Firstly, thank you for subscribing to Outside Kids.

There are now nearly 1,500 of you reading this each week, which is a solid gaggle of parents trying to lift their game, or at the very least having a chuckle at me attempting to improve mine.

I write this newsletter each week from our home in the Forest of Dean. I started last July after moving back from sub-tropical Australia, where the vitamin D is bottomless and lizards are the size of shetland ponies. The timing has been impeccable - we’re experiencing the wettest start to the year on record and my lawn now qualifies as wetland habitat.

I’m a dad of two (9 and 6), trying to make sense of modern parenthood in a world that thinks toddlers should own tablets. These emails are a way to document the adventure and hopefully help a few of you along the way too.

As dads for whom going viral as kids once meant a doctors visit, we’re in a unique position to understand the before and after of the technological tidal wave, and to help guide our kids through it with better, nature-centric alternatives.

At the same time, fatherhood itself is transforming. Expectations are higher. The roles are different. We’re more hands-on, more emotionally available, more involved…and completely making it up as we go. It really is a wild time to be stepping up to the dad plate.

The goal of this newsletter is to help us make sense of it all, using good ol’ fashioned analogue adventure as the vehicle for deeper connection with our kids and for keeping a bit of our own sanity intact along the way.

I love sitting down to write this each week, but I won’t pretend it doesn’t take a fair chunk of time to produce and send. To make Outside Kids sustainable long-term and to give myself room to build what this could become, I’m switching on a simple supporter model.

This newsletter will remain free. That matters to me because I don’t want money to be a gatekeeper between families and ideas that might help them spend more time outside together.

But for readers who get real value from this (which judging by the email replies that land in my inbox each week, many of you do) there’s now an option to support what I’m building for less than the price of a packet of Nik Naks a week, and help keep the weekly inbox treats coming long into the future.

Paid supporters get:

The cost is £3.99 a month, or £39.99 for the year (about £3.33 a month).

Only you can decide whether Outside Kids brings that level of value, joy, or inspiration into your life. If it doesn’t, genuinely no hard feelings at all, I’m just glad you’re here (roping in a few other parents instead is a highly effective plan B).

Either way, I’m having an absolute riot building this. The messages, the stories, the random opportunities bubbling up - they all reinforce that something worthwhile is happening here.

Thanks for reading and for following along.
And thank you, in advance, to anyone who chooses to help keep it going.

Henry