwing an element of play in this way. So it's not as ultimate of a stack, but it's a way of disrupting maybe the tendency to always approach what homework has to look like in one particular way. Or also, it could be packaging up dinner like maybe you just make a regular soup in your house, but you're going to put it in a in a thermos, and you're going to head out somewhere, and you're going to sit outside and eat it, or you'll go for a short walk and stop and take a few spoonfuls, and the rest of time, you know you've got, you've walking the dog. Also, maybe that's something on your tasks that you have to do, and everyone is out, and you're noticing birds and it just is a more nutrient-dense period of time, which another way of talking about stacking, but it's also checking off multiple boxes instead of just homework.

Yeah, yeah. And that, to me, is kind of the key to all of this, is, how do I stack the stuff? And I've started to look at my life and where I can start to do some of this stuff. And I know that in your most recent book, you actually talk about the ways that you can examine the tasks that you do on a daily basis and and see how you can start to fit more movement into those. And so I'm wondering if you would be willing to kind of dance in the moment with me a little bit here. And if I was to tell you the five things that I spend most of my time doing in the house, which I imagine is somewhat representative of the kinds of things that other parents are doing, if you can help me to see how I can start to work more movement in and I'll tell you, since I've been reading your book, how I've I've started to do that myself as well, but I'm curious to hear your ideas first. So so the the five things that I think I spend most of my time on our work, firstly, which is largely computer-based, largely typing based. Second, actually, is I am kind of proud of this actually, when I'm thinking about how I spend my time, it's actually reading to my daughter. And I would say I do that for at least an hour a day, by the time you factor in bedtime stories and other things through the day, there's cooking, there's washing dishes and there's laundry. So how can I possibly stack those things?

Okay, well, let's do them one at a time. So your computer-based work, I imagine you being in place, or at least in front of a keyboard, is important. So arranging your shape as you type, you know the idea of not everything being seated. I'm doing a podcast right now. This is in place work, but I'm doing it standing. I actually have something underneath my feet. I'm stretching my calves as I do it, so it allows some of this very light activity, micro-movement. So changing up the shape of your workspace a bit also, as a writer, which you are, perhaps as well, I have found that I spent, I was spending a lot of time sitting in front of my keyboard not actually producing writing that there's a synthesis, there's a creativity, and making sure that that was represented in in my writing time by taking outside, because I think what happens is, if you, if you're a writer, or you, or your output is the written word, there's a lot of ruminations. Maybe there's discussion with yourself, maybe there's discussion with others, to to organize that time wise, where maybe on Mondays is the time where you call your writing or your work partner and you're working through whatever otherwise typing you would need to do on the move in that particular way, or at minimum, opening up a screen, and instead of going back-and-forth with text-based conversations, standing up and doing some stretches while you do it, or sitting on the ground and doing some stretches while you do it. That was a big one for me, because I would say that, you know, if you're like, 40 hours a week of writing or 20 hours a week of writing, if you actually had a camera on yourself, you're probably producing writing much less than that. And so instead of sitting there and just scrolling to just go, Oh, this is part of my process, and it doesn't need to be sitting down inside to do it. You can. And there's a lot of research on creativity and walking for writing stuff, and so just honor that and put it into your schedule.

Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, I had, I would say there's a good chunk of reading time, and then there's writing time, and I've already sort of disaggregated those two things so that we can do things like going to places that don't have internet access, and I can keep working while my daughter's doing something else, but I hadn't thought about taking the additional step of, how could I actually stand up while doing this or do in a different posture? So okay, so that's a new one for me. Okay, so reading to my daughter, I'm curious to see your thoughts. I've been playing this one a lot actually.

What is the reason for reading to your daughter? What is what is the need being met by that?

She likes it?.Yeah, she can read. She's not a super fluent reader, and she really enjoys the connection with me of reading.

So it'd be interesting to know if similar connection would be you listening to a story being told to both of you while you were out.

Actually no. It would make my life a lot easier if she was open to that. But no, she likes me to read to her.

Okay, so maybe going out to a playground and reading and letting her move about as she's being read to, you know, or at minimum, getting into a swing outside. You know, if you're always doing a lot of that reading, sitting inside, when the bulk of the day is also sitting inside and seeing if maybe she would be open to a different way. Like, is it just that you are reading to her? Is it just that you are focused on her? You know, if, if there's another way, if she would lose your focus because an audiobook was playing. Is there some other activity where you would give her equal focus, but it would be dynamic? You know, when maybe reading is not the only conduit to what she is able to extract out of it. So that would be a trial and error in coming up with some other activities where you were focusing on her, which I know, having, you know, an 11 year old and 12 year old is a need, but it might not have to be a sedentary.

Okay, yeah, so I hadn't considered those ideas. Um, we have tried taking the book elsewhere. We're actually staying in Albuquerque right now, and we have friends who have a pool, and they're letting us use their pool regularly, and she will slip the book into her pool bag and ask me to read to her while she's in the pool. So she had thought of that one herself already. We haven't tried sort of some sort of side by side task, a jigsaw puzzle I can imagine, could be one that's a little sedentary, but still, but maybe we could come up with something else there. The way I've been playing with it is I can get a pretty much a full stretching routine in as I'm reading to her, yeah, and I'm also sitting on the floor while I'm doing which I know from reading so many of your books, is a huge shift from your perspective. Can you talk a little bit about what you think about floor sitting?

Well, it's a very light activity that really slots well into life. It doesn't take an extra time. It's an easy stack. So if you're doing any activity that requires that you more or less be in place, so that could be anything from reading a book to watching television to even working on your laptop, if you can bring it down to floor level and be when not only are you getting up and down off of the ground, which is a big body user, and all of the chairs that we have really prevent us from using the lower half of this movement, you know, like for many people, that's a movement they do. They hardly do it all. So if you reintroduce that, plus the different sitting positions, it's similar to going to a class to just stretch those parts on purpose. You know, where? Again, that's the exercise packaging where you have to leave and step aside. You're like, I'm going to do yoga, or I'm going to do some, you know, mobility work for this period of time. It's like, you don't have to leave your house. You can meet other needs while you're also getting that done, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was a huge shift for me. The. I could, you know, I could spend 20 minutes stretching, and it would cost me 0 extra minutes in the day. So what about things like the cooking, the laundry, the washing dishes, those kinds of things. What would, what would you do with that?

Well, a big for like, for me and I in my one book, I think I put dishes like, I just feel like dishes is the thing that fills my life. You know, I, no one ever says it on their biography, but I feel like dishwasher is such a significant portion of my time. We do a lot of outdoor cooking. You know, the prepping and just setting up a small I'm not talking about building an outdoor kitchen, but just moving dinner prep to outside has really been a way to take a lot of those household tasks and get some fresh light in and again, floor sitting or ground sitting, it brings the children outside also and opens up the wonder of the natural world. You don't have to go to a nature center or go to something that more akin to wilderness. It could just be not inside your home. So that's a big one. We also in our home, we do a lot of kitchen tasks by hand. We've eschewed a lot of the motorized kitchen aids for like things like hand beading. You know, we make cream by shaking it in a jar, and then what you're doing is you're just, you're expanding, again, the nutrient density of a task. You know, it's not just eating the whipped cream, it's the fact that you made it and then you understood how it is made and the energy that goes into making it. And of course, it has all the benefits of less trash. It's another minimal approach to maximizing, sort of how you get out of something. So household tasks like that we're always making them over for more physical input. And then dishes iss this one of those things like, luckily, in the pyramid of movements that we need, making movements is a big one, you know, and it really meets the need for hand work. It's not the most fun, perhaps, but it is. It's just labor. You know, we've gotten rid of so much labor.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. I, as I was reading your books, I obviously happened over a period of time, and I make this oatmeal every morning. I called the world's most amazing oatmeal, and it's got all these fresh ground spices in it and and I do grind them myself with a mortar and pestle. And I realized, Oh, this is my grip strength workout. And I started alternating the hands that I do it with. And then I kept reading your book. I'm like, Oh, my right hand is already so dominant that I really should just start grinding the spices my left hand, because that's going to provide sort of the, you know, the level of activity that my right hand is getting just in everyday usage. And it's little things like that. And in one of your books, you talk about how, you know, if you if you don't have grip strength, you're not going to be able to drive as you get older. And so I'm at a point where I'm starting to think about the next 20 years, and what are they going to look like. And so you know, if it's just as simple as grinding my spices for my oatmeal helps me to maintain the kinds of things that I want to be able to do for longer, it's like, okay, yeah, this makes sense,

