Blossoming the Family (BTF) Program

You have children, or you are planning to have a family, or you may be a caretaker or work professionally with children. Whatever the case, you are not satisfied with contemporary parenting practices. You may have little or no experience with children, and you have grown frustrated with your efforts. You want to learn easy-going and honoring ways our ancestors and other indigenous people had — and some still have — for raising their children.

Now there is a place where families and individuals can come to learn firsthand the nature of children, how to support them in their self-education, how to create a children’s culture, how to co-parent, the danger of compliments, how to conduct rites of passage, and so much more. The program is based upon the indigenous child-rearing experience of elders Lety Seibel and Tamarack Song, and the knowledge Susan and Abel Bean have gained from their years of experience with co-parenting in the wilderness and at the Teaching Drum, as presented in the book Blossoming the Child.

The setting is pristine: you are surrounded by the Elder Pine groves and pure, sparkling waters of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. The Healing Nature Trail, with its labyrinths, wildflower beds, and observation decks, starts right outside your door.

You have a choice of either the Intensive thirty-day Blossoming the Family Program or the Comprehensive six-month Program. You live together with two or more families, either residing in the Healing Nature Center’s Giant Pine Lodge or tent camping in the adjacent Elder Pine grove.