Hi everyone! This week I am so thrilled to be interviewing Nicolette Sowder from Wilder Child. If you don't know Nicolette, you really should get familiar with her and her community...
 

Nicolette leads an amazing community for those who are really passionate about raising a wilder child and getting back to nature with their children.

So Nicolette, hi! And thank you so much for being here.

Nicolette Sowder: Hi, thank you so much for having me on, I'm so excited.

Ashley: So, Nicolette...
Could you start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself and your mission and how you got started with Wilder Child?
Nicolette: Sure, so right now, I live with my husband and my two little girls and we're wild schooling on sixty acres in Michigan. We actually run a pastured farm, but we weren't always here. We were on a trip five and a half years ago... the time's gone so fast... but so much has been packed into such a small amount of time. So we moved from Northwest Indiana -- it was really like a satellite suburb outside Chicago -- so we did have a little bit of property, but once we moved here, I mean, we are now just surrounded by nature.

I always grew up appreciating nature with my parents, so that really instilled some key values within me. This was all enhanced when I got here, just us being dominated by nature. It was all around us, and I was able to form such a close relationship with our animals. At that time I had my one year old, my daughter who now is almost six (which I can't believe!), but when we came here she was one. It just had such a profound impact on me being in this environment with her. I felt like I really had to start writing about it.
I think that's how a lot of bloggers start, with trying to express this totally transformational experience that you're having with your children.
This was all enhanced with us being really with mother nature as well. I like to think of her now as the third parent. So this whole experience was mind-blowing, I thought I had to write about it. Then it became so much bigger than me. It just felt like there were so many parents who just wanted to talk about it, talk about how to reintegrate and heal that bond with nature from a parenting perspective.

I feel like at that time, there was a lot of nature-based educational information, although there wasn't that much in the parenting context. That's really where Wilder Child has moved and really, really speaks. That's my passion, it's working with parents, working with families.

Ashley: You know, I think this is such an interesting story because you had this experience growing up yourself as a child who was very connected to nature. It's not just something that you're interested in on your own, but that your parents really encouraged. Then when you became a parent yourself, it sounds like it was almost not only about  creating this connection for your own child but also in some ways, it was maybe a reconnection for yourself and learning to understand the natural world in a different way, through a parent's eyes.

Nicolette: Oh my gosh, that's exactly what it was like.
The role of nature and how it fits into your parenting life is a very special and very different thing to just nature on its own when you're growing up.
There's a completely different energy when you're growing up, and I think you tend to miss a few things. It's still immersive when you're a child and it's so instinctual, that connection with nature, it almost goes unacknowledged. I don't mean that in a bad way, it just is. Mother nature should've always been with you, then and now. It's just that now, mother nature has become much more of a support system for me, one that I am fully able to appreciate and acknowledge.
Everyday, I'm more and more thankful, more and more aware of the role that Mother Nature is playing in my life.
Ashley: Sure, that's so beautiful. I'm not a parent myself but I remember spending so many days a...