How do I motivate my child to go hiking?

Hiking is a great activity for the whole family. What sounds so exciting at first and seems like a wonderful day in our excited imagination can quickly turn out differently in reality. Especially if our children don't participate as much as we had imagined.
Is your child perhaps a "hiking reluctant" or are you looking for tips on how to make hiking more appealing to your children? Then you've come to the right place .

My child doesn't want to hike

If our children are still young, hiking usually works quite well. Our little darlings quickly figure out that they need to be carried by mom or dad when they get tired or just don't want to walk anymore . However, this changes by the time they reach primary school age, usually earlier. They become too heavy for us and we place different demands on our children's stamina. That's fine, but of course it can also mean that our children don't want to hike as much anymore.

The goal is the goal

Unlike us, for children the journey is not the destination. The destination itself is what drives and motivates our children. We therefore ensure that they are motivated along the way.
This is not only the case with small children, but also with school children and even teenagers. We can boost this motivation from the outside. However, it is important to keep stress and pressure out of the situation. Time-related stress and accusations like "I told you so" have no place on hikes. Hiking should be a positive family experience , where we create many beautiful moments together that give us and our children strength in difficult times. Therefore, it is good and important that we motivate our children to take part . But it is equally important NOT to turn this experience into a negative one.

Why don’t children want to hike?

The reason why our children avoid hiking is often because it is simply too strenuous for them. And it is often not worth it for them. The destinations are usually just huts, with no major highlights along the way. Perhaps we can get our children excited about the view or the chance to see an animal or two, but we can't promise that. After all, many children ask themselves the cost-benefit question. And so the effort is simply not worth it for them . That is why they try to avoid hiking. Almost every child has their own tactics to influence us parents.

In order to motivate our children to go hiking with us, we have to convince them of the value of hiking :

13 tips to convince our children to go hiking

1. Announce and plan the hike in good time
2. Involve children in planning
3. Have your own backpack and hiking equipment packed
4. Provide exciting goals
5. Choose themed trails (there is something to do regularly)
6. Present destinations and stopovers in an appealing way
7. Allow enough time to avoid stress
8th. Give the child the hiking map and “hire” him/her as a hiking guide
9. Make a checklist of everything there is to discover and work through it.
10. Include games or songs
11. Include special adventures, such as a picnic on the mountain, a hike with an overnight stay in a hut or the like
12. Go hiking with friends
13. Always praise and recognize achievements!

Everything that makes hiking exciting and varied for our children is allowed and desired. Tasks and exciting goals as well as praise for the effort in between motivate our children. It is more fun for them and increases their own desire for more. In this case, to "cover more of the path" in order to experience the next task or the next adventure . If the goal is worthwhile, this increases our darlings' motivation even more.
You can find more detailed information on how to praise your child correctly in order to motivate him or her in this article .

What games can you play while hiking?

Games are a great way to provide variety and distraction in between games. This means that our children often don't even notice how far they're going and they don't get bored .

The following playful activities and fun tasks are suitable for hiking:

• Hide
• Balance
• Jumping from stone to stone
• Rock climbing
• Play hiking guide
• Collect berries, herbs or mushrooms
• Collect or identify stones
• Search for hiking stones
• Find a walking stick and maybe carve something into it
• Building a stone man
• Collecting treasures of nature, possibly as craft materials
• Play “I see what you don’t see”
• Find and identify flowers
• Geocaching
• Search for and identify traces
• Turn the hike into a treasure hunt or puzzle rally
• Search and identify birds
• Take a photo safari
• Singing hiking songs

Hiking trails for families

There are many hiking trails that offer information boards or other attractions especially for families.
From nature-themed trails to swing trails, hikes can be made more interesting for our children without any additional creativity or effort. If we don't tell them, they usually don't even notice that it's a hike.

Guest author

My name is Mag. Ines Wurbs. I am a qualified psychologist and a mother of two children. My many years of working with children, young people and parents have always been fun, but it has also shown me that we parents are the experts on our children. As a psychologist, it is my job to impart the necessary knowledge to support and strengthen our children and us parents. That is why I try to impart scientific findings from psychology to parents in a practical way with my magazine Familiencouch.com.