Walks with kids: how to make a walk fun for children

Hand over the decisions

The quickest way to turn a walk around is to stop leading it.

1. Let them choose every turn At each corner the child decides: left, right or straight ahead. Your only rules are that you don't say no and you don't turn back. Half an hour of this ends somewhere neither of you expected.
2. Stop when they stop Agree before you set out that every time the child stops, you stop too, for as long as they want. Snails, drain covers, a stick. It takes a while. That is the walk.
3. Give them the map Hand over your phone or a paper map and let them navigate to somewhere you've picked. Getting a little lost is how map reading is learned.
4. Let them set the pace, and mean it Two kilometers in no less than forty-five minutes. Stopping counts. Sitting down on the curb for ten minutes doesn't.

Games that fit in a pocket

These need nothing but eyes and a bit of patience from the adult.

1. Count the house numbers Odd on one side, even on the other. Somewhere a number will be missing, and finding out which one is the game.
2. Whose shadow is longer Late afternoon, sun low: stand side by side and compare. Then find a spot where the child's shadow beats yours.
3. Three smells before we get there Name three different smells along the way: bread, wet stone, somebody's laundry. Children are far better at this than adults.
4. Count the lit windows at dusk On a winter afternoon, count together how many windows are already lit. Whoever gets to ten first picks the way home.
5. Find the strangest thing There's always one on any walk: the odd lawn ornament, the chair on a roof, the shoe on the wall. The first to spot it names it.
6. Point out what grown-ups notice late The date carved above a door, moss growing on only one side of a tree, the weather vane on a roof. Show one thing per walk; it changes what they look at.

Walks with something to make at the end

1. A paper boat for the first puddle Fold one before you leave. The walk is now a search for water to float it in.
2. A fort of sticks In any wood or park with fallen branches, build a shelter big enough for one child. It doesn't have to last past this afternoon.
3. Chalk hopscotch where you end up Carry a piece of chalk. Draw the grid somewhere that isn't your own street, play it, and leave it for the next person.
4. Three leaves, three shapes Collect three leaves of clearly different shapes from the ground, not the tree, and lay them in a row at home to compare.
5. A story as long as the walk Make up a story out loud that has to last exactly until you reach the door. If it ends early, keep inventing.

Try their height

Once in a while, crouch down and walk a stretch at a child's eye level. From down there cars are enormous, hedges are walls, and a flight of three steps is a climb. It explains a lot about why they stop so often, and it's funnier than it sounds. Then put them on your shoulders for a stretch and let them see what the street looks like from six feet up.

What usually goes wrong, and the fix

Where RLQuest comes in

RLQuest is a quest app for people who want someone else to set the task. Each morning it hands you three to ten quests from a library of more than 2,700, picked to fit your age, interests, the weather and the time you've set, and it checks what you did: the recorded route, your steps, the photo, the clock. Plenty of quests in it are built for walking with someone else: let a child choose every junction, walk two kilometers at toddler speed, fold a paper boat and photograph it afloat, build a stick fort and photograph the result.

Every quest carries an age limit, a risk level and a night permission, and children never get risky quests. It's free to download for iPhone and Android; a Premium subscription adds more quests per day. The ideas above work without it, which is the point: a child doesn't need an app to find a walk interesting. The adult sometimes does.