When families live in shelters, family life can be strained. Living spaces are small, rooms can be noisy and crowded, and there are only few places for children to play. In previous research, parents have expressed that this frustrated their family functioning. That is a problem, because a shelter should function as a safe base from which the family can rebuild its independent life. If the shelter adds stress, it cannot function as intended. To contribute towards the reduction of this problem, nature is introduced at shelter locations, for example by creating gardens. Various studies have already shown that nature can reduce stress and offers an interesting play environment. However, it is important to establish what nature can do for family functioning of families in shelters. We firstly explored professionals’ perspective on the benefits of nature for family life in women’s shelters. Thematic analysis of transcripts of Community of Practice meetings showed five themes. According to professionals, nature (1)offers a place for family leisure time, (2)supports social connectedness, (3)supports psychological well-being, (4)offers metaphoric experiences, and (5)supports parenting. The first four themes are in line with extant literature. Professionals’ explanation of the fifth theme suggests that nature supports parenting by providing relatedness between parent and child, parental feelings of competence, and autonomy in parenting. Relatedness, competence, and autonomy are described as basic psychological needs of parents. We know that all parents experience ups-and-downs in their basic psychological needs, but we do not yet know of circumstances that support need crafting. We designed a quasi-experiment and a single case experiment to test if experiencing nature was associated with parents’ basic psychological needs. A quasi-experiment (N=160) with one measurement in the standard indoor context of the shelter and one measurement while experiencing nature showed that experiencing nature was associated with enhanced ...