Having Fun Making Herbal Remedies With Your Kids

Have you ever felt the  joy of crafting herbal remedies with your kids?  Well, if not, this episode is sure to inspire you with fun, creative ways to help your kids fall in love with herbal medicine, and nature all in one! There’s so much fun, and wisdom to be had from these simple herbal activities, and I can’t wait for you to try them!

If you’re ready to take the next steps and learn about how to make your herbal remedies so you know they’re going to work, and taste so good your kids will BEG you for more, join me for a free class right here https://www.theherbalistspath.com/herbal-remedies-that-work 

00:40 The Benefits of Teaching Kids Herbalism
04:34 Herbal Tea Blending with Kids
06:35 Making Bath Bombs with Kids
09:57 Herbal Popsicles and Gummies
13:11 Creative Herbal Activities
14:46 Safety and Kid-Friendly Herbs

And, if it’s time for you to master your herbal remedy making skills, join us inside Medicine Making Mommas for more herbal insights and connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share with friends!

If you've been trying to figure out the best remedies to have stocked in your natural medicine cabinet, you are in luck! I've got a free guide for you where I'm sharing the best remedies to have for all the things from colds and flu, to tummy aches, sleeplessness, and daily well-being. You can get it right here!

If you're done struggling to keep your kids healthy as cold and flu season comes about, then you are going to LOVE Oregon's Wild Harvest and their Kids Echinacea with Raspberry flavoring. I know my daughter LOVES it, in fact she asks me for it all of the time, even if she's not sick!
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Chapters

• 1:44 Teaching Kids Herbal Remedies
• 16:33 Exploring Herbal Remedies With Kids
• 20:44 Promoting Herbalism for All

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:45

Hello and welcome to the Herbalist Path, a podcast where you'll discover how to make your own herbal remedies at home so that you can take better care of yourself, better care of your family and better care of our planet. I'm Mel. I'm a clinical herbalist, environmental educator and mountain-l living mama with this crazy passion for teaching more mamas and their little loves how to use plants as medicine in a safe, effective and tasty way, so that there can be an herbalist in every home again. It's an absolute honor to have you on the journey down the herbalist path with me so that together we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers. Hello, hello, hello and welcome back for another episode on the herbalist path. I am super excited that you are here today, because today's topic is all about having fun, particularly having fun making herbal remedies with your kids. I am a huge, huge, huge believer that the more fun you have with learning, the better off life is and the more these lessons stick right, and I'm also a huge believer that there needs to be an herbalist in every home again. So if you've been following me for a while or tuning into this podcast, you know that I really have this passion for teaching moms how to use herbal remedies. And my true hope with that is that those moms and those grandmas pass this information down to their children so that we can continue to make herbalism spread like wildflowers. Right Like these. Kiddos really need to learn this stuff and honestly, I have that again piece in there, because it used to be that the grandmothers and mothers would share this essential knowledge, these essential life skills, with everybody in the family. That's how everybody was healed before Western medicine came around and it was really, really beautiful. And I think that today we really have an opportunity to make it so much fun. And honestly, there's endless benefits to teaching your kids about herbal medicine, to getting them involved in making it with you. I mean, think about it this way.

Speaker 1: 4:23

One of my students, sarah, brought this up. She was like well, you know, what's great about kids making their own herbal medicine is it's a lot like when they're cooking their own food. It may taste like absolute poop, but because they cooked it, they feel pride and they feel excited and they're more willing to try something right, like that's super fun. And the same thing can go with the herbal medicine Plus, as you're doing it, they're learning about plants, they're making that connection to nature. They're understanding that plants are actually here to heal us and maybe that whole beautiful connection evolves into them having a deeper, passionate love and care for our precious planet, because we need more people to care for this planet. If you haven't noticed, things are dramatically shifting and a lot of that is due to us as humans not giving love and passionate care to our planet.

Speaker 1: 5:28

So you know, a huge part of my mission also in this world of herbalism and how I got drawn into it is because I wanted to save the planet. No big feat there, you know no big deal, but it's true. That's totally why I got into it. I recognized the many different ways that herbalism is better for the planet. So teaching our kids, nice and young, about these kinds of skills is super beneficial for everybody. For you as the mother or the grandmother or the father or the auntie or whoever you may be, this is beneficial. You're also going to just have more bonding time with them, like exploring the plants, touching them, tasting them, feeling them, recognizing how they impact your body or their body, and doing those things together is just so powerful, so impactful, so powerful, so impactful, so beneficial for everybody. And again, it's fun, like you're doing a crafty, creative activity. There's all kinds of synapses firing and thought processes happening. It's really beautiful and it's helping them become much more self-sufficient. They're recognizing that medicine doesn't have to just come from the drugstore, but that we can even walk outside into our garden and gather actual medicine. That is so incredibly beautiful, so incredibly empowering Excuse me, I got all funny with my voice there but super empowering and, again, fun. It is so much fun to do this stuff.

Speaker 1: 7:09

So one of my favorite things to do with kids is to teach them how to blend herbal teas. So one of the things we definitely do inside of Medicine Making Mama is have like an herbal tea blending station. I've done this a few times live and in person where I've taught like outdoor schools and other early education places. I've taught in a few times live and in person where I've taught like outdoor schools and other early education places. I've taught in a few churches and all kinds of things. But I'll set up like an herbal tea blending station and I'll have like base note tea herbs and middle note herbs and the bottom note.

Speaker 1: 7:44

I don't know if that's the proper word, that's not really how I want to call it, but you know what I'm saying. I'll have herbs in all of those different categories and then I'll talk about their medicinal benefits and I really encourage the kids to like get in there, touch it, taste it, smell it, feel it, think about is this something? When I look at the health benefits, is that something that I need? And, of course, if you're dealing with your three-year-old, they're not really going to care about the health benefits unless it's maybe like a tummy ache or something like that, and they're like, oh well, yeah, if this plant can help me with a tummy ache, fabulous, right. So really, for them, it's all about looking at how beautiful these plants are, how much they smell good and how well they taste, and encourage them to choose how much of each herb in all of those middle and top notes and bottom notes, if that's what we're going to call them. All of those herbs, like which ones do we want to put the most of in and just really get creative and then brew up that cup of tea and have a little tea party, a little tea ceremony with them and celebrate that they created this, they created medicine that is super yummy and tasty and going to make that tummy feel a whole lot less crummy yeah, I do rhyme entirely too much, yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:13

So another super fun one to do with kiddos is just making bath bombs. Like, kids are always taking baths, hopefully. Or maybe, like my kid, I had to force her quite a few times, but you, oh darn it. Or with, like my kid, I had to, you know, convince her quite a few times to take her bath. Sometimes it was more of a struggle than necessary. But one thing that would always get her to take her bath is if I had some kind of fun bath bomb or bath bubbles or anything along those lines. If I had that, then she was all about it and it was easy right. And this is another really, really fun thing that you can make with your kids. They make it and then they experience the fun and the joy of having that bath with those herbs and the fuzzy, fizzy stuff and all that jazz. It makes them really, really excited. So one like I like to do bath bombs.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Here's a super simple recipe to do it. You do a cup of baking soda, a cup of citric acid, half a cup of cornstarch and do about a third to a half a cup of calendula infused coconut oil. So coconut oil does harden. You're going to want to melt that down gently, but not so hot that you actually cook the coconut oil, and you just definitely want to make sure that you infused your calendula oil really well. So it should be a nice deep orange to yellow depending on what color of calendula petals you used. So I'll add all of that together.

Speaker 1: 10:52

I'll put about a tablespoon of lavender, maybe a tablespoon or two of some beautiful calendula petals you don't really want the calyx because that's going to be big and awkward, but the petals just to add color and pizzazz to the whole blend and then a teaspoon of vitamin E and then about 10 to 12 drops of a really high quality lavangela and gustafolia essential oil. And then have your kiddos mix those ingredients all together until it kind of becomes a crumbly dough, and then they can shape it into the bath bombs or set it into a bath bomb mold. This part is really fun for them because they get pretty messy, and what kiddo doesn't love to get messy. So yeah, once it's in the mold and all packed tight together, you can just let them set overnight and then the next day you can let them out of the mold and let them air dry for another day and then all you have to do is drop it into the bath and they're going to be so happy and so delighted. And maybe talk to them about how the calendula is moisturizing for their skin or might help if they have some type of rash or bug bites. Same with the lavender. Talk to them about how lavender makes them feel calm and peaceful and how it's really really nice to have, at the end of the night, when it's time to go to bed that evening, bath time and just share those things with them, as of course, they're smelling and looking at the herbs when you're blending it all together. I forgot to mention that part, but maybe I mentioned it in the tea part, so thinking about that is super duper fun. Tea part so thinking about that is super duper fun.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Another thing I love, love, love, love, love to do with kids is make herbal popsicles. So when my daughter was younger, I was the mom who herbed all of the kids at the birthday party and I would do it with popsicles. So instead of like super sugar laden cupcakes and cakes and whatever that's, at most birthday parties I showed up with delicious popsicles and a super easy recipe for you to do is to take like lemon balm and chamomile, and brew that into a strong tea. Maybe wait to add the chamomile, because it can get really bitter really fast, but it doesn't really matter, because you're just going to turn that into your blender. Pour it into your blender with some strawberries and some spinach or some other type of green kale, whatever you've got on hand. Dandelion greens would be amazing, because you could teach your kids again that these weeds in the yard are really incredible medicine and super duper nourishing for their bodies, right? So then you blend it all together and you put it in popsicle molds and you suddenly have the happiest kids who are just like on this super mellow, chill phase you can. Oh, if that's not like sweet enough, you can always add in like a good quality maple syrup or some honey or something along those lines to help it be even yummier. This recipe is also going to be great for those kiddos that are dealing with tummy aches or well, with colicky babies. You'd have a hard time giving that to them, so, and with honey, we don't want to give that to the infants, so thinking about that is really important too.

