Encouraging today's youngsters to bond with Mother Earth
By Richard Louv
UNION-TRIBUNE
May 28, 2005
* Discovering nature all around us
If, when we were young, we tramped through San Diego's chaparral canyons, or raised pigeons on a rooftop in Queens, or fished for Ozark bluegills, or felt the swell of a wave that traveled a thousand miles before lifting our boat, then we were bound to the natural world and remain so today.
Nature still informs our years – lifts us, carries us.
LAURA EMBRY / Union-Tribune
What adults might see as nothing more than garden pests, a child will study in wonder - if given the opportunity.
As a boy, I spent hours exploring the woods and farmland at the suburban edge of Kansas City. Within the windbreaks were trees that we could shinny, the smaller branches like the rungs of a ladder.
We climbed far above the fields and, from that vantage, looked out upon the old blue ridges of Missouri, and the roofs of new houses in the ever-encroaching suburbs.
Often, I climbed alone, imagining myself as Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves. If I climbed high enough, the branches thinned to the point where, when the wind came, the world would tip down and up and around and up and to the side and up. It was frightening and wonderful to surrender to the wind's power.
Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Members of my generation grew into adulthood taking nature's childhood gifts for granted; we assumed (when we thought of it at all) that generations to come also would receive these blessings. But now we know that something has changed.
Defining the problem
"Nature-deficit 'disorder' is not a medical diagnosis, but a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. Among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. This disorder damages children; it also shapes adults, families, whole communities, and the future of nature itself. Yet, exciting new studies show us the benefits – biological, cognitive and spiritual – when we give the gift of nature."
– FROM "LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: SAVING OUR CHILDREN FROM NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER" BY RICHARD LOUV
Over the past 15 years, I have interviewed families across the country about the changes in their lives, including their relationship with nature. With few exceptions, even in rural areas, parents say the same thing: Most children aren't playing outside anymore, not in the woods or the fields or the canyons. Today, kids are well aware of the global threats to the environment, but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature on a day-to-day basis, is fading.
A fifth-grader in a San Diego classroom put it succinctly: "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."
I believe our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That unintended message is delivered by schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities – effectively banning much of the kind of play that we enjoyed as children. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom, while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Well-meaning public-school systems, media and parents are scaring children straight out of the woods and fields.
Many parents are aware of the change, and they sense its importance. When asked, they cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework and other time pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger, as round-the-clock news coverage conditions them to believe in an epidemic of child-snatchings, despite evidence that the number has been falling for years.
SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune
Alma Tidwell and son Diego, 4, explored Mission Trails Regional Park recently with husband John and their older son, Lucas, 6 (not pictured).
As a result, children's worlds, limitless in cyberspace, areshrinking in reality. A 1991 study of three generations of 9-year-olds foundthat between 1970 and 1990, the radius around the home where children wereallowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in1970. This year, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds,"conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, revealed that kids' averageweekly electronic media exposure is almost 60 hours, more time than most ofparents spend on full-time jobs. And the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives ofFamilies reports that during the week, parents and children are in constantmotion, racing between school, games, shopping, work – and American kidsspend virtually no time in their own yards. Such lives leave little time forunstructured activities in nature.
As the nature deficit grows, new studies demonstrate just how important direct contact with the outdoors is to healthy human development. Some of the most intriguing research has been inspired by Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson's "biophilia" hypothesis. Wilson defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." He and his colleagues argue that humans have an innate affinity for the natural world, probably a biologically based need integral to our development as individuals.
In short, we need experience in nature more than we know.
Most of the new evidence that connects nature to well-being and restoration has focused on adults but, during the past decade, scientists have begun to study the impact of nearby nature on child development. Environmental psychologists reported in 2003 that nature in or around the home, or simply a room with a view of a natural landscape, helped protect the psychological well-being of the children.
Researchers have found that children with disabilities gain enhanced body image and positive behavior changes through direct interaction with nature. Studies of outdoor-education programs geared toward troubled youth – especially those diagnosed with mental-health problems – show a clear therapeutic value. Some of the most intriguing studies are being done by the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois, where researchers have discovered that children as young as 5 showed a significant reduction in the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder when they engaged with nature. Could nature therapy be a new option for ADD treatment?
Meanwhile, the California-based State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort to study environment-based education, found that schools that use outdoor classrooms, among other techniques, produce student gains in social studies, science, language arts and math; improved standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and enhanced skills in problem-solving, critical thinking and decision-making. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that time in natural surroundings also stimulates children's creativity.
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People who care about children and the future of the environment need to know about such research, but for the most part, they do not. Today, we see dramatic increases in childhood obesity, attention difficulties and depression. When these issues are discussed at the conference table or the kitchen table, direct childhood experience in nature is seldom mentioned. Yet, the growing nature deficit experienced by today's children, and potentially for generations to come, may be the most important common denominator.
I am not suggesting that we bring back the free-range childhood of the 1950s. Those days are over. But, with a deeper understanding of the importance of nature play to healthy child development, and to their sense of connection to the world, we can create safe zones for nature exploration. We can preserve the open space in our cities, and even design and build new kinds of communities, using the principles of green urbanism. We can weave nature experiences into our classrooms, and nature therapy into our health-care system.
And we can challenge environmental organizations to take this issue seriously. For if the disconnection between children and nature continues, who will become the future stewards of the earth – and who will swing on birches?
Adapted from "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" by Richard Louv.
© 2005 Richard Louv. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
