Rewild Your Child: Trusting the Wildness Within

What if we’ve been getting it the wrong way round?

Modern parenting is full of good intentions: protect, prepare, perfect. But in trying to smooth every bump in the road, have we lost sight of something more essential - our children’s natural ability to adapt, imagine, explore, and recover?

To rewild your child is not to step back - it’s to step alongside. It means resisting the cultural impulse to micromanage and instead creating the conditions in which something extraordinary can emerge.

Nature teaches us that resilience doesn’t come from control, but from trust - in the system, in the soil, and in the child.

From Forests to Families

The concept of rewilding comes from ecology: stop over-managing a damaged environment, reintroduce diversity and key species, and let natural processes reassert themselves. The result? Self-sustaining ecosystems that are richer, more dynamic, and more resilient.

Psychological rewilding draws on the same principle. What if children’s minds, like ecosystems, are healthiest when they’re allowed to grow wild — when they’re nourished by diversity, not narrowed by standardisation?

I’ve written before about Natural Resilience — the innate adaptive intelligence we all possess. Resilience isn’t a skill we drill into children. It’s something we reveal and nurture — if we get out of the way just enough.

Parenting in the Age of Anxiety

We live in an era of over-parenting. Not out of carelessness, but out of fear — fear of falling behind, missing out, or letting our children suffer. So we supervise, schedule, and smooth over. We trade spontaneity for safety, and unpredictability for control.

Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik offers a helpful metaphor: many parents today act like carpenters — working to a blueprint, trying to craft a perfect child. She suggests we should be more like gardeners — creating a space where many possibilities can emerge.

But even that metaphor needs nuance. A rewilding gardener doesn’t prune or train every branch. They prepare the ground, remove harmful barriers, and trust the wild forces of growth. The point isn’t to cultivate a prize rose — it’s to let the whole forest come alive.

The Five Principles of Rewilding a Child

1. Encourage Diversity (Psychodiversity)

Children are not consistent — and that’s a strength. They’re wild and contemplative, generous and chaotic, cautious and courageous — often in the same afternoon. This is what I call psychodiversity: the ability to move fluidly between different emotional and motivational states.

Rewilding embraces this inner diversity as the root of resilience. Rather than training our children to be always calm, polite, or focused, we help them learn when and how to shift — to be serious or silly, reflective or rebellious, depending on what life calls for.

2. Let Natural Processes Unfold

Development isn’t a straight line. It moves in loops, regressions, bursts, and pauses. Just like in nature, growth follows its own rhythm.

Let your child be bored. Let them daydream, play, create nonsense, and test limits. These aren't distractions from development — they are development.

Psychologists like Jean Piaget and Margaret Donaldson showed us that deep understanding arises through exploration and interaction. Rewilding means resisting the urge to rush them through the curriculum of childhood — and allowing time for their minds, emotions, and imaginations to expand on their own terms.

3. Reintroduce Risk (and Undo the Fear of Failure)

Children need appropriate, supervised risk. It builds decision-making, courage, and confidence. Let them climb. Let them try. Let them fail — and discover that failure doesn’t break them.

One of the hidden costs of overprotection is a fear of failure — the belief that mistakes are shameful or dangerous. But failure is how systems learn. It’s how forests regenerate and how children grow.

Let them get things wrong. Let them repair. Let them laugh about it. That’s how resilience takes root.

4. Reduce Over-Control (and Practise Co-Regulation)

Control is tempting. We correct, coach, and choreograph. But when we overdo it, children stop listening to their instincts — and start outsourcing decisions to authority.

Rewilded parenting isn’t about letting go entirely — it’s about co-regulation. That means modelling calm when emotions run high. Naming feelings without judgement. Holding limits with empathy. Being the lighthouse, not the tugboat.

You step alongside your child — not to steer, but to support. To reflect, hold space, and gradually help them manage themselves.

5. Foster Deep Connection and Open Corridors

Nature thrives on connection: between species, systems, and sites. Rewilding often involves creating corridors that allow animals and plants to move, mingle, and evolve.

The same is true for children. Relationships — with parents, peers, mentors, nature, animals, stories — are the emotional corridors through which strength and selfhood develop.

Psychologist Dan Siegel calls this felt safety: the deep, unconscious sense that “I am seen, held, and safe.” Children don’t need constant praise. They need real presence — moments of shared attention, unhurried time, and openness to who they really are.

Let Them Be Wild

The rewilded child isn’t an ideal. It’s a return. A return to what children already are — messy, imaginative, volatile, radiant.

In a world that prizes productivity, conformity, and safety, raising a child who is wild in spirit, rooted in connection, and rich in inner life may be one of the most radical — and hopeful — things we can do.

Let’s loosen the reins. Let’s trust the process. Let’s rewild our children.

Based on ideas from my book How to Survive and Thrive in an Impossible World, and my work on Natural Resilience and Psychological Rewilding.