00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Today's episode is all about hunting with kids and hunting with newbies and what you have to think about to make it a success. It's crazy how fast a decade goes when you have kids. When my wife convinced me that we should pull a goalie and add to the world's population, I was mostly just a selfish outdoor writer who was pretty used to having tons of time to hunt. In fact, I was on an access hunt when she called me to say she was pregnant, and I was on a muleteer hunt when she called me to say we were having two girls. Maybe that makes me sound like a bad husband, but this will be worse, and I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I was terrified of missing out on hunting opportunities once those of the girls were born. I thought about that a lot. Man. I was so wrong on so many things then, and that's what I want to talk about today, because those babies are now preteen sass monsters who love to hunt. And I gotta tell you something this episode and the next one, because this is gonna be a two partter. Here it applies to everybody who might take a new hunter out. It's not just if you're gonna take kids out, it's also you take your cowork or your buddy, your brother in law, whoever. And there's a lot of good information in these next two that are going to make you a better hunter if you find yourself in any of those situations. The first ah ha moment I had with kids and the outdoors happened while I was going a little insane with a pair of three year olds at home. We needed an excuse to go outside and to do something besides playing at the neighborhood parks, so we took a trip to Cabella's. I bought a cheap pink fishing rod with an equally cheap and pink spinning reel, and I started talking about fishing. Where I live in Minnesota, finding water really isn't a problem. My buddies who live out West always talk about wet years and dry years and what the elker meal deer feed looks like and how that should translate to bigger bowls and bucks or not. Here in the Upper Midwest, we don't really have that problem. Our dry years are still pretty wet and we've got water to spare. How the downside is, at least where I live, finding water that isn't covered in people doing summertime water things. That's tough. Bear with me here. But it was a bathroom break at a local tar j that brought me to the perfect water for my girls. The pond kind of one of those ornamental drainage ponds, located smack dab in a strip mall parking lot. It's not really the ideal setting for fishing. The old saying about beggars and choosers comes to mind, And I'll tell you something. When I walked my non bathroom emergency daughter down to that pond while killing time and waiting for my wife to wrap things up in Target, I spotted about a million dinky sunfish. I also saw a school of feral goldfish, which cost my attention. I've never caught a goldfish and these were pretty good sized. The problem was, I don't know if you could legally fish the pond. I didn't really know who to call. I'm also, I don't know, at least on paper kind of a journalist. And I say that in the roughest, loosest sense of the word. But that led me to some research, which culminated with a phone call to a very nice lady from the city department who told me, yeah, you can fish there with your daughters, but no, you're not gonna catch anything. She said that pond is empty. Well I thanked her, and I loaded up a small tackle box with some jigs and random plastics, and then loaded up the girls. We caught fish there, tiny sunfish, tiny crop ease, but unfortunately no goldfish. But it did make me realize two things. I might be able to get the fishing bug to stick with the girl and the rod I bought was marketed toward little girls who want to fish with their dads but not up to the task of anything big. It was a forehead slapping moment for me. I'm a quality fishing gear addict. I just them comes from my tournament days. I love good stuff. I appreciate high end rods, high end reels, and the experience that comes with him. Now I know people who will say you can fish just as well with a twenty dollar combo from Wally World. But they are wrong. They're free to fish with whatever they want. Go ahead, go nuts, you do you, but they're wrong about that one. The backbone of a rod, the sensitivity of it, the grip, design, everything plays into the experience, and people who fish for a living truly understand that. But it's not just that small group of folks who can benefit from a good rod. Kids can too. If they want to cast well, they want to be able to set the hook with some level of gir and fight fish. Cheapy rods are a liability and not really an asset. That lesson stuck with me, and it hit home when I was thinking about getting the girls into hunting now. In my home state of Minnesota, getting them into hunting meant taking them gun hunting when they turned ten, or waiting for them to be twelve and then they can bow hunt. But I didn't want to wait, and neither did they. That meant Wisconsin, with its no minimum age rules and cross bowl legalization. It's pretty obvious choice, but also kind of a weird choice for me. I don't really know much about crossbows. They don't interest me. I'm not totally adamantly opposed to them. Like some bow hunters, I'm just not really interested in them, kind of like I'm not as interested in as gun hunting for deer as I am bow hunting for them. Just my thing. I don't enjoy shooting crossbows, and I don't have much of a desire to hunt with one, unless for some reason I couldn't draw a vertical boat. Anyway, a cross boat was the obvious choice for the girls, and so I bought kind of this youth woman's model and set them up with a good tripod. We started practicing on a three D target. And let me tell you something. If anyone tells you that crossbows and vertical bows are the same thing, they either have the mental horsepower of an ice cube or they are intentionally being deceitful. Those little girls could hit the vitals and a deer target at twenty yards right out of the gate, and they could do it over and