Nature Deficit Disorder & Teaching Kids to Self-Regulate Outside | Amy Reyes-Hauff, Get Wild Wyoming

What twenty-seven years in early childhood education taught Amy Reyes-Hauff about nature and calm

Scott Shepherd with a group of 1st Graders at Cuyamaca Rancho State Parks

When I taught third grade, I built a unit around one question: what does it mean to be a wolf pack? We'd go outside, spread out across the field, and howl to call each other back together. It was our version of a safe word — a way for eight-year-olds to regroup once the world outside four walls had scattered their attention in six directions at once.

I didn't think of it as anything more than a classroom management trick at the time. I know better now.

Amy Reyes-Hauff with her students

Amy Reyes-Hauff has spent almost twenty-seven years thinking about exactly this — what happens to a child's nervous system the moment they step outside, and why so many kids today have never had the chance to find out.

Amy is the founder of Get Wild Wyoming, an outdoor learning initiative she started after watching the same thing happen over and over in classrooms across the state: children escalating, dysregulating, and nobody quite able to say why. What she noticed was that the kids struggling most were the kids least exposed to the outdoors — what researchers call nature deficit disorder. Not knowing the sound of wind in the trees. Not recognizing a bird call. A complete absence of the sensory vocabulary most of us take for granted.

A little girl digging in the dirt with Get Wild Wyoming

She didn't come to this work through a theory. She came to it through her own childhood. Amy grew up poor, at times homeless, without toys or a television. She and her sister played outside because it was free, and because it was the only option. She told me they'd lay in the grass for hours, pretending to be somewhere else, somebody else — and without knowing the term for it, they were teaching themselves to self-regulate.

She carried that into the classroom. Amy told me a story I haven't stopped thinking about. A child on a behavioral intervention plan is building toward a meltdown in her classroom — you can feel it coming. She takes him outside to practice self-regulation, and a ladybug lands on his arm. She tells him if he wants it to stay, he has to calm his breathing. He does. The meltdown never happens.

That's not luck, or not only luck. Amy calls what nature provides a "balanced sensory diet" — uneven ground, wind, birdsong, things to climb and touch — the kind of full-spectrum input that a fluorescent-lit classroom with plastic desks simply can't offer. You can buy weighted blankets and fidget tools, she told me, or you can send a kid outside to climb a hill.

A group of students journaling outdoors with Get Wild Wyoming

Get Wild Wyoming now serves more than 350 classrooms and roughly 6,000 children across the state, targeting classrooms with high rates of expulsion first. Teachers report back that their kids are calmer, and that they themselves feel like better educators. Amy has also partnered with Teton Science School to launch a new micro-credential in place-based education — open to educators nationwide, not just in Wyoming.

What struck me most, though, wasn't the scale. It was Amy's answer to the weather problem. In Wyoming, wind chill can hit fifteen below. Instead of keeping kids inside all winter, she built a wind chill chart and a library of ten-minute outdoor activities that work in nearly any condition. "It's not bad weather," she told me, "it's bad clothing." The same rule, she said, applies everywhere else that outdoor learning meets a skeptic — the heat, the rain, the parent worried their kid will get hurt. Practice indoors first. Build your class's safe word. Then go outside a little more, every day, until it isn't scary anymore.

A little boy looking at the camera with binoculars in Get Wild Wyoming

If you work with kids in any capacity — a classroom, a backyard, a Saturday program — Amy's challenge is a simple one: find ten minutes today to take them outside with no agenda beyond noticing what's there. You don't need a grant or a task force. You need ten minutes and a willingness to let a ladybug do some of the teaching for you.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

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