My Kids Are Feral, And I Love It

I confess: My kids are feral. It’s true. At any point, at least one of them is half-naked, barefoot, and probably peeing off the deck. My two-year-old currently has a pretty great full body tan going on. Wrestling is a full-time sport in our living room. My house is never clean, even five minutes after I’ve cleaned it. My five year old, as girly as she is, has a strong aversion to hairbrushes. They fear very little. They regard inside voices as…..wait, I don’t think they know what an inside voice is. One of their favorite past times is running around roping each other. They know how to doctor a yearling cow for pink eye, but can’t seem to remember where their toothbrush is every single night. They believe jumping on the trampoline with the sprinkler constitutes a shower. They know ranching vocabulary and I often hear things like:

“That cow has a bad bag. We should sell her.”

“That’s a dung beetle, they’re good for the soil.”

“That cow is naughty. She’s definitely going to the sale barn.”

Or the most recent one: “Mom, I got to clean nuts at the branding today!”

For my fellow ranch moms out there, you can probably relate to a few things here. For my city moms, you are probably mortified. But if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I LOVE how my kids are being raised. I think there needs to be well-behaved, indoor children in this world to balance out the wild ones, but it’s not going to be mine.

I mean, we’re not completely off the rails. My kids know their manners and usually use them. We value education and knowledge and strongly encourage our kids to be readers. We teach financial responsibility and entrepreneurship. Each evening, we gather around the dinner table to eat, talk, and list three things we are each grateful for from the day. We love each other fiercely. So, no – we aren’t completely raising renegades…just mostly.

I believe there are real benefits to kids being raised with a little more freedom to explore and be outside getting dirty. Our kids know how to entertain themselves. They don’t have tablets or cell phones or screens of their own. They climb fences, build forts, play tag, jump on the trampoline, and flip over cow pies to look for bugs. They don’t step outside their house and see concrete and manicured parks. They see 12,000 acres of grassland….it’s the wild west out there, and it’s their playground. They are expected to help out on the ranch, and they mostly enjoy it. They can fill taggers, wrestle calves, ride horses, open gates, bring cows up an alleyway, and many other things that not all kids get to do at five and seven years old. They hear, “You can do hard things,” from me on a regular basis. They’re learning creativity, imagination, and resilience. They get to live a life that actually very few kids ever will. Farm and ranch families comprise less than 2% of the U.S. population, so 1 in 50 kids in the U.S. get the opportunity to live this life. I’m pretty grateful my kiddos do.