From occupational therapist & Natureled™ founder Kathleen Lockyer
Wild Inside
How Nature Protects Your Child's Mental Health — and Restores Yours
Your child's hardest behaviors aren't defiance. They're signals. Wild Inside teaches you how to listen — and shows you where the answers have been waiting all along: just outside the door.
"A gentle, persistent, beautiful voice."
— Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods
If parenting feels harder than it should, you're not imagining it.
Anxiety. Meltdowns. Inattention. Defiance. More children than ever are carrying labels — and more parents than ever are exhausted, second-guessing themselves, wondering what they're doing wrong.
Here's the truth this book shows you:
It's not you, and it's not your child.
Our culture is out of sync with the evolved needs of children. We've normalized disconnection from nature, fractured communities, overstimulated nervous systems — and chronically under-supported parents. What looks like a behavior problem is very often a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, in an environment it was never designed for.
The good news? The environment your child's nervous system is designed for still exists. And it's closer than you think.
A different way to see your child — grounded in 30 years of clinical practice
Drawing on three decades as an occupational therapist, and on deeply personal pieces of her own story, Kathleen Lockyer offers a powerful re-framing of how children develop — and how adults can heal alongside them.
Ecoception™
Your child's innate sensory connection to the natural world — a built-in dialogue between nervous system and living landscape that modern life has muted, but never erased.
Relational-Regulation
How the nervous system is shaped through interaction — with caregivers, with community, and with the more-than-human world. Regulation isn't taught. It's woven.
Habilitation, Not Rehabilitation
The better we support children's development from the start, the less repair they'll need later. Wild Inside shows you how to build a healthy nervous system with nature as a wise guide — through the most ordinary moments of family life.
This is not another parenting book of rules, rewards, and checklists. It's part memoir, part neuroscience, part invitation — and it asks nothing of you but presence.
What readers and reviewers are saying
"What struck me most was Kathleen's generous way of listening, her rootedness in the natural world, and her ability to weave science and story with vivid, intense lived experience."
— Holly Ringland, bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, from the foreword
"A sacred cause."
Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods, calls Kathleen a "personal hero."
— Richard Louv
"Poetic prose that catches your breath."
A review praising the book as more than a parenting guide — genuine, empathetic, and grounded in real practice. Read the full review.
— Lee Rinehart, Compulsive Reader
★★★★★
"…an extended conversation about our lives and how we can improve them."
A five-star review praising the book's practical, accessible guidance and the vulnerability that invites readers into their own healing. Read the full review.
— Leslie Anne Smith, Reader Views
The Author
For thirty years, Kathleen Lockyer, OT/L, has worked at the intersection of occupational therapy, neuroscience, and the living world — helping families rethink mental health, resilience, and human development through relationship, sensory health, and nature.
Raised a little wild by a rugged fisherman from Newfoundland and a little refined by a debutante from New York City, she brings both grit and grace to everything she teaches and writes. She is the founder of the NatureLed™ Institute and RxOutside, an AOTA Approved Provider, and a faculty member at the Academy of Forest Kindergarten Teachers.
She lives on California's Central Coast with her partner and their Great Pyrenees mix, continuing her advocacy for nature as an essential relationship for the human nervous system. Wild Inside is her debut book.
Meet Kathleen — or bring her to you
story, science & honest conversation
Upcoming Events
An Evening with Kathleen Lockyer
Chaucer's Books · Santa Barbara, CA
Event Passed
Community Book Event
Bishop, CA · C5 Studios Community Arts Center
July 25, 2026, 6:30-8:30pm
Invite Kathleen to Speak
Kathleen speaks to parent communities, schools, outdoor programs, and professional audiences on nature-connection, child development, and nervous system health. Talks range from intimate bookstore evenings to full professional development trainings — with CEUs available for OT practitioners through her AOTA Approved Provider status.
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Begin where healing begins — outside, together.
Wild Inside: How Nature Protects Your Child's Mental Health and Restores Yours
Kathleen Lockyer · Foreword by Holly Ringland
Otter Play Publishing · October 2025 · Paperback · 340 pages · $22.95 · ISBN 9798986593210
In Joy and Stillness
Buy Wild Inside