Teaching Kids about Herbs: The Home Medicine Cycle 3

We partially homeschool. For a while, I had a standard preschool curriculum for my kids where you learn about “community helpers.” When we got to the picture of a “doctor," my kids were excited. They know our doctor. He’s nice but he gives shots. They don’t really like shots but he also gives them stickers for being good. They like stickers.

It was when we got to the pictures of “medicine” that things got confusing. My kids didn’t recognize the medicine shown in the curriculum. It wasn’t just the brand or the type of medicine. They have rarely ever taken medicine from a pharmacy. They didn’t know about pills.

Walking near the Growiser Native Plant Preserve in Northeastern Oregon, an area of great biodiversity.

If you ask my kids to show you what “medicine” is they are likely to point out a weed or at most a jar of salve, possibly some dried leaves for tea. This is because I make most of our medicine and we have increasingly less need for medicine from pharmacies.

So, a slight disconnect in communication comes up when my kids talk to other kids or adults about medicine. It isn’t that they’ve been deprived of the knowledge of what pharmaceutical medicine looks like. They have two toy doctor’s kits with the standard accoutrements, plus the spare salve and tincture bottles I added. But they are simply used to the idea of herbal medicine and many other people aren’t used to it, especially kids.

That got me to thinking about how I taught my kids about herbs. How is it that my children have some fundamentally different assumptions about health and medicine and plants?

Mostly it is simply what we use.

Since my kids were babies they’ve been around when I cultivated, harvested and processed herbal medicinals. They have taken “black honey” for everything from coughs to stomach aches since they were a year old. “Black honey” is simply a syrup made of plantain and honey that is one of the best remedies for kids. It can help significantly with coughs, sore throats and stomach troubles, but even if it doesn’t cure what ails them, it tends to taste so good (much like caramel) that they feel at least a little better anyway. (I'll post the recipe for black honey when the plantain come up in the spring.)

My kids are also used to herbal tea and a variety of salves. They know about chewing up a bit of plantain to put on a scrape when they’re outside.

But even more fundamentally than that, they understand that medicine doesn’t “make you better.” It is part of healing that includes a balance of rest, food, water and cuddling. They see medicine (whatever the type) as just one factor in getting well or staying healthy.

In the process of learning about herbs myself, I’ve observed how other families teach their kids about herbs and developed a set of tips that can help along the way.

1. Use herbs as much as you can both in cooking and medicine. Name them specifically when talking about them with kids. Instead of just saying, “Let’s add some herbs to the soup,” spell out that you’re adding sage and thyme or whatever.

2. Point out plants by name whenever you can, whether they’re herbs or not. I once knew a two-year-old whose parents were biologists and when he pointed to a duck he gave the correct scientific name for the particular type of duck because that is how his parents named them to him. So, while most kids would say “Duckie!” he would say “White-winged scoter!” And he’d be right. The same is possible with plants. The human brain was designed to catalog enormous detail about the natural world but it’s an aptitude we don’t exercise much these days. It's hard to keep up with it if the knowledge is irrelevant to your life, but if you follow the other tips here, plants will be essential and your child will remember the names of many plants.

3. When discussing medicine or doctors with preschool-age kids pretend that we live in a perfect world where there is no chasm between doctors and herbalists. When we teach kids about money, we first teach them the concepts in an idealized way. We don’t teach them first about money laundering, corruption and crippling poverty. We teach them that you work and you get paid and you then spend your money to buy things. When we first teach kids about soldiers, we don’t tell them about war crimes and how even “good” soldiers sometimes kill people. We teach them that soldiers protect us. We do teach them that guns and other military equipment are very dangerous because we don’t want them touching these things on their own. The same goes for medicine. We teach them that doctors give you medicine to make you well again. Sometimes a doctor might recommend pills or sometimes she or he might recommend herbal tea. Both are to be treated with respect and kids can’t take them without a grown-up’s help. Make the idea that herbs are medicine a simple fact, so that the opposite is strange.

