Wild Inside: How Nature Protects Your Child's Mental Health and Restores Yours

Bringing together the neuroscience of child development, sensory integration, with the healing power of nature therapy, and the honesty of personal memoir, Wild Inside: How Nature Protects Your Child’s Mental Health and Restores Yours goes beyond traditional parenting books to show how both children and adults can rediscover resilience, regulation, and a more meaningful life through nature.

Where many parenting books focus on the benefits of outdoor play, Wild Inside reveals why those experiences matter on a neurological level—showing how the human brain is literally wired to receive nature’s signals.

Drawing on nearly three decades of clinical practice as an occupational therapist, Kathleen Lockyer shows how many of today’s children suffer from developmental deprivation—a lack of the natural movement, play, and relational connection their brains evolved to expect. The result often looks like anxiety, attention struggles, behavior and emotional dysregulation, but the root cause lies deeper: disconnection.

Lockyer introduces key concepts such as:

• Ecoception — our innate ability to sense and respond to nature’s cues (Lockyer’s term)

• Interoception — awareness of the body’s inner sensations, the foundation of emotional-regulation

• Alloception — our sense of others, essential for empathy and relational healing (Lockyer’s term)

These three ‘senses’ form the foundation for what Lockyer calls relational-regulation—the process by which safety, attunement, and shared presence build nervous system health and resilience.