Yeah. And also, you know, the three last tasks that you mentioned really seem to be home-based tasks. And so instead of only making over those tasks, I would check to see if you had a hanging station in your home. You know, because you're moving in between tasks, you don't only have to make over, like the way you vacuum or the way you do dishes. It's just recognizing, oh, this container, this environment, is an environment in which I'm spending the bulk of my time. So if there's nothing for you to get any sort of big body hanging work, simply putting in a doorway hanging bar or some sort of hanging station would allow you just flowing from task to task, to fit in one minute or two minutes of really essential movement without needing to schedule it, without really needing to step on the toes of any of these other tasks that you need to do.

Yeah, we actually have a pull up bar in the doorway, which doesn't have a door between our bedroom and the bathroom, and I have never used it in that way. Oh, so we all start when we go home. I would love to put some kind of hanging bars down the hallway. I'm not sure it's gonna work. When we get home enough to check it out, we have a big wall of glass down one side, and then I think doorways are gonna be too high. So I'm not sure that's gonna work, but I would love to put something in like that that I've seen pictures of online, that kids, I mean, just adore using.

Even one set of rings, you know, like there's, there's, if, the if, the big modification, sometimes we pick the bigger thing, and it's got a lot of hurdles for us, like maybe pick the smaller thing that will be used more frequently anyway.

Yeah, yeah. And that actually reminds me of a house that we were staying at in Flagstaff a few weeks ago, belonging to a friend of mine, and it had a like a rope suspended from this really high ceiling with a dowel across it. And she my daughter would when I, when I'm reading to her all evening, every evening, she's launching herself from one couch to the next and trying to see if she can get, you know, can I get from the arm without doing a skip step on the couch and get to the arm of the other? And she's doing this so much, she actually built up calluses by the time that we left. And this is it just seems like such a contrast with a paper that you cite in Grow Wild, where it said the most common reason why children say they sit is I sit because it's the norm or because I have to, right? So how, if I'm seeing that I'm sitting a lot of the time, how can I kind of challenge this idea that sitting is how these things happen when I'm doing something like reading to my daughter, when I'm not staying in a house that happens to have a dowel hanging from the ceiling at a perfect height for that kind of play?

Tell me more about the contrast. Where are you seeing the contrast?

Well, the so the contrast in one of the papers that you cite in Grow Wild, right where the kids are saying, I sit because I have to, and my friend having this, this dowel hanging from her ceiling, it's like my friend already sees sitting is not a requirement of being together in our living room. Unfortunately, my husband actually whacked his head on the end of town when we were staying there, so there is zero chance we're gonna be able to do that in our house. But it seems as though there are other ways that we can encourage children to move as well, right? Instead of instilling in them this idea of I sit because I have to, because it's expected, because it's the norm, yeah. So what would you say to that?

Well, I mean, I so I do think that the literature shows that the reason children are still is because it's the containers beget stillness. The implicit and the explicit rules are to be still, and when you happen on a space where someone has changed the rules, changed the container, you could see it's not actually, it's not their norm. But that, to me, that paper is communicating, the child is saying the weight of the environment and the rules within so what can we do is to take more cues from your friend and the rules that they have set up for movement? I mean, to put a big swingy thing in a living room space is to communicate a set of values that they have around movement. And so I think where parents are often tethered is they recognize the importance of movement, at least theoretically, academically, but they might not embody them, or they haven't actually changed rules enough for them. So there's this tension where they're telling, like, we should you need to move more, move more, but yet they're not doing anything, yes, but they're not changing anything about the rules that they either don't realize they're communicating or are communicating sometimes just explicitly. You know, this is not a place for that kind of play. If this is dangerous type of play, look I got hit in the head, you know, and to get, you know, to, like, validate the reasons that you don't move, you can always find reasons not to move. It's much more challenging to be counterculture in that way, to recognize, oh, it is a priority. And, and we're going to set up our lives to really hold this as a greater value.