4. As kids get older let them use herbal salve for cuts and scrapes on their own. Make sure it doesn’t include any ingredients that aren't okay for internal use because kids may use salve for lip gloss. (For instance, North American arnica is often added to herbal salves for bruises and should not be used on broken skin or near the mouth.)

5. Teach kids to identify the most basic edible plants. You could start with dandelions, chickweed and violets. Put them on salad to make it pretty and tasty. Kids get the idea that many more plants can be used for food than those we see in the grocery store or even the vegetable garden.

6. Teach kids early on where it is okay to pick flowers and herbs and where it isn’t. Just as kids need to know about the invisible world of germs and why we have to wash our hands before dinner, they have to know about the invisible world of pesticides and herbicides. Make sure your kids know if you use chemicals in your yard and that they can’t eat the flowers or herbs that grow in such areas. Point out that in parks and other maintained public places, these chemicals are almost always used. Show kids that they should never gather herbs directly beside a road or anywhere near a major highway (particularly if you live near a freeway interchange for instance).

This is the correct kind of plantain but possibly too near a road.

Photo by Sannse of Wikipedia

7. The easiest medicinal herb to start with is plantain. This is because it grows just about everywhere, its easy to identify and low to the ground where kids can reach it. It’s medicinal action is also very direct, observable and easy to understand. Whatever it touches it heals. Sit in a meadow and have your kids practice identifying what is grass and what is plantain. Plantain has distinct parallel ridges on the leaves. There are two types, one with broad leaves that come to a point abruptly and one with long thin leaves that taper gradually. The thinner leaves are more medicinally potent but neither is harmful. When your kids can identify the plant successfully, show them that you can chew up a piece of plantain into a paste and then put it on a cut or scrape. A minor scrape will stop hurting almost immediately and this is very satisfying to kids. If your kids are older, they may initially balk at the idea of putting green spit-mush on themselves. They can mash the plantain up and add a few drops of water. That works too.

8. At this stage you might consider reading the Herb Fairies books with your kids. Herb Fairies is a set of thirteen story books plus activity packs. As far as I know the only way to get them is by joining the Herb Fairies book club. Once a year the book club opens for new members. The basic membership, which doesn’t include printed books but only ebooks that you can print out or use on a Kindle or a tablet, usually costs around $100 which can be intimidating. You are allowed to download the first book and activity pack for free and keep it even if you don’t decide to join the club for the full thirteen books, which are sent to you over the course of a year. I’m not affiliated with this program in anyway. I bought my own membership for my kids a few years ago at full price and I’m very happy with it. I particularly like the fact that the fairies in the books are not all female, not all Caucasian and not all young-looking or even skinny. They are all quite fun and pretty though. The first book mentions plantain, so that is why it is fun to start the series when you’re first learning about plantain. The writing in the story books isn’t spectacular but it is as good as say The Magic Tree House in terms of good flow and age-appropriateness. The story is engaging and there are four kid characters of various backgrounds and levels of herbalist understanding for kids to relate to.

9. The classic Flower Fairies books also provide a lot of beautiful pictures that include medicinal plants. They are focused on beautiful flowers though and will include many poisonous plants and leave out many medicinals. The best way to use Flower Fairies in your herbalist curriculum is to get the black and white Flower Fairy coloring book and use specific pages that feature a medicinal plant. This also circumvents the other problem I encountered with Flower Fairies, the fact that all of the Flower Fairies are very pale and Caucasian-looking, which may not be comfortable for all families. 

