Bringing Out The Best in Your Kids

Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story The Garden of Forking Paths where he compares life to wandering in a garden with ever-changing paths.

We can see many possible futures, but with each step, the paths shift, creating new routes and closing off others. The garden is no longer a garden in itself, but a place of endless permutations and, thus, endless outcomes. It’s exciting and very nerve-wrecking. An inch forward could lead you into the abyss, and a step side-ways could alter your future into a hundred possibilities.

After a long and bleak winter, spring finally arrived.

Our three-day creative camp in Jeju fell right in the transition of the seasons. Birds are out in the air. Colours began to appear. You could feel the cold wind brush against your bare skin as you peer at the sun with your eyes half-opened, embracing the rays as they warm your cheeks. The children were, at every step of the way, like the forest, experiencing renewal. The old has gone. The new has come. In a blink of an eye, everything has changed.

This reminded of what Steve Rinella wrote about nature's effects on us.

“Looking into the soil of a garden,” Rinella wrote in Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, “can be like looking into a mirror. You are bound to notice things about yourself that you might otherwise miss. Making the necessary adjustments, so you like what you see, is the ultimate reward.”

Legendary music producer Rick Rubin also said something similar about the impact of the natural environment on our self-awareness and creative spirit.

​He says that if you’re picking colors based on a Pantone Book, you’re limited to a certain number of choices as defined by the people who invented the hue categorisation. But if you were to step out in nature, the palette becomes infinite: Each rock you pick up has a variation in color within it that we can never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.

And if we dedicate our lives solely to noticing changes in the environment, Rubin says, as time pass, we are sure to discover something new.

Canola Fields of Jeju Island

In the 1960s, Singapore’s then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew mooted the creation of a clean and green environment to mitigate the harsh concrete jungle and improve the quality of life so that future generations like myself could live. But I’ve always thought that these green spaces, though aesthetic, well-maintained and proper, were all engineered. To be specific, human-engineered. Man-made. And because Singapore is so tiny, natural spaces make up a fraction of space before urban structures creep in. Like most things, I can appreciate it when authenticity is preserved.

My gripe about this is that kids who grow up in Singapore don't fully understand the impact a large, undisturbed natural forest can have on us as creative human beings.

Wouldn’t it be great if our kids get access to an almost-unlimited amount of space to play and wonder and create? Wouldn’t it be great if our kids get to experience and immerse themselves in an untouched, natural environment made up of novel flora, fauna and wildlife?

And wouldn’t it be great to bring out the best in our children by giving them an opportunity to access a wide-array of ideas, cultures, stories of the land, and along the way, express their imagination and discover themselves at their own discretion?

I highly suspect that was in Theodore Roosevelt’s father's mind when it came to cultivating an enriching educational experience for his children.

The would-be president’s unique learning journey, instead of being walled-up in one physical space like a school or a classroom, stretched beyond the boundaries of his home to include two separate yearlong journeys abroad: The first was to Europe, the second to the Middle East, the Holy Land, and Africa. Home during the trips included hotels and inns, in tents, and private homes. His family spent two months in Rome, three weeks in Greece, two weeks in Lebanon, three weeks in Palestine, and an entire winter in Egypt.

At night without fail, a biographer once noted, Roosevelt senior would contextualise his children’s experiences by reading aloud the poetry, history, and literature of the region they were visiting in. In Dresden, Germany, the Roosevelt family lived for two months with a German family, and arrangements were made for the host’s daughter to immerse the children in the German language, literature, music, and art. Lessons would last six hours a day. Roosevelt was so intrigued with what he was experiencing that he pleaded his father to have them extended.

What this whole experience means to the Roosevelt family is translated into this idea of world-schooling. The world—the largest classroom ever made—becomes a place of enquiry and interaction. You're free to roam, free to experiment, free to appreciate the rich diversity of our planet. To be alive is the prerequisite. To be present, ultimately, is the point.

Which is also what I want my son to experience, and the very reason why Mathieu and I brought him with us to Jeju, and will do so for as long as we can. To explore the world beyond home is the best educational experience I can give him. And I choose to believe that in just these two weeks of being abroad, it has transformed him more profoundly than the same duration in a classroom at home.

Even us grown-ups were engaged.

Super engaged, in fact.

I genuinely felt I learned something by simply being there, without any distractions of home and things crying for our attention. Mathieu and I had frequent outbursts of creativity and inspiration. Be it the storytelling and creative literacy of Jeju Island, nature walks, ecology and marine biology at Hyeopjae Beach, or the in-depth cultural folklore of the goddess Hallasan, by being fully connected with the activity is how both kids and grown-ups learn best. That's learning engagement at its core.

But isn’t this just “travelling with your kids?”

Indeed it has been said that travel is the best form of education. But the difference is not what you do—as in travel—but how you travel: How do we turn these wonderful experiences into learning moments that can stick with your children, yet make it fun and engaging so that they want to learn for themselves. The team took considerable effort to curate a unique curriculum that is facilitated by the experts of the land, which makes it contextual and thus, effective.

One of our camp participants found it challenging to read and write. We weren’t sure if she was going to gain anything out of the creative literacy component, let alone enjoy it. Mr Min, our writing educator, made it a point to emphasis that, when it comes to creative writing, the focus is on your imagination. There is no, in a sense, right or wrong. In the realm of creativity, the experiences in our head can spill out through words. All we had to do was to tap into past memories and communicate what we want to communicate. Again, no right, no wrong, as long as it relates to the overall theme we're writing about. Something clicked in this child, and the result was that she came up with a paragraph all by herself, to the surprise of both Mr Min and her mother, with words that contained alphabets of a particular intonation.

Why did this happen? Or rather, how did this happen?

It was likely a variety of factors. It could’ve been Mr Min’s cheerful and empowering disposition. It could’ve been the weather. It could’ve been that she was in an entirely new environment in which this awareness of being somewhere else gave her the permission to unmask her insecurities and thus, unlock the doors of her imagination.

My instinct is pointing me towards this idea of Shinrin-yoku, a Japanese term for “forest bathing”, or plainly speaking, “taking in the forest atmosphere.” The purpose was twofold: To offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout, and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests. While this concept isn’t new, it drives home a point I believe we all know is true, but never quite grasp its meaning until we experience it ourselves: Time spent in nature is good for us. It’s does wonders to our minds. It enhances our self-awareness. We feel calm and serene. The tranquility of the forest is the antidote to the madness of our citylife back home. And it has this unexplainable, comforting effect that will trickle into everything we do—work, life, creativity—whether we realise it or not.

But really, it’s just Nature at work. We don’t have to understand it to appreciate it. That's just how it works.

On the final day of the camp, parents come together for a forest showcase of the children's work.

I want, not just the best for our kids. I want to instill in them agency. I want them to get to a point where they are capable of bringing out the best of themselves, on their own. So for Gosh! Kids, we're committed to creating camp experiences all around the world so that children can empower themselves.

If we give our kids an opportunity to unplug from the craziness of school life, if we allow our children to notice these changes in natural light and shadow as the hours pass, they can discover something they’ve never known existed.

And who knows, it might just lead them into the garden with ever-changing paths.