Grow Wild
The Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More
- 2021 INDIES Winner
- Gold, Family & Relationships (Adult Nonfiction)
Pandemic parenting. Zoom meetings. Virtual school. If you’ve coped with looking at devices all year, Katy Bowman’s Grow Wild will strike you as a gentle, cautionary guide about kids’ “super-sedentary” environments, and how it’s countercultural, yet urgent, to start changing these.
A biomechanist, Bowman encourages reconnecting with movement and nature, not only for their health benefits or evolutionary ties, but for longer-term family and community vitality. Rather than outlining specific exercises, her holistic approach spans everything from choosing footwear and flexible clothing, to setting up movement-friendly indoor spaces, to adding motion in natural stages. Its methods dovetail with activities we’d be doing anyway, such as making food.
Color photographs of real families and alloparents supplement the book’s personal stories about engaging wild and urban spaces. These inspire ways to rethink how we use our settings. Logical, persuasive, and compassionate arguments make this a timely resource: we’re all culpable of sitting around too much, but we’re all capable of redefining our modern mold, too.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