Speaker 1: 14:17

What else can we do? You can make herbal gummies. You can do so many fun things. You can just start bringing in the culinary herbs that you're cooking with and soups and teaching your children that these are also medicine, that they really taste good. It's really going to get them to experiment and explore with all these magnificent herbs and have an absolute blast doing it right, because learning is all about fun, and learning about herbalism is all about fun and being better for ourselves and better for our families and better for our community and better for our planet. And so when you learn this stuff and you teach your children to learn it with you, you are making a huge difference in future generations of humanity. Like that is beautiful. It is so much fun and so exciting, so I'm getting really giddy right now, but I want to say congratulations and kudos to you for doing that. Like there are so many fun ways that you can do this and eventually your kids at the age of four will be like okay, mom, today we're going to have chamomile and I want to have some hibiscus and oh, look, there's the dandelion leaves, I want to put that in our tea, and so on and so forth, and it just becomes so amazing. They get to create on their own. They're being mixologists and artists right there with plant medicine. It's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And of course, I mean you can also do tons of different arts and craft things with your kiddos, where you know they get to see how beautiful the plants are, like just doing the simple crayon rubbings and maybe you know if they're creative with words, coming up with fun poems about it, or if they like to paint, maybe painting a picture of an herb. But that's not all about making the remedies. But there's still medicine in that right, because you're still spending time with the plants. You're still spending time with your kids and having that bonding experience and really, really enjoying learning and creating and playing with beautiful natural things all around you.

Speaker 1: 16:33

One of my dear friends in the online space her name's Rebecca Desno. She actually spoke at the Holistically Healthy Family Summit. I did way back in February of 2024. But she is amazing. She teaches classes on dyeing clothes with foraged plants, and so you could definitely get into that kind of stuff. If you want to, you should check her out. Just look up Rebecca R-E-B-E-C-C-A. Desnos D-E-S-N-O-S B-E-C-C-A Desnos D-E-S-N-O-S. She's on Instagram with a beautiful, beautiful, inspiring to me page. I definitely don't have the time and patience to make my page as beautiful as she does, but maybe one day, maybe one day, I will grow into that, but it's not on the list yet, yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:22

So, anyways, as you are playing with your kids and experimenting with all of these flavors and all of these scents, you know of course you do want to be safe with the herbs. You do want to make sure that they are 100% positive in the plant identification they're choosing. If it's out in the wild, make sure that they're doing more age appropriate tasks. You know, if it's a three-year-old, you probably don't want them simmering the fruit juice to make some gummies on the on the stove, of course. But they can measure things and they can taste herbs and tell you what they like or smell them and listen to you talk about their medicinal properties and how it can help them.

Speaker 1: 18:00

And definitely I would recommend choosing more-friendly herbs. So some of my favorites I've mentioned it a few times, but chamomile, for sure. Lemon balm is really nice, catnip's really nice too, but not as fragrant and lovely as lemon balm. Peppermint, fennel, dandelion, right, all of these can be really wonderful and easy to introduce your kiddos to. So I hope that you are feeling somewhat inspired to play with herbs more and make this process fun, to get your kiddos involved in it and recognize that, like, hey, you may just be learning some of this herbalism stuff, or maybe you've been doing it forever, but what's really important is that you're sharing this knowledge and this wisdom with your children so they, too, can fall in love with plant magic right and plant science, because it's fun to dance the two together and it's really important to dance the two together.

Speaker 1: 19:01

So if you're looking for more help or guidance into how to make herbal remedies and how to make sure that you're getting all the ratios and all those things right, you may not achieve that with your kiddos, but if you're looking to do that on a deeper level and maybe make medicine for people in your family or in your community, I do invite you to join us inside of Medicine Making Mamas. I would love to break down the science and break down the folksy ways to make medicine with you. It's super easy to join us and connect with the community inside of there. And, yeah, go play with medicine, go get your kids involved, listen to them, let them teach you. Don't forget that part. Let the plants teach you and let those beautiful kiddos teach you. So that's really it.

Speaker 1: 19:55

I just wanted to come in and share some love and excitement for the fun of herbal medicine making and, again, I hope it inspires you. If it does, please reach out and let me know. Send me a message on Instagram at the herbalist path, email me budding herbalist at the herbalist path or wherever you get emails from me, and just let me know, because right now, honestly, I love talking to you, but I'm talking to a microphone and I love knowing that I'm talking to actual humans and you hear me. So thank you, thank you, thank you for hearing me and being here this long. I hope you have an absolutely amazing August. Take care.

Speaker 1: 20:45

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Herbalist Path. Being on this journey with you is absolutely incredible. If you dig this episode, please leave me a review on your favorite podcast player and share it with your friends so that together we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers. On another note, I must mention that, while I know you're getting some good info here, it's important to remember that this podcast is purely for entertainment and educational purposes and is not intended to be a substitute for medical treatment. While the information in this podcast is absolutely relevant. Herbs work differently for each person and each condition. That's why I recommend you work with a qualified practitioner, whether that be another herbalist, a naturopath or your doctor. So thank you again. I am truly honored that you're tuning into these episodes and on the path with me to make sure that there's an herbalist in every home. Again, the path with me to make sure that there's an herbalist in every home. Again, don't forget to share this episode with your friends so that we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers.