OUTDOOR If all else fails, invite their friends

biked, canoed, caved and rock-scrambled throughout the Mid-atlantic.

They might not vote to repeat it all, namely the 2010 camping trip to a music festival outside Cumberland, Md., when hurricaneforce winds and hail drove Cathleen and Kai into a sponsor’s RV for refuge. Or the time 5-year-old Christina rocketed down a natural waterslide in a Shenandoah streambed, lost her footing and disappeared around a blind corner. (By the grace of Mother Nature, she landed in another pool,

unscathed, just after I lost sight of her.)

I shudder every time I recall that episode, but, as Hasbach says: “Our species has always been adventurers and risk-takers. That’s part of our deep memory, and when young people don’t get those opportunities to have close calls in the wild, they’re going to seek other channels of risk: drugs, promiscuity and other things. If a kid falls out of a tree and breaks an arm, it can be set. But what if the kid never gets to be in a tree? What are we missing?”

Still, it can be tough to pry children away from sedentary entertainment, which is why you must ...

Think like a kid. Maxims such as “We’ll all feel better after we do this,” “No pain, no gain!” and “GET IN THE CAR THIS INSTANT SO WE CAN GO HAVE FUN!” don’t resonate well with the under-10 set.

One tactic: Channel your inner child. On an earlypandemic Saturday, as Kai and Christina were upending our living room in a medieval battle and fiercely resisting our plans for a hike, Cathleen suggested relocating the drama to the evil lord’s fortress — in George Washington and Jefferson National Forests. By midday, armed with foam axes, plastic swords and a convoluted storyline, we were powering through an 8-mile tromp with nary a complaint.

When all else fails, invite their friends. Kids would rather crawl across broken glass in a vacant lot with their friends than ski in Aspen, Colo., alone, so recruit accordingly. And once you’re out there ...

Don’t push it too hard. My cousin Timmy, a former ski patroller in Utah, recounts the time he led his 4-yearold son, Griffin, down a

double-black-diamond run after Griffin had successfully skied a couple of singleblack-diamonds. “I knew he had the skill to ski it, but he just freaked out,” Timmy said. “I had to carry him down. He refused to ski for three years after that.” Although now, Griffin, at age 16, is a world-class competitor in the grueling sport of ski mountaineering, so make of that what you will.

In general, it’s best to open the door to possibility and let the child determine the intensity level. Have patience, grasshopper: They’ll ramp it up soon enough.

But definitely push it. Children are factory-set for adversity, insulated with fast-healing bodies and an innate sense of adventure and danger. “Things rarely go as planned out in the wild,” Hasbach says. “So kids have to learn flexibility, problem-solving, resilience,

and all those things contribute to self-confidence.”

A couple of years ago, we found ourselves pedaling mountain bikes up a seemingly endless Appalachian fire road, and the long, flowy, downhill trail we’d heard about was nowhere in sight. With a mutiny brewing, I recalled the Navy SEAL tactic of assessing a big challenge as a series of smaller ones.

“If we make it around that next bend, it’ll get easier,” I lied to Christina. (Cathleen, with far more sincerity, promised her a cookie.) When the next bend, and the three after it, revealed only more uphill and Christina summoned curses upon my soul, I pushed both of our bikes while singing show tunes with her until we crested the ridge and rolled, to her audible woo-hoos, down a laurel-lined, 3-mile trail and back to our campsite.