Yeah, I think that that point that you said early in that answer, that we don't realize that we're communicating, right, the values we don't realize we're communicating because I had seen how she would move by herself, right, like I described at the doctor's office with the ear infection. And when I'm reading to her often, she will, like, move her body and she'll she'll drape herself off the couch, and she'll end up upside down. I'm like, how is that even comfortable? But it is comfortable for her, and so I've never stopped her from doing any of those kinds of things. And she does move herself fluidly and frequently throughout the day, but I have never taken that extra step to, you know, other than, you know, the outside movement that I try and incorporate regularly, I've never taken that extra step to, you know, how can we set up our house to better incorporate that? And what am I communicating about my values, about our values, when I don't do that, when I have that silent message of, you're not, you know, jumping on the couch is kind of not okay. And so I think that seeing that unintentional values communication is really, really, really important. So so I think, you know, that's something I see in your work, is you're so explicit. This is my value, and this is how we're setting our home up and our lives up, to take that into account.

And I think further another way to support one of those earlier points about, how are we affecting how we're how our children move, to verbalize what you're seeing about the way that she's moving, it's like, wow, we see you're doing a back bend over there that must does that feel really good to your body? Because then what's happening is a lot of those you know, it's just like natural eating behaviors that. They're upwellings, natural upwellings. But to give someone a language around it and a recognition of their body's communications is to call that out and be like, Wow, I see that you really love hanging. Would you like to be able to do more of that in other places? When's another place that you feel like hanging? Because then when there's tension later on, the child be like, oh, I need to hang this is that feeling that I'm getting. And so just by checking in that way and communicating is to give them a language that helps give voice to these communications that are coming from the body, these signals to move that she's able to follow now, but become harder and harder to follow as your cultural construct becomes more solidified in your mind, like if you're the only one moving in a room, at some point you're going to stop. If it's just your mom, it's okay. And I think a lot of times, with some children, they'll need to only be with their mother because the mother is the only person who tolerates that way of moving and so that's why it's really important to recognize this is a need for all children, and if we can be okay with it, then more children can be comfortable in more spaces. And you know, more spaces can be for them.

Yeah, that was in one of your books. You have pictures of movements that are allowed. Instead of having a sign saying, you know, don't jump on this, don't climb on that, it's like, do this here. See how are you can jump here. Take an eye break and see how what's the furthest thing you can see? I love that idea.

Yeah, I there's so many don't signs, especially around movement. The more you now that we've you've heard this, you'll start seeing them in places. I'm like, I understand that there are reasons, safety reasons, where you would not want certain movements to happen. But if you don't declare where movement can happen, then what's happening is just a slow withering of the space in which it's okay to move culturally, and that is what is happening. So I just made some signs. Anyone can go download them, and you can hang them up in your school or your space, and it's just a little visual permission. If you don't have the ability to stand around and give permission 100% of the time, you can let the signs do their job.

Oh, fantastic. I hadn't seen those available who download. I will get that link from you, and we'll put those and we'll put a link to that on the website. So awesome. So it seems as though extracurricular activities might be a place where parents are thinking about my kids running around all the time in soccer, football, whatever. The thing is, how do you see extracurricular activities fitting into a picture of movement?

Well, I see everyone having a movement diet, you know. And with a movement diet, you're looking to make sure movement is distributed over certain categories. I do think, you know, we're in a kind of a movement free culture, you know, we're in a sedentary culture. So right now, the way we see movement is very binary. You're doing it or you're not doing it, you know, so that, and like so many of so, much of the messaging around movement is to just burn off excess energy like that that you would just want to put gas in your car only to drive it around because you have it, rather than put it towards developing certain skills. So this movement diet for children and also for ourselves, there are categories that you want to hit. There are skills that are listed for children, and they're they're not. Some of them are for skills. It's kind of tricky, because as our society becomes more sedentary, less movement is required for certain people in society. Now just keep in mind that there's a quite a large laboring force of people, and those people are getting plenty of total movement, although their diversity of movement is not very great, because it's very repetitive, because they've, we've outsourced many people, have outsourced much of their labor to other people.

