Taking a kid on their first hunt.

Get the paperwork out of the way early

Illinois sets the rules on youth deer hunting and hunter education, and they are not something an outfitter can wave away. Check requirements for your child's age with the Illinois DNR, get hunter education booked if it is needed, and apply for their permit on the same schedule as your own. The nonresident deadlines are on our permit guide.

One child hunts free with every paid adult here, which covers the guided hunt, the lodging and the meals. It does not cover their permit, because that is the state's and not ours. Details on the kids hunt free page.

Pick the season for them, not for you

The rut is the best hunting and it is often the worst first trip. Long sits, cold weather and a lot of sitting still is a hard introduction. Two better options:

• Early archery in October, when it is warm, the sits are short and there is plenty to look at.
• Spring turkey, which is genuinely the best first hunt there is. You are done by mid morning, there is calling and movement and noise, and the whole rest of the day is free. Ours is a five day hunt at $1,500.

Shorten everything

An adult can sit six hours. A ten year old cannot, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a kid who says they do not like hunting. Plan three hour sits. Take snacks up. Let them fidget a bit. Come down while they still want to be there rather than after they have stopped.

Let them be part of it, not cargo

Give them a job. Carrying the calls, running the rangefinder, keeping the log of what they see. A kid with a role is engaged; a kid told to sit still and be quiet for four hours is being punished.

Take the pressure off the shot completely

Say out loud, before you go, that they do not have to shoot anything. Then mean it. The worst outcome of a first hunt is not an unfilled tag, it is a child who took a bad shot because they thought they were supposed to, and now associates hunting with having let somebody down.

If they do shoot, slow everything down. Talk through the shot before it happens, where to aim, when to draw or mount, and what to do afterwards. Then let them tell the story at dinner as many times as they want.

What we do differently on a youth hunt

Guides here shorten sits without being asked, build in food, and shift their focus from the deer to whether the kid is warm and enjoying it. Blinds get used more than stands, because a blind is warmer, hides movement and lets a parent and child sit together and talk quietly. There is an outdoor pool and an archery range at the lodge, and in April both of those matter more than anything that happens in the timber.

The honest reason we do this

Hunting has a recruitment problem. The average age of a licence holder keeps climbing, and outfitters pricing families out of the sport is part of how that happened. A guided Illinois hunt is an expensive thing; doubling that cost to bring a twelve year old is how a twelve year old ends up not going. So the policy has no asterisk on the hunt price and it applies to every hunt on our board.