Ethan Demme: 00:00:00.000
We really have to sort of break this idea of here’s the modern American experiment. And it’s an experiment. We haven’t done this very long where we drive everywhere and we stay in a heated and air-conditioned house and we never go outside. And we are on these phones, which are just constantly providing stimulation. Whereas walking is the exact opposite of that. You’re slowing down, you’re removing that constant sort of artificial stimulation, and you’re replacing it with sort of constant regular movement of both your legs, your arms, and your eyes. And then you’re being able to notice and slow down and see, oh, there’s a heron over there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:43.125
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe, and I am so excited to welcome Ethan Demme to this conversation for the Demme Learning Show. I’ve been waiting for a long time to have this conversation with Ethan, and I think you’ll find out why as our conversation together unfolds today, our topic is walk this way, how 20 minutes a day boosts your child’s health, happiness, and development. I know I have experienced this personally, but Ethan is walking this path right now with his children, no pun intended or every pun intended. And he’s going to share with us why he has found this to be so tremendously valuable. And Ethan, I’m going to throw the floor open to you and let you take it from here.

Ethan Demme: 00:01:27.424
Awesome. Well, thanks, Gretchen. It’s a foggy day in Lancaster County. And as we do every morning, this morning, we took our kids on a walk. And it’s become a ritual that we do as a family. So it’s one of our little things we mentioned. We mentioned Demmes, we walk, we walk places. And it’s become a powerful thing that my wife and I have done with our kids. This had a fantastic effect. So a little bit of background. We have been foster parents in the past. We’ve raised siblings of my wife. We’ve also been foster parents. We’ve done respite care. We’ve had a couple of long-term placements. And the last long-term placement that we had, we adopted. So I’m the proud father of four kids, ages eight. I should know. They just had birthdays, so I have to do the math in my head. Get out some blocks. So there’s 7, 9, 10, and 10. The oldest two are twins. We have two boys and two girls. So one of the things that we do every day to connect is to walk and a story that I’ll share to sort of set this up. These are the types of conversations that we have with our kids. So these blur together. So about a year ago, one of my sons, we were walking on the river trail, same trail we walked on this morning gets right behind a little neighborhood. And as we’re walking, he’s holding my hand and he turns, and he says, “Why can’t I live with my mom,” his biological mom? And that’s a conversation that we’ve had multiple times. We’ve explained it to him. We’re going to have it another 100 times before over the next couple of years. But what struck me at that time was where that question came from. And the question came from, we were walking. We were walking, we were observing nature, we were being quiet.

Ethan Demme: 00:03:24.663
And in those moments of ritual and walking, that’s where kids can feel safe and they can open up. So we’ve had the most deep conversations on a walk. We’ve also had the absolute silliest conversations on the walk. So this morning we were on a walk, and I had two kids with cowboy pistols and they were running, shooting squirrels and each other and shooting each other in the butts. And it was just crazy silliness. We’ve had deep conversations. We’ve had learning experiences. we’ve climbed trees. We’ve gotten dirty. And all of those things happen because we go for a walk. So that’s our time of connection. So it resets us. We go from a morning, as most homeschool parents could probably relate, you get up. And especially if you have more than one kid or four kids – we’ve got four kids – so one of them is always throwing a fit and having a rough day. So we just rotate which one of them it is. And everyone’s kids, we love them all, but there’s one that we kind of hope sleeps out a little bit each morning. So we went from one kid throwing a fit in the morning. We had two kids and I had to help eat breakfast all the way through, including feeding them the last few bites, and then we’d get our morning walk in. And by the end of the walk, though, the morning is reset. And it’s a way for us to say, all right, now we can start our day again and we have that connection that goes through it. So that’s the ritual that we’ve done. And we’ve done that not just with our current set of kids, but literally every single set of kids that have come into our house. Usually, the first thing we do is we go for a walk. And the reason is, is that piece of connection. And there’s a guy that I’ll quote, hopefully I remembered a quote in each time, but as we were preparing for our foster journey, we met a guy named Gordon Neufeld, who’s a developmental theorist and psychologist based out of Canada. We actually met him at a homeschool conference in Germany, of all places. But he wrote a fantastic book, which I highly recommend. If you read one book, it’s called Hold On To Your Kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:45.210
We’ll make sure that we include that in the show notes so folks can see that.