10. A very good book for teaching not only a few medicinal herbs but also a lot of good herbalist concepts is The Herbalist of Yarrow. This little treasure found its way onto my bookshelf a year ago. It is a very engaging story for kids seven and up that hits home the importance of medicine as just one part of the process of healing, including the idea that medicine that makes you feel good when you are still sick can prolong illness because it prevents you from resting. This story does open up the issue of the divide between doctors and herbalists, although doctors aren’t mentioned explicitly. The villain in the story is a “wizard” who wants to force everyone to use only the wizards’ medicine and wants to stamp out village herbalists by force. The story manages to be very suspenseful and exciting without actually resorting to violence and the ending is one of reconciliation and mutual understanding. It will, however, tend to bring up the issue of conflict between those who don’t accept herbal medicine and those who do. The book also includes several recipes and pretty, child-friendly illustrations.

Picking nettles with rubber gloves, doubles as both necessary weeding in our yard and harvesting the greens for dinner. 

11. Start learning about more edible or medicinal herbs one by one. Start with some you already know how to identify and can harvest near your home, herbs that you know are very safe and that can be used in cooking as well as medicine. Mint, nettles, thyme, elderberries/flowers, marshmallow, calendula and red clover are all good for the next step. It is important at this stage not to try to go too fast. Don’t try to teach kids about a whole bunch of herbs at once. It is much better to spend some time focusing on one, exploring what it looks like, where it grows and what it can be used for. Draw pictures or color coloring sheets with that herb. Pick some and discuss the differentiating features, what the stem looks like, how many petals the flowers have, how the leaves look, what the texture is, what it smells like and how it feels when you crush a leave or flower in your finger. This sensory exploration is important for correct and safe plant identification but it also connects you and your child with the plant on a deep level. It is much easier to remember the medicinal uses when you know the plant intimately, know where it likes to grow and what it looks like in the early spring, mid-summer and late fall, as well as the times in between. Take your time. In terms of overall herbalist education in the long run, it is much more important for children to know a few things well in the beginning than to memorize lists of herbs and their uses.

12. If children aren’t yet fascinated by plants, try asking them questions instead, such as „What does the shape of this leaf make you think of?“ and especially why questions like , „Why do you think this plant has this color or grows here or has white milky stuff inside?“ Correct answers aren’t the point. Exploration and interest is the point. If you get the child talking about it, like this, "Maybe the plant likes to drink milk, so it milks worms down under the ground," you've won, even though the answers will probably be wrong. Then you can continue the line of inquiry. Dig up some worms. Check them out. Do they appear to produce milk? That might be the end of it for that moment. But if the child is really interested, you could look up the plant and read about the real reason for the milky stuff.

13. Use herbs in recipes and crafts. In my posts over the next year I will include a lot of recipes for food as well as medicines such as salves that are suitable for making with children. Children are all kinesthetic learners to one degree or another. They learn from being hands-on. Take advantage of this talent. Even a seemingly non-medical activity such as making lavender pillows or dried flower arrangements will bring children closer to an understanding of herbs as medicine. Sign up for my hearth-side emails, to keep tabs on this series of posts.

14. Once your children have developed the basic concepts listed here and have deep experience of a handful of herbs, it is possible to start on a more systematic herbalist education. You can teach specific herbs and their uses, going down the list of the safe and reliable herbs I will write about this year. Another tool you can use at this phase is Wildcraft, a wonderful board game developed by the authors of the Herb Fairies books. This game not only provides a fun way to reinforce knowledge of which medicinal herbs are used to treat which types of ailments but it is extraordinarily well made and a piece of beautiful artwork. It’s a cooperative game where players race against the sun and help each other rather than trying to beat one another out and yet it manages to be very suspenseful which is a challenge with cooperative games. This game normally sells for $40, which is a lot. While it is worth that amount, I would point out that if money is tight and you aren’t in a big hurry, you can sign up for the mailing list of the company and wait a bit. My experience is that at least once a year the game goes on half price and you can pick it up then.

I hope these tips are helpful. My next post will focus on cooking with herbs and roots to help you get through the tail end of winter with a minimum of sniffles. After that spring will bring the active herbalist season and we can start with the first specific herbs to harvest and use.

P.S. Please remember that this isn't medical advice from a doctor.