When I first heard the phrase “disaster-style parenting”, a little montage of the past 24 hours flashed through my head — images of my son drawing on the walls with my mascara, my daughter threatening my life unless I gave her chocolate pralines, me screaming into a pillow with reckless abandon — and thought: “Ah yes, my parenting is also disastrous”.
But, while I gave myself a pat on the back for so seamlessly aligning with a new parenting methodology, “disaster-style parenting” as coined by professional alpinist Zoe Hart.
An alpinist is a mountain climber who specialises in difficult, or high altitude ascents; Hart is the fourth American woman to earn her International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations status, the highest level of credential available to professional mountain guides. So, understandably, her parenting involves something far more interesting, intentional, and enlightening than the shambolic efforts of a feral woman in a Victorian terraced house, which is roughly where I’m at.
Riffing on “disaster-style alpinism”, a climbing philosophy of bold living and risk-taking, Hart has applied this mentality to her parenting — favouring adventures to Apple products and valuing the climate over currency.
As a parent, I find that we’re often surrounded by different ideologies, methods, and advice that the internet screams at us on a daily basis. It can, at times, feel like a never ending rabbit hole of conflicting commentaries about what to say, do, and feel when it comes to our children - and, amid all the noise and the schedules and the strategies, Hart’s message is, quite simple: get outdoors.
Create situations for your kids to succeed... where they’re allowed to get dirty, maybe get hurt, then feel really strong when they manage that fear and that danger
Hart fell into the world of alpinism after her father died unexpectedly, and she scrapped her plans to become a teacher, citing her outlook at the time as: “what’s the point of getting a job when you’re twenty, if you don’t know what’s going to happen”, and it was this turn away from a traditional path that led her to discover a passion for climbing.
Years later, once settled in Chamonix with her husband, she had children and applied the lessons learned from traversing perilous terrain to parenthood. Hart says that she hated the schedules that came with having small children, and instead found her transition to motherhood far more comfortable when she brought her children outside with her, or took them on her travels.
From Australia to Iceland, Hart has traversed the globe with her children, often living alongside them in a van for weeks. In our conversation, she recalled that on one trip to Sardinia when her children were three and two, her son asked if they could sell all of their sofas and move into the van, “he said [he] didn’t even need toys…we’ve got sticks, we’ve got [stones], we’ve got sand, they caught on quite quickly that everyone was happiest in that space”.
According to Hart, what’s encouraged her along this path is seeing what their adventurous life has instilled in her sons, and what she’s witnessed them learn. Lessons that they’ve had in nature about overcoming obstacles, facing fears, and experiencing failures are all things that she credits as helping them have a deeper sense of self and more profound innate confidence.
How to do 'disaster-style parenting'
by alpinist Zoe Hart
Go camping in the garden
Take walks together at night
Let your children get dirty
When it’s raining, send them outside with buckets and welly boots
Get a picnic, go to the park and spend the entire afternoon there in nature
Let your children go to the shops or on a bus on their own (follow them to ensure their safety)
While, in her new short film series, her children can be seen backcountry skiing, skating, climbing, and kitesurfing, Hart also mentions all the smaller day-to-day ways that she encourages her children’s autonomy and independence. From her son going to the grocery store when he was three (she knew the person who worked there) to taking the bus by himself (her friend was also on the bus - but he didn’t know that) Hart is committed to finding ways to help her children feel emboldened to try things by themselves.
Instead of shying away from risk, she enthuses that she looks for ways to create “situations for your kids to succeed…where they’re allowed to get dirty, and maybe get hurt, but then feel really strong when they manage that fear and that danger”. In a world where we can often bubble wrap our children, Hart believes that we should set them free to take risks and make mistakes within an environment that remains relatively managed, and with any dangers pre-assessed.
When I asked Hart about how parents in less nature-rich environments can embrace her ethos, she mentions a range of ideas from camping in the garden to taking walks together at night, and talks about her sons’ fondly-remembered rainy days when she’d send them outside with buckets and rain boots, emphasising that, “bad weather isn’t bad weather, you just have to put the right clothes on”. Other suggestions she gives include taking weekend trips, and even making a day of an afternoon spent in a park - planning and shopping for picnic supplies before spending some quiet time together in nature.
Not all adventures need to be huge, she emphasises, believing that the importance is less in the grandiosity of it, and more the frequency of it. Ultimately, at a time where there are so many books, forums, and apps telling us what to do with our children, sometimes, Hart would argue, the best answer is right outside our door.
