Rachelle Beckner is a thirty-something mother of two beautiful, rambunctious girls, ages 3 and 21 months. She lives, works and plays in Charleston, WV, the capital city of the Mountain State, with her husband of four years. Her online presence also extends to two blogs — the most recent of which is Mountain State Motherhood. Read more about Rachelle on our Contributors page.

It’s funny how you can pick up parenting tips and advice in the strangest of place. The best parenting advice I received in my three years as a parent, I learned while I attending a national fundraising conference earlier this year. From Jane Goodall of all people! And the advice that Jane offered wasn’t from the perspective of being a parent, but rather from a child’s perspective.

As a parent, you often suffer from a misguided form of perverse altruism: unsolicited parenting advice. “You know what you do to get a baby to go to sleep when she’s teething, rub a little whiskey on her gums.” Um, yeah, because what I want is an alcoholic 6-year-old. When I was pregnant with our first daughter, Belle, we received all kinds of unsolicited parenting advice. And I’d just nod my head and say uh-huh. When our second daughter, Lilly, came along and we were struggling with a newborn and a 16-month-old we sought out a lot of advice — especially from parents with two children. It’s then that many folks who were so willing to offer advice the first go-around clammed up.

See, Jane’s mother encouraged her interests in the outside world, in bugs and animals — which helped shape her future. Jane shared stories about her childhood with us at this national conference. One story in particular brought tears to my eyes as I thought about our oldest daughter, Belle, and how I should be shaping her future.

As a young girl, poor and living in the English countryside, Jane enjoyed the outdoors. One evening, she brought four earthworms with her to bed. Did her mother go scream and shout, “What are you doing? Look at the mess you’ve made,” when she discovered Slimey and his friends had come inside for a sleepover? No! She didn’t angrily strip the bed, throw the sheets in the wash and threaten to bath Jane again. No, Jane’s mother simply explained to her curious daughter that if she kept the earthworms with her in bed they would die because they needed the soil to live. So Jane went back outside to deposit her friends back into the garden.

Jump ahead a couple of decades, Jane’s mother encouraged her to save her money to make her first trip to Africa to study the chimpanzees and when the British government said they wouldn’t let Jane sit out in the jungle to study chimps without an escort her mother gladly volunteered to join her for four months in the African jungle.

Now I’m not jumping at the chance to sit in the woods with Belle to study deer poopies (as she fondly refers to them) but I realized one important lesson that day. Rather than squashing my daughter’s natural curiosities (she loves bugs and animals), I should encourage them. I could refrain from jumping off the deep end when she wants to jump into a mud puddle or collect caterpillars in her jacket pocket. I could, instead, jump in that puddle with her and help her identify which type of caterpillar she has found.Who knows? Maybe one day, she will become a Jane Goodall.

To learn more about Dr. Goodall’s work today, visit Roots & Shoots