But for you know, the group of people that is a really identifying as sedentary and saying, this is a problem, the skills that we want to have would be like walking, you know, being able to walk from point A to point B. This is all outside of the idea of a disability, but you know that you've got endurance and strength to be able to walk, you know, a few miles different different mileage at different ages. Jumping is so important for bone building, you know, in children. I mean, the thing to remember about children is the juvenile period of time is, is when you're setting your adult body. That's part of the role of that period of time. So as childhoods become more and more sedentary, the adults will have that in their their biography, and it will be in the skeleton of sedentarism, early sedentarism. So whole body, big body movement, you know, crossing the monkey bars like opposite to fine motor. Fine motor has its place, but you. Making sure the shoulders and the arms can hold that weight, throwing and catching accuracy with those types of things is just part of how the brain and the eyes work together and coordinate with the arms. So if your child plays a certain sport, you can look and say, Oh, they're getting lots of sprinting and outside and community time. Okay, great. Play is also something children need, which is usually unsupervised, unscripted. They're free to create the rules around that. That's a need for child. So playing a sport doesn't necessarily meet the need for play. They were using the word play in both and in both situations, but plays a little bit different, unstructured. So I like to use the word unstructured. They need unstructured, dynamic time. So making sure that's in the movement diet. And then you pick your extracurricular activities by, obviously, what the child finds meaningful, but also in something that sort of balances how they spend the bulk of the day. You are asking like, how do I offset all this in front of the computer work I have to do? You want to think in those same terms. Like, if your child is sitting inside at a desk for a large portion of the time, maybe it could be an early morning walk. Maybe you could figure out how to walk all or part way to school after school, you're walking home so that you've got this decompression period of time. And then talk to children about utilizing their recess times or their lunch times, you know, saying, Oh, this would be a really great time. I had a good conversation with my kids once about what I was packing for lunch, nutritious, but didn't work for their very short schedule. It's like, I need something I can eat faster so I can have 20 minutes to play. It hadn't occurred to me to pack a lunch for playtime. Okay, right? And so I'll make that, you know, so having conversations about if they're having to eat or move to not force them into that situation and so a lot more conversation around seeing movement as a need will help.

Yeah, and so you've, you've been sort of mentioning this a bunch of times throughout our conversation. I want to make this explicit, like you talk about nature, right? Why it's important that this movement happen outside, and preferably outside, in nature as however we can define that, right? It can be a flower pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk, if that is our observation of nature that we have access to. What's what does nature mean to you? Why does it matter that this movement happened outside in nature?

Well, I think of the classic definition of nature is in the parts of the world that aren't so human centric. And so, you know, I'd be looking at the phases of the moon. It could be looking at a tree. And so to make sure there's a balance in our experience of the world, you know, when I I mean, this is just, you know, my own value system is making sure that there's an appreciation for beyond the human centric experience. But then there's all the benefits of nature that are just researched, and that usually just means outdoors. It doesn't have to have a there's anything outside counts. But then, of course, wilderness is going to have a lot more intact, less human centric pieces. And then, you know, staring at the moon cycles, which everyone can do, tracking lunar cycles from wherever you are. You might stand outside on your porch in your very busy city, and there's more human centric but there's still plenty that aren't human centric, into, you know, tune into birds and plants and clouds and weather and then the moon, and there's always something available. But I think there's multiple reasons, it's beneficial. Some of its physiological, you know, the chemicals that are coming from the plants and the trees. And then there's things like the eyes, you know, the fact that your eyes are sort of blocked from being being able to do their eye thing based on how far the thing is from the our faces that we're looking at. So going outside just happens to be the only condition that allows the eye to stretch really far. There's natural light, right? That's just something that the walls of your house block. There's nothing you could do about it. Windows don't even let it in. Glass blocks it. So there's just physiological interactions that are created through being outside that because outside is the environment in which our bodies evolved. We just can't exist solely inside, like a greenhouse is the example that I like to use. Plants can't even exist completely in a greenhouse. Why would humans be any different?

Yeah, and so I just want to draw a point that you said there. You know, our bodies evolve for a different kind. End of movement. You talked earlier about taking food prep outside. That's how we prepared food for thousands and thousands of years. We prepared food by sitting or squatting on the ground. We didn't prepare it standing in a kitchen counter. And in one of your books, you say that the movements required by today's environment are a one-handed phone grasp and finger swipe. Movements required by our bodies are based on much older environments. And so we when we are constrained to 8 or 8+hours a day sitting at the computer typing the one handed, you know, in the phone and finger swipe, our bodies aren't designed to cope with that little movement. They're designed to move to get the food that we need to survive, not just to burn off the calories that we overate because we because getting food is so easy now.

Yeah, I mean, it's just again, the the movement that we're doing has things in it that we need so, so you couldn't exist solely on one food. Nor can you exist solely on a single position of your body. There's just as you are shifting your position throughout the day and picking different things up and bending over and twisting and doing different things your the cells in your body, but like even the plumbing, you know, we're really a big plumbing machine. You know, when you think about all the tubes and the pressures that are operating within the body, those are all depending on movement. This is a complete novel and outlying environment that would allow you to be completely still while still producing quite a bit. And so it's just what's called a mismatch. Evolutionarily speaking, our bodies cannot work correctly in this environment. They'll just be places of movement malnutrition showing up in our lives. Now, whether or not we call it movement malnutrition, that's the tricky thing. We have different names for it, because our language, again around movement isn't very well developed.

Yeah, and you've alluded to this already, but I want to draw out more explicit more explicitly. We've talked a lot about walking, walking, you know, to school, to other places. What does this mean for people who have what in our culture is called disabilities, which is really a mismatch between our body's capabilities and the way the environment is set up, but what does it mean for people who can't walk to the grocery store, to, you know, pick up their kid from school?

Well, I mean, anyone with a disability who's unable to move would just remove that from their needs. It's like not being able to digest a certain nutrient, like, there's just some things that are always going to be off the table for you, and whatever your sometimes permanent disability, sometimes temporary disability is. So walking, if you can do it, should be done. If you can't do it, you're not going to do it. But it's also not the only movement. You're just trying to maximize your movement diet, given your capabilities, and certainly, there is always things that you can use to potentially supplement technologically, you know, or we would call it like adaptive, you know, there's a way to adapt different movements, like, maybe you can't walk, but you could bicycle outside, you know, and you could still transport or do a walk after school, on bike instead, or you wheel if you're in wheelchair, you can wheel. The principle is that you're doing more human powered motion outside in whatever way, shape or form you can.

Yep. Okay, great. Thank you for addressing that. And so as we start to head toward a conclusion, I know that some parents are going to be listening to this, thinking, I'm just so tired. What I need most of all is rest. And I've seen you argue that rest doesn't have to mean sitting on the couch. As I started, just to discover I have historically thought, you know what, I'm tired. I'm reading to my daughter. I'm going to sit on the couch. It's taken a shift for me to start using that time for exercise. And so I am wondering if you can tell us about if I am just feeling tired right now, what are some kinds of movement that you might recommend for parents?

Well, I just quickly define like we need a better language for tired or exhaustion. There is definitely physical exhaustion. Many people have it, but there is also attentional exhaustion. So you know, you're still processing. You're still your mind's at a treadmill. Your eyes are on a treadmill. You're taking in a lot of information. You're thinking. You're doing all of this processing. It leaves you exhausted. But if you can look at your day and say, well, I barely took any steps, and I sat most of the day. I'm exhausted, then you're probably more intentionally exhausted. You're not physically exhausted. Unfortunately, both feel the same when you're trying to muster enough energy to change something, anything, including your physical state or your position. But. If you can be armed with this understanding of, oh, right, I'm intentionally exhausted, then you could find an activity that you don't have to think that much about. And so it's usually something simple and repetitious. It would be, you know, a gentle walk outside. It could be just putting music on and just like swaying around to the music, you know, just a little kitchen dance party, if you will. It could be sitting outside and maybe chopping, you know, chopping vegetables to be like, Oh, instead of ordering out, I'm gonna bring this giant cabbage with these vegetables, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit and chop them over I've been sitting down. I'm gonna stand and chop them outside and get some sunlight, and maybe I'll put some music on too, because it pleases me. You also might want quiet. You know, there's, there's a lot of different factors to individualize, but usually it's something rhythmic, swimming laps, you said you had access to a pool, you know, just going in and just even kickboarding, you know, side stroking. We're not talking about fitness. You're not trying to get your heart rate up. It's simply wringing out your body, shaking out the edge of sketch a little bit, and letting your mind off the treadmill. And then once you start moving your body, there's again, that that loop, that language of communication, like I needed to move. I didn't realize that my body was telling me I needed to move, because oftentimes that's what pain signals are. That's what the feeling of just general malaise is. And the more we can correlate those messages with our movement state, the more we'll be able to be in communication with ourselves about the movements that we need, and when.

Oh, that's beautiful. And as you're talking through those examples, I'm realizing there's so much pressure in our culture to do all the time right, to produce, to move, to do things that are, you know, I'm exercising because I want to burn X number of calories and it's good for me and all the rest of it, and what you're really describing is the sense of being right? I'm not going into the pool to swim laps to burn calories, I'm burning I'm going into the pool to lazily go up and down because it feels good to my body. It's a state of being, not a state of doing. It's such a more profound, nurturing way of being with ourselves.

And sometimes I'll go swim laps and just chat with my daughter, with my 11 year old. We'll just, we'll just take kickboards and chat. And so, you know, I do think that looking at the modes of movement that you're selecting to make sure you actually like them, because so much of what we do is because we're supposed to, and it's close, or it's convenient, all fine. But if you haven't actually asked yourself, what would I love to be doing with my body and get that answer, then it's a lot easier for what we call adherence, just the ability to do it again and again without resistance. Meaningfulness is very important when it comes to selecting exercise for ourselves.

It is for sure. Okay, so as we wrap up, then, I like to try and leave listeners with three ideas or three practices that they can try. And we organize those by level of difficulty, right? So curious is, I'm just learning about this now for the first time listening to this episode. How do I get started learning is okay, yeah, I've been around this idea for a little bit. I want to take the next step. Growth is okay, yeah, I'm, I've, I've been practicing some of this stuff for a while now. What, how do I move this forward and take it further? What practice would you offer to listeners at each of those levels?

So let's start with the ground level. Yes, and let's do, literally, get on the ground level. Just start using the floor of your home. You know just if you're watching TV at night, or if you even like to read instead of doing it in the chair or the space that you normally do it in, get down on the floor. You can lay on your back, put your legs up on your couch, put your legs up on the wall. The whole point is that you're using your body in a in a different way. Doesn't take more time. All it takes is just a little reminder, oh, I'm gonna do this on the floor, and maybe you need a pillow to be comfortable. You know, maybe your body needs a little extra support. That's fine. What I just mean is get out of your typical, conventional seat and get yourself into something slightly different for the learning, for learning. Okay, thank you for learning. I would look for a single rule in your home. Oh, I would ask in Grow Wild, there's a bias. Check in, in every container. I would I would ask yourself, like, what are the rules of my home around movement? What are the explicit ones? You know, the ones ask your children, ask your partner, ask your roommates, like, what am I allowed to do movement wise? What what do you think you're allowed to do in this house? And what are you not allowed to do? What movements would you like to do? And have that as a conversation. And then you'll have a little template of. Um, maybe some changes that you could make. You might learn something about what you've been, uh, silently communicating that you didn't know. And then change one that would that would be the actual action. Then change something okay. And then growth.

Yes is the higher level. Yes.

For growth, I would look for pairing walking, if you're able, or if not, the your equivalent, your outdoor on the move on the role, equivalent of taking some task that you would have sworn was an indoor task, and make it an outside task, an outside task. And that could be a morning meal. You know, when people, especially we're in the summer, they're like, I can't get my kids out. Like, did they just start on? Start on the tech and then they're and then they're on there all day, serve breakfast outside, and just watch what happens, because it's in the same way for us. It's just inertia. It's just the inertia of change. If you put food out there, and that's their breakfast. The food will do the work for you, and now they're outside, and then now a nurse is also working for you. Now they're outside, too much work to go back in, you know, and put out a few things, put out a hula hoop, put out, you know, seemingly silly little thing. And just watch children and yourselves become more playful because all of those hidden, simple gems either don't exist in your house, because my kids wouldn't play with them, you'd say, or you'd think, they want their higher tech things. If you put the low tech things outside, and you create some novelty, they just start listening to their bodies more and start following suit.

Awesome. Thank you so much for that. That was super, super helpful. So so we listeners can find links to the the papers that I referenced in today's episode, as well as Katy's books. A couple of the ones that I've really especially appreciated are Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More, and also, My Perfect Movement Plan is the one that was just released yesterday, The Move Your Day All Day, Move Your DNA All Day, workbook. Katy can you just say where else folks can find you? I know of you have a podcast as well. You're on social media. Can you just share where folks can find you?

Move Your DNA podcast named after move your DNA book. And the Nutritious Movement is my company. It's the website, it's the social media, everything. So if you think movement interesting. You'll find me.

Awesome. Well, on that note, everything that we've just talked about will be at YourParentingMojo.com/NutritiousMovement. Thanks, Katy, it was really great to talk with you.

Likewise. Thank you.

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