Ethan Demme: 00:05:51.081
Yeah, so he wrote this book Hold on to Your Kids. And it’s why parents need to matter more than peers. And this applies to everybody, but it especially applies if you have kids who have trauma in their background, if they’re from foster care and they’ve bumped around a lot, that connection and making that connection matters. So oftentimes when you’re in the foster world or even the adopted world, you’re choosing between multiple good things and you can’t do all the good things at the same time. You could go to play therapy. You could go to vision therapy. You could go to speech therapy. You can go to occupational therapy, and then you need to spend time one-on-one connecting with your child, and then you need to do all the extra stuff and go to school, and you just can’t do it all. So you’re looking for ways where you can stack benefits. And early on, it was based off of what he had talked about is when you’re outside, you get this intense level of connection. So when we would get a set of kids placed with us, the first thing we’d do is we’d bundle up and we’d go to a local trail. It’s called Shiprock, and it’s in the woods. So there’s also a benefit of outdoors is good. Outdoors in the woods, even better. Because when kids are out in the woods with you on a trail, you get this layered levels of attachment and connection. So it’s sort of connection on steroids. Because once you’re out there, you’re alone and your kid immediately knows at a deep level, whether they can articulate it or not, that they need you literally for their survival. So their physiological needs, you’re the only person who can get them home. You are the only person who knows where we’re going. You’re the only person with water, with food, who’s carrying the coats. So early on, we do all of the carrying of the stuff, and we take kids out. And it’s fascinating to watch them because they stay close with you so they can feel safe. And it’s one of the profound sort of ideas that I’ve taken away from our foster journey is can’t become an independent child or grow to be an independent adult until you can learn to be dependent and know for certain that you are safe and you are loved and you are taken care of and you belong. So it comes from you can only explore the world once from a position of safety. So early on, you take kids and they’re walking right beside you. You can grab their hands, you can hold their hands. And those are all ways that they just know that this is the person who can take care of me. And then as you progress, a few months later, you keep doing this, all of a sudden they start exploring a little bit. And then once they start to feel their oats as it were, they start to explore. Then we start to do things like, “All right, here’s a backpack and you can now carry your water bottle.” And then they go from– I have a picture of my kids. When we first got them, we were out for a walk as we do every morning. We were out for a walk and they was in the rain. So they had their special rain jackets on and they had umbrellas and they had rubber boots and they’re all walking single file in a row on the path in the park. And then I have a picture of the same park about two and a half years later, also on a rainy day, and my kids are nowhere to be seen on the trail. They’re climbing trees. They’re getting muddy. There’s no rain jackets because they’re like, “It’s only a 30-minute walk. We’re going to get wet, but we’ll dry off when we get home.” There’s no umbrellas. And they just see now the whole park as their playground, not, “Oh, I have to walk on this one path.” So it’s been just a fascinating joy for me watching the evolution of our kids go from, “I’m safe, I’m protected from the rain,” to, ” Now I don’t care about the rain and I can just run like crazy.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:52.405
Well, Ethan, that brings up an interesting point because one of the questions that was asked in two or three different ways of the parents who registered for the webinar is, “Well, what do you do when the weather’s poor?” And I know you. There is no such thing as poor weather, it’s just poor planning for weather. So you walk every single day regardless of the weather.

Ethan Demme: 00:10:14.572
Yeah. So we are outside every single morning unless it’s unsafe conditions. So unsafe conditions are there’s lightning close by. There’s wind that’s strong enough to knock a tree over or there’s a tornado. That’s pretty much it. If it’s bad weather, we just walk a little shorter. So if it’s pouring rain, we’ll put on the raincoats and we’ll walk. We might just do 20 minutes. So I know that the title is we should start with 20 minutes. So most folks may not be as hardcore, but we walk two, three miles, probably 20 to 40 minutes every day. But there is no bad weather. There’s just bad clothing and your kids will figure it out. And in 20 minutes, you’re not even going to get hypothermia. So worst case scenario is you just come back, you warm up once you get home, and that’s a great fun memory of, “Hey, we walked outside in the cold.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:13.647
Well, you know what I find really interesting? And until you said this to me in our planning session for this conversation, I’d never really thought about it this way, but in order to be independent– and I do recognize and understand this as the parent of six myself, my kids are all wildly independent, but that independence rose out of a safe dependence on a constancy of parental involvement. And the way that you have framed this is so affirming for parents. “How do you get your kids off of these? Go out in the woods, go find some time away from that technology where they have to engage with you.”

Ethan Demme: 00:11:55.416
Yeah, and that’s really the thing. We get comments all the time from other folks who are on the trails. Usually it’s older folks with their dogs and people who walk dogs are just the best people on earth. But they’re always saying, we’re so happy to see you out here. There’s no one else out there. And oftentimes we’re at these parks in the morning. School hasn’t started yet. And there’s nobody there. There’s a couple of old folks walking their dogs. That’s it. And often our modern society is sedentary. We like our nice air conditioned and warm heated house, and we get in our air conditioned and heated car. And then we drive to the parking lot. And then we quickly go from the parking lot to the building we’re going to. And then once we get to the building, we jump on our phones or our iPads or start watching TV. And it’s just a constant level of, we’re both mentally overstimulated, and we’re physically complacent because we’re in 68 to 72 degrees year round. There are steps or elevators everywhere we go. The ground’s not uneven and we have nice comfy places to sit down. And that’s not how we were designed to operate as humans. We really have to sort of break this idea of here’s the modern American experiment. And it’s an experiment. We haven’t done this very long where we drive everywhere, and we stay in a heated and air conditioned house, and we never go outside. And we are on these phones which are just constantly providing stimulation. Whereas walking is the exact opposite of that. You’re slowing down. You’re removing that constant sort of artificial stimulation, and you’re replacing it with sort of constant regular movement of both your legs, your arms, and your eyes. And then you’re being able to notice and slow down and see, “Oh, there’s a heron over there. Oh, what’s that sound? What bird makes that sound? What tree is that?” And it allows us to stop and smell the roses. But that’s how we were designed to operate is we’re operating as a tribe, walking through the Serengeti, and we’re hunting for our food, we’re gathering it. We’re eating. There’s no air conditioning. There’s no heat, and you’re walking every day.

Ethan Demme: 00:14:12.177
And that act of walking reminds you that you’re safe. So if you’re walking with your people, your family, your tribe, you’re safe. And from there, you can go out and explore and do a bunch of other cool things. So it really is a countercultural thing. And when you do this on a regular basis, you’ll see kids blossom. And that’s probably the coolest thing is when we’ve taken– because we’ve had several sets of kids in foster care live with us, and they come from high stimulation environments where kids couldn’t walk a mile when they came to live with us. And they were constantly glued to screens too. And some of them couldn’t walk. They would walk and trip and fall down. They had to go to occupational therapy for their walking. And then, after a few months, the occupational therapist would ask us, what are you doing at home? Because I’ve never seen a child progress this quickly. It’s like, “Well, we hike in the woods on uneven ground.” And the occupational therapist says, “That’s literally what we do every day. And here is we try to get kids to walk on uneven ground. If you just do that outside by yourself, you don’t have to go to occupational therapy for that.” So there’s those little things, if we just did it, and then we would get that affirmation from the professionals that would say, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” So every time we go to the doctor’s office, the kids brag about how fast they can walk, or– we’ve now, after four years of upgraded– we run about three days a week. So not everyone can jump right to that. So we walk every day, or now, run every day. So run three days a week, walk two days a week. And it’s just one of– there’s no upper limit on the benefits of walking. You can’t walk too much.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:01.035
My kids are grown and flown, so I don’t have kids to walk with now. So I just have to take my fur kids with me. But I did ask my middle son to take me on a hike in the wilderness, take me to whatever his favorite trail has been this summer. And he said, “Yeah, mom.” He said, “How many miles do you want to do?” And I said, “Oh, four or five. We’re good.” And he said, “All right.” And then we discovered he doesn’t estimate mileage very well. It ended up to be right short of nine miles. And we finished that walk in the absolute dead dark. The sun went down a good 90 minutes before we got down off the mountain in Pisgah. But it was worth every minute because you’re away from all the technology, all the distractions, and the conversations that you have are priceless. And I think that makes such a huge difference. Before we started, Ethan, I was trying to remember the author’s name of a book. The book is called Stolen Focus. And the author’s name is Johann Hari. What I loved about him is he’s a researcher, and he was researching the addiction of cell phones. And one of the ways that he talks about combating that addiction is to get out into nature, leave the phone at home, and see what you can find in nature. And so between Gordon Neufeld’s book, between Johann Hari’s book, and then between Lenore Skenazy’s book, which I absolutely loved, and maybe you can talk a little bit about Lenore and kind of her background because there’s an interweaving here, the blog that you wrote about kids needing to take risk. I want us to touch on that as well because I think we’ve become such a risk-averse society that we’re creating kids who don’t know how to press into what feels dangerous and then feel the accomplishment of accomplishing that.

Ethan Demme: 00:18:11.235
Yeah, the risk piece is a really interesting one. And I’m a huge fan of Lenore Skenazy and her work. She’s doing fantastic work with the Let Grow Initiative. I was actually on a Zoom call with her a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking through this issue. And I was really bringing up that point of you cannot learn to assess risk appropriately or well until you are safe. So it’s only from that deep-rooted safety connection. If you’re in a fight, flight, or freeze mode, it’s really hard to stop and assess, “All right, how risky is this?” And teaching kids that– because the ultimate goal is we want our kids to grow up and be independent, be able to assess risk on their own where we don’t need to take care of them. And that’s sort of the goal is to get them to fly the coop. But to do that, you have to keep them really close from a connection standpoint, but not from a helicopter parent, keep them safe standpoint. So I’ve designed our yard. It sort of got a hippie redneck vibe when you drive by, and it’s always a mess. And the mess I can look out in my window right now, there’s four four 55 gallon barrels, those blue barrels, that are sitting in my yard. And the kids have been playing with them. And so I was walking by the other day, and they were standing on the barrels, trying to balance on them, and then proceeded to fall off and bump their heads pretty hard. There was a few tears, but it was one of– I just watched. The other day, I have a little rock climbing wall and my one son– because each kid assesses risk differently. So the way we message it with kids, because they come not knowing anything about risk and not having great hand eye coordination and not being able to know what’s good or what will happen. So you need to have them learn to– start with little things of assessing what will happen, natural consequences of climbing on furniture, jumping off the couch, running through the woods, climbing on stumps, climbing on trees. And then they get to that point. And our rule is, “You go as far as you feel safe going. You climb as high as you feel safe going, but I will not help you down.” And you’ll see them different ones.

Ethan Demme: 00:20:31.777
So I have one son who’s much better coordinated, high risk tolerance, and they had dragged over a small trampoline underneath the rock climbing wall. So rock climbing wall, when I started, it was only a little 8-foot rock climbing wall. Now we’re about 12 feet in the air. And he had dragged the trampoline over and he climbed up to the top and then jumped off onto the trampoline. Of course, knees buckled and he just bounced. And then I saw my next son, who’s older, but much more cautious. And he climbed up pretty high. He looked down and then he backed down a little bit, climbed, and then he just sort of jumped off about half the distance. And those are the pieces where people drive by and thankfully we haven’t gotten any calls. We’re in a cool part of town. But my office right here is an old one car garage. The kids climb up on the roof of that all the time and play.

Ethan Demme: 00:21:27.966
So my only rule is you have to take all your furniture and toys down. Otherwise we looked like Sanford and Sons over here would just trash on top of the garage roof. But other people come over and they go, “You let your kids climb on the roof?” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” We go to the park and not only– so you go to a park with your kids and everyone’s running around. And we read the rules on our playground and our kids go, “Those rules are dumb. They’re saying we can’t do any of the fun things.” So they climb on top of the slide all the way up to the top. And oftentimes I’ll get that look from the other parents when my child starts to climb something a little unsafe, but then they look over at me and I’m climbing a little higher. So they usually just stop.

Ethan Demme: 00:22:11.251
I’m not usually on my phone watching my kids on the playground, I’m climbing on the playground as well. Because a lot of what my kids learned, they had to learn how to play and we had to teach them. So it’s not one of like you can let– if you’ve sort of raised your kids from infancy, they have a lot more that they’ve experienced or just observed. So there’s a lot of times when I’m getting down on my hands and knees and teaching a kid to go head first down a slide is not something most 40-year-old people want to do. Your back will tweak on you when you do that, but [crosstalk]–

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:48.354
Especially when you’re as tall as you are. What are you? Even 6’4″? Seeing you on a slide, I’m going–

Ethan Demme: 00:22:57.761
I’m 6’2″ and yeah, I climb the slides. We play tag and it’s been one of– I’ve had some back issues, but I went to physical therapy. One of my main objectives when I went there was I want to be able to play on the playground with my kids at their speed. And those are the ones of from a connection standpoint, you’re playing with your kids. And this is one of the key pieces, both the playing to risk taking, as well as walking is you shouldn’t have an agenda. And you can learn a lot more without an agenda than you can intentionally. So the agendaless behavior of just go on a walk and whatever your kids start to seem interested in, if it’s at all reasonable to do, just roll with it. So we’ve gone on walks and all of a sudden the kids are like, “Hey, we should we should get in the water,” and it’s way too cold to get in the water. And I go, “Okay, get in the water. Take your shoes off, take your socks off and start walking in the water.” And sometimes they go, “It’s too cold.” They’ll come back out. Other times the stops right there, and we’re just going to play in the water for the next 20 minutes, and then we’ll walk home from where we were at. So not having a specific agenda of, “Hey, we need exactly 10,000 steps,” or, “We need exactly two miles,” we’re letting it sort of flow. We stopped and climbed trees the other day, and my one son was now climbing this big tree that three years ago, none of them could climb. And it was a very scary tree. But we’ve walked that same route so many times. I’ve climbed the tree, and then now he’s able to climb the tree. Now I have three kids that can climb the tree, and I’ll probably get all four by next year. And it’s just slow incrementalism. And now it’s one from, “Hey, our kids are walking with us on these trails.” So two weeks ago, we were running on a trail near us. It’s about a two-mile out and back. So you run out a mile, and you run back a mile. It’s right behind a subdivision. We now know every dog on that trail, every dog owner.

Ethan Demme: 00:25:00.930
And the rule initially was, “Stay within eyesight.” But now uncomfortable areas, the rules sort of bend and are fluid. And so the kids took off running. My wife and I could not keep up with them. So all four kids took off. We didn’t see them until we got almost to the end, and they turned around and were coming back. So in a 30-minute excursion, we saw them for about 45 seconds. When we got back to the car, they were there stretching, waiting for us. So they ran two-plus miles and were just chilling, waiting for us at the end, and we couldn’t keep up. And that was perfectly fine. And they were excited to be able to do that. And other parents were going– or people on the trail were telling us, “They’re up ahead.” We could hear them because they’re not quiet kids, but we couldn’t see them for 20 minutes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:53.348
And now in your adventures, have you gotten pushback from those helicopter parents who think that you’re being irresponsible by letting your kids have this degree of independence?

Ethan Demme: 00:26:07.198
We haven’t gotten much. I mean, we get the– I would say I’m an intimidating person. Sort of I’m a big person and people don’t usually–

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:18.404
So you’re saying no one’s gonna broke an argument with you?

Ethan Demme: 00:26:21.434
Yeah, no one starts it, but you can see the judgmental looks. So I’ve gotten plenty of judgmental looks of or very inquisical ones, or someone will start to like bring something up, and I can tell they’re going there, and I just launch into, “Here’s the benefits of what we’re doing.” And they see it. But it is one of– it’s usually on playgrounds is where we get the most sort of judgmental looks because our kids are, “You can climb anywhere you want.” Sometimes if the little kids who don’t know how to assess risks are copying them, we’ll say, “All right, if someone’s copying you, you’re now responsible for that other person’s safety. So don’t let them do something that’s unsafe.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:02.979
Which is wise parental counsel in most situations. What would be the closing words that you would have for parents to encourage them to begin this journey?

Ethan Demme: 00:27:16.052
Just start small, make it fun. So the only thing you have to do is get out and walk and then have no agenda on the walk. Don’t set a distance goal or a, “Here’s how many steps we need,” but make it fun and explore things along the way. If you walk 20 feet and you find a frog, that can be your whole walk. Just stop and play with the frog. But there’s lots of– sometimes you might need an activity to get going with it. You can do scavenger hunts. So you can do– we’ve done geocaching. There’s hundreds of different things you can do, but the most important is get out, walk, and then be consistent. And you’ll see your kids grow. You’ll see yourself grow. The benefits of parents to reset when the morning’s gotten off to a rough start, the benefit to my wife and I is as much if not more than for my kids to reset is if you want to conquer that day and the next day, have that reset built in and a walk is the best way to do it and connect with your kids and connect with yourself.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:17.713
And I think this is one of the things that would be a wonderful inspiration for a New Year’s resolution for parents is to be able to change the way you relate to your child, remove the device from the exchange, and instead use the great outdoors to bring your child’s heart closer to your own. I think that would make a tremendous difference for a lot of families.

Ethan Demme: 00:28:41.636
Yeah, so I’ve talked to a lot of people and I’ve started to realize that this is a very countercultural idea to just get out and walk. So I’m excited to be pushing the message, and I hope to write a lot more and spread the message of– we’ve seen a huge benefit, and I just want other people to get the same benefit that we’ve gotten.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:59.853
Well, Ethan, thank you so much for spending this time with me. You are an incredibly busy gentleman raising four wonderful kids with a beautiful wife. And I don’t take lightly the fact that you’ve carved out an hour for this conversation. And I know it will be a game changer for many families. Thank you so much for this time. I really appreciate it.

Ethan Demme: 00:29:20.727
Well, thank you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:21.774
Take care.

Voice-Over: 00:29:24.943
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