over and over again. It was impressive, it was fun, and it also made me feel better about taking my then nine year olds hunting. My biggest fear was that they'd spine one or have just a really terrible shot that would go south and taint the whole experience. I wanted to make sure that if they got a shot, it would go really well and result in short blood trail. But of course you can't guarantee anything like that when you're dealing with wild animals and kids. To be fair, I couldn't guarantee anything like that. You know, with adults either or myself. We practice a lot. I set the crossbow up with heavier bolts and solid one piece fixed blade heads as the season drew closer. After shooting it myself several times when they're actually hunting AMMO, I was pretty confident that if I got a deer within that magic sixty ft range, it was gonna go pretty well and I would During all of this, we also drove over to Wisconsin a few separate times to hang cameras and set up blinds, glass dear, eat candy, trout, fish, eat more candy, and really get the preseason work finished. It was fun and a huge part of the process. Still, I was nervous. Not only did I have my girls shooting a weapon that is undoubtedly a big advantage over a vertical bowl, I had put in a lot of work to ensure that we had set ups that would put a few deer right in our laps, and I wondered, did did the advantage I provided there was that like a too great? Was it too much? Was it going to be too easy for them? Now? I think I'm just getting old, but I really worried about making it too easy for my daughters, and I worry about their generation having it too easy now. I've coached them in t ball and softball and basketball for a few years now, and I've seen that everyone gets a trophy thing play out, it doesn't do much for them, sets them back. I think it's crazy, crazy, how a little competitiveness in a sport can spark real enthusiasm, Whereas when they couldn't win because there were no winners, it was boring and they didn't care. So even at six, they responded so well to a challenge in the prospect of winning. I think it's innate in us. I believe it. I think we need challenges, and I think it's more important now than it ever has been in our history as humans. It wasn't that long ago when we were hunter gatherers and the challenge of finding enough protein to fill our stomachs was a big one, you know, but a lot changes in ten or twenty thou years, and today we've got it pretty damn good, so good that we even invent drama so we have something to fight about. That's a weird spot to be in. Too easy, it's not so great, and it's one of the main reasons why you and I are probably so drawn to white tail hunting. We need a challenge, and hunting deer is a pretty good way to get that fixed. That's part of the reason the public land thing is so appealing to so many people. No one goes into that process thinking it's going to be easy, but the idea of the reward that come from public land hunting there's a lot of gravity to it. And to be fair, a lot of people seem to go into public land white till hunting, you know, thinking that it will be easier than it is. That's a different topic anyway. I wrestled with this as a parent. I think we're all struggling to find that balance between giving our children as good of a head start as possible, but without making things so easy that they become ship head adults who can't handle life. In this case, I wanted to give my daughters a great head start on deer hunting, but not make it so easy that they wouldn't appreciate it. Part of that stems from the exposure to hunting that I've seen on so many hunting shows. I can get pretty judge when I'm somewhere that has I don't know the Sports was channel of the Outdoor Channel, and I catch an episode with a twelve year old sitting over a food plot passing to shoot a one seventy that I know the kid didn't work for and probably won't fully understand the gravity of. But why should I care? I honestly shouldn't. It's just an easy thing to be a prick about. It's my own kids and their experience that I should focus on. And I can tell you the thing I wrestled with the most was that balance between easy and fun and challenging and rewarding and all the things we'd also like to get out of all of our hunts that in the spine shot, the ugly death thing was dominated my thoughts. I knew we had a hedge in one way because where we put our blinds in north central Wisconsin, it wasn't like we were going to be covered in deer. The visibility would be limited due to the blinds and their locations, but we'd also be hunting around a pretty sparse deer population. I thought that would produce some dead hours and dead sits and make it really special when any deer walked in. That's weird how we justify our actions in hunting and life, isn't it. I have no doubt there was a time in my life before I had kids where if someone said they were going to have their nine year old shoot across but out of a blind, where I would have been like, m I don't think those kids are ever gonna understand why I do this. But how things change. My friends, perhaps you're dealing with this yourself as your kids come of age to hunt, or maybe you're taking somebody else out who's a newbie. It's a weird situation now because it wasn't that long ago when you couldn't find a youth season in any state. It wasn't that long ago where most states required kids to be twelve to hunt and have earned their firearm safety certification to do it. Now there are quite a few states where under twelve year old kids can hunt, and quite a few of them you know, they offer unique youth only seasons for deer and ducks and turkeys and whatever else. And they'll also sell you a ridiculously cheap tag for that. I'm talking like one dollar tags and in some cases six or seven dollar tags for nonresident hunting. Isn't that wild? I think it is, But I'm also not complaining. I feel like the window in which I can get my daughters somewhat hooked on hunting it's pretty short one. They already have sports all year round, they have jim naw sticks, They have unlimited opportunities to do things that aren't in the woods or on the water, and the gravity for those activities is huge, and it gets even stronger if you're happy to live where I live, and hunting isn't quite as important to the average person as the you know, I don't keep up with the Jones lifestyle that ropes all family members in and keeps them doing what the neighbors are doing. I knew this as my daughters were growing up, but I didn't really know it, if that makes sense. It's kind of like when you first get married and people with a little gray in their sideburns and their beard they warn you that the honeymoon will end and things will get We'll call it less fun. You might think, not me, man, I'm different, My marriage is going to be different. Well, I got news for you. You probably aren't different. They are like eight billion of us. We aren't that special and we aren't that different. We just think we are. And that led me to believe that I'd be able to take my daughter's hunting and fishing all the time, and that they shun the activities my wife wants them to be in. I can almost hear the middle aged and upcrowd laughing at that, and I fully admit it. I got it way wrong. But there is a good fight to be fought, and I think it starts with getting your kids hunting, or getting newbies and hunting. I figured I might have a few more seasons to really get this to stick with my daughters, and that's what I'm trying to do. I know not everyone has that fight, because there are some youngsters out there who are fully wired for the outdoors. A lot of them aren't, though at least totally and needed a little bump in the right direction. That's the spot I'm at with the girls. The clock to teenage dumb it's ticking. I've been worn plenty on that, but it's inevitable and I don't care. What I care about is their experience now and how I can plant some seeds that might take root. That's what deer hunting offers, and my job is to try to get them into it as best I can. That's your job too, if you've got some young ones at home and they're thinking about the days when you'll be able to go afield with them, or you've got that co worker who you like who keeps hinting that he'd like to try deer hunting, or like I said earlier, maybe you marry into a family and the brother in law or the sister in law or the father in law or somebody it's like, you know what, I like venison and I've never tried hunting. We're all there, we all have someone like that, and so I guess, I guess what I'll say to tie a bow on all of this is what I've learned the last two seasons with my daughters. The process is more important than a dead deer. We often think about taking new hunters out and focus so much on getting them a filled tag that we gloss over what is really important about this stuff that we do. I catch myself in this trap a lot, and I have to remind myself that a few dear will probably show up if we do everything right. But it's the doing everything right part that matters the most. The time walking field edges and through the woods for sign and answering a million questions, that's real important. The trail camera card polls, they're fun and they're important too. The time spent glassing with a kid or a nubie so important because they get to see deer and other critters doing what other critters do. The gear prep as much as they'll be involved, that's really important too. Talking about it, asking them what they are excited for. All of that stuff feeds into a love of the game. I think, No, no, I believe making them a real part of it instead of a I don't know, like a pampered guest who is divorced from what it takes to actually be a hunter. That's kind of what I'm getting at, I guess, And I don't know. Maybe that sounds too preachy. I don't really care. I think it's worth acknowledging, and it actually extends way beyond the typical take a kid out for the first season type of thing. It's actually a pretty solid blueprint for getting anyone out to hunt and to develop a real appreciation for the whole thing. It just also happens to work for kids really well too. At least that's the route I've taken. And if I've made it too easy for them, I have plans to make it harder. While they've hunted out of ground blinds only so far, with a nice tripod to set their crossbow in and as good at locations as I can get them too, this coming season, they'll start to hunt from ladder stands. They'll start to shoot a vertical bow I bought for them too, even though they're not gonna hunt with it yet now they know I won't force it. But by the time they're like twelve, they might be expected to hunt with a bow that does not have a scope on it. They will have to learn how to time their draw and how to hunt like I hunt, and if I'm being honest, and I am, but they won't be forced to do it. I hope, just like with training dogs, that I can develop a positive message around this stuff that translates directly into embracing the challenges and a love of the game. I'll ask my rant on the topic of getting kids started or newby started any away your path will look different. But I do plan on keeping this train of thought going for next week's episode because I really want to talk about what I actually learned about while hunting with the girls and how that really feeds into the planning and the process. It's also a good lesson, as I just mentioned, for anyone who is looking to take out a newcomer, so the next one has a lot of information about how you can make it a better experience for them and how you're going to grow as a hunter for doing just that. That's it for this week, my dear obsessed amigoes. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. As I always thank you so much for listening, all of us here at Meteators truly appreciate it. If you need a little bit more white tail wisdom, feel free to head on over to our Wired to Hunt YouTube channel or to visit the metator dot com slash Wired. At both places, you're gonna see videos or articles on all kinds of deer hunting strategies, tactics, whatever you name it, so check them out.

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