Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

eleven spend about thirty hours a week looking at a TV or computer monitor. Medical researchers in Seattle found that by three months, about 40 percent of children regularly watched TV, DVDs, or other videos. The second factor: More exercise would help.

But what kind of exercise, and where? Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children’s sports in history. Experts on child obesity now concede that current approaches don’t seem to be working. What are kids missing that organized sports, including soccer and Little League, cannot provide?

Oddly, the word “nature” has seldom shown up in the literature of child obesity, though that may be changing. Generalized, hour-to-hour physical activity is the absent ingredient in this discussion. The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development. Research findings on outdoor play often mingle types of activities, such as bicycle riding in the neighborhood, with findings more specific to the nature experience. Additional rigorous, controlled studies are needed to sort out correlation, cause and effect. However, when recent studies are considered together, they do lead to strong hypotheses.

“Play in natural settings seems to offer special benefits. For one, children are more physically active when they are outside—a boon at a time of sedentary lifestyles and epidemic overweight,” according to Howard Frumkin, M.D., now director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health.

Recent studies describe tantalizing evidence that links time spent outdoors to other health benefits, beyond weight control, that may be specific to the actual experience of nature. In Norway and Sweden, studies of preschool children show specific gains from playing in natural settings. The studies compared preschool children who played every day on typically flat playgrounds to children who played for the same amount of time among the trees, rocks, and uneven ground of natural play areas. Over a year’s time, the children who played in natural areas tested better for motor fitness, especially in balance and agility.

Adults, too, seem to benefit from “recess” in natural settings. Researchers in England and Sweden have found that joggers who exercise in a natural green setting with trees, foliage, and landscape views feel more restored, and less anxious, angry, and depressed than people who burn the same amount of calories in gyms or other built settings. Research is continuing into what is called “green exercise.” These studies are focused mainly on adults.

But what about children’s emotional health? Although heart disease and other negative effects of their physical inactivity usually take decades to develop, another result of the sedentary life is more readily documented: kids get depressed.

Biophilia and Emotional Health

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child’s life. You’ll likely never see a slick commercial for nature therapy, as you do for the latest antidepressant pharmaceuticals. But parents, educators, and health workers need to know what a useful antidote to emotional and physical stress nature can be. Especially now.

A 2003 survey, published in the journal Psychiatric Services, found the rate at which American children are prescribed antidepressants almost doubled in five years; the steepest increase—66 percent—was among preschool children. “A number of factors acting together or independently may have led to escalated use of antidepressants among children and adolescents,” said Tom Delate, director of research at Express Scripts, the pharmacy benefits group that conducted the survey. “These factors include increasing rates of depression in successive age groups, a growing awareness of and screening for depression by pediatricians and assumptions that the effectiveness experienced by adults using antidepressant medications will translate to children and adolescents.” The growth in such prescriptions written for children occurred even though antidepressants were never approved for children younger than eighteen—with the exception of Prozac, which was approved as a treatment for children in 2001, after the rise in juvenile prescriptions began. The findings were announced a month after the Food and Drug Administration asked pharmaceutical companies to add explicit product labeling warnings about alleged links between antidepressants and suicidal behavior and thoughts, especially among children. In 2004, data analysis by Medco Health Solutions, the nation’s largest prescription benefit manager, found that between 2000 and 2003 there was a 49 percent increase in the use of psychotropic drugs—antipsychotics, benzodiazepines, and antidepressants. For the first time, spending on such drugs, if medications for attention disorders are included, surpassed spending on antibiotics and asthma medications for children.

Although countless children who suffer from mental illness and attention disorders do benefit from medication, the use of nature as an alternative, additional, or preventive therapy is being overlooked. In fact, new evidence suggests that the need for such medications is intensified by children’s disconnection from nature. Although exposure to nature may have no impact on the most severe depressions, we do know that nature experiences can relieve some of the everyday pressures that may lead to childhood depression. I’ve mentioned the Ulrich study and a few others that focused on adults; in The Human Relationship with Nature, Peter Kahn points to the findings of over one hundred studies that confirm that one of the main benefits of spending time in nature is stress reduction.

Cornell University environmental psychologists reported in 2003 that a room with a view of nature can help protect children against stress, and that nature in or around the home appears to be a significant factor in protecting the psychological well-being of children in rural areas. “Our study finds that life’s stressful events appear not to cause as much psychological distress in children who live in high-nature conditions compared with children who live in low-nature conditions,” according to Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis