9 tips to get active outdoors with your teenager

By Barb Howard   Illustration By Susan Camilleri Konar

News alert: ThE REASON your teen doesn’t come out with you might be . . . well, frankly . . . you. Here are some tips to lessen the impact of you and increase your chance of getting in some outdoor activity with your offspring.

1. The visuals: Don’t expect your teenager to leave the house with you if you are wearing any of the following: fanny pack, zip-leg pants, a floppy sun hat, or spandex *. If you usually wear all these things at the same time, there is no hope for you. Unless you are in Europe or running a marathon, your shorts need to have an inseam longer than five inches. Your strap for your sunglasses, your zinc cream, your helmet that looks like a sawed-off volleyball on your head (as opposed to one that fits and was made in the 21st century) must not come out in a teen’s presence. 

*Note re spandex and road cycling: Bravo if you’ve convinced your teen to get on a road bike alongside you because, catch-22, there is a spandex requirement. You must wear sweats or big shorts over your stretchies until the second before you get on the bike and, similarly, you must be in baggies within seconds of disembarking from the bike.

2. Choosing the activity: Pick a doable adventure, but make sure there is some adventure. Most teens are not going to want to go on some lame-o stroll with you. Walk the dog? Forget it. That’s not fun, that’s a job. Hike three hours straight up to an impressive ridge, drink a Gatorade and eat 10 cookies, jog back to the car (teen knees are lubed) and be home in time to get together with friends for a night of Xbox and Criminal Minds reruns. Now that’s a good day. (Note how you were a small part of their day.) Equally important: pick an adventure you can do yourself. You don’t want to be the parent who has to be helicoptered home.

3. Getting there and back: Music to and from the start point (the trailhead, the ski base, whatever) must be the choice of the teen. Forget the lecture on Eminem’s aging potty mouth or the complaint about the infinite loops of Rihanna’s Rude Boy. Your music, all of it - whatever it is, even if it is Rihanna and Eminem - is wrong in their eyes. Remove yourself from the DJ seat. If your teen is old enough to drive, remove yourself from the driver’s seat. In fact, the phrase “you can drive” is often enough to get a teen to do any activity with you.

4. Who’s the laggard? Your teen may shuffle, especially at the beginning - possibly because the crotch of their pants is at their knees. Let it go. Enjoy the moments of rest. Teens do activities in sprint intervals. When the single track turns into a scramble to the summit, or when the groom turns into frozen chop and cliff bands, you will be the laggard, and you will realize an ugly truth: you are old.

5. Stop the Pollyanna CRAP: Kids are smart. You don’t have to keep telling them what to notice or how the natural world is an amazing place. They get it. And if they are not enjoying it, if they are hating the outdoors and the activity (and you, at the moment), your “aren’t we lucky” or “enjoy the scenery” comments ain’t going to help one bit.

6. When things go bad:  Oops. Seems there are a few unexpected turns/grizzlies/lightning strikes on the route you’ve chosen. You’re lost or just out of your league. Explain the situation, ask the teen for input, but hey, at the end of the day, you’re the parent and you’ve got to suck it up, Buttercup. Stop, take a gel (unless you’ve used them all up or forgot them) and some water (unless you are out of that, too) and review tip #5.

7. How to make sure they don’t want to come along next time: Get really mad. It doesn’t matter if you yell at the teen or at a blister or at a dog on the race route, yell at anything. Or complain about how good you used to be or how nothing is going your way, or how you need new gear or about how useless your teen is.

Even worse, force some bonding or retrospection into the moment. Keep trying to talk about what they want to do when they grow up. Continually extol the virtues of outdoor activity over screen time.

If the activity is going OK, swarm the teen with your own overwrought enthusiasm. Start planning their whole summer/winter holiday around that same activity, talk about clubs they could join, how they could train and improve and generally become a better/different person.

8. Increase the probability of future outings: Time will ease the pain caused by most of your parent crimes. Don’t mention another parent-teen outing for a few weeks. That will give your teen time to digest the good parts (i.e. the outdoors, the activity) and forget the bad parts. (i.e. you).
During activities with my teens, I have accidentally locked myself in an outhouse during a race, surfed into my son’s head and worn spandex so old that another rider told me my buttcrack was visible to the world. I am proof that, given enough time, even teens forgive.

9. And the point is? The point is to get outside and hang with your teens for a bit. Lay off. Make a few concessions in their direction and they might make a few in your direction. It’s not about forcing your sport on them, or trying to whip them into buff-bodies.

Teens are fun. And smart. They challenge us to think outside our staid and stuck adult brains. Perhaps most importantly, they are less messed-up than most of our adult friends. Who could ask for better sporting companions?

Barb Howard lives in Bragg Creek, Alta. Her sons are mortified that she wrote this article and likely will not go out with her for months.

November/December 2010 Issue