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

“Whatcha doing?” she asked, with a smile. “Waiting for a team?”

“Nope. Just playing catch,” I answered, tossing the ball to Jason.

“Ah . . . killing time,” she said.

When did playing catch in a park become a form of killing time? This mother had the best of intentions, of course. Most of us do. Yet, as the pace of life, especially for children, has quickened—as we have striven to improve schools, increase productivity, accumulate wealth, and provide a more technological education—the consequences of our intentions are not always what we intend.

Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive. In an effort to value and structure time, some of us unintentionally may be killing dreamtime. In our worry about our children’s safety we may take actions that, in some ways, decrease our children’s safety. Institutions that have traditionally introduced the young to the outdoors are now adopting policies that, in some cases, actually separate children from nature. Even some environmental organizations are hastening that separation—unconsciously, with the best of intentions—and risking the future of environmentalism and the health of the earth itself.

Okay, back to the park.

My purpose in telling this anecdote is not to diminish the importance of soccer. Certainly, organized sports get kids outside, and these activities offer attributes all their own. Still, we need to find a better balance between organized activities, the pace of our children’s lives, and their experiences in nature. That mission will be difficult, but attainable.

Eighty percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, and many of these areas are severely lacking in park space. Support for existing parks atrophied in recent decades. For example, only 30 percent of Los Angeles residents live within walking distance of a park, according to the Trust for Public Land.

More to the point, parks increasingly favor what Robin Moore calls the “commercialization of play.” Moore charts a broad “international trend toward investing public funds in sports areas rather than in multi-choice space for free play.” He adds, “For-profit indoor play centers are developing around the world. Until now, they have offered a narrow range of gross motor activity.” Meanwhile, vacant lots are vanishing, and the nature of suburban development is changing. Suburban fields that might have been left open in earlier decades are being erased, replaced by denser, planned developments with manicured green areas maintained through strict covenants. “Most countries do not even have a general guideline for play space allocation,” Moore reports.

From 1981 to 1997, the amount of time children spent in organized sports increased by 27 percent. In 1974, the U.S. Youth Soccer Association had approximately 100,000 members; today, the association has nearly 3 million. Demand for playing fields is up. Expenditures on parks are falling. When parks are offered, the designers focus on reducing liability. Encouraging a variety of play styles is less of a priority. A flat patch of grass or synthetic turf (approved for several parks by the city of Seattle) may be perfect for organized sports, but not for unstructured or natural play. When a park is graded to create a playing field, children gain soccer capacity, but they lose places for self-directed play. Indeed, research suggests that children, when left to their own devices, are drawn to the rough edges of such parks, the ravines and rocky inclines, the natural vegetation. A park may be neatly trimmed and landscaped, but the natural corners and edges where children once played can be lost in translation.

Ironically, as mentioned earlier, the childhood obesity epidemic (with a complex set of causes) has coincided with a dramatic increase in children’s organized sports. This does not mean, of course, that organized sports contribute to obesity, but that an over-scheduled, over-organized childhood may. Such a childhood, without nature, is missing vital ingredients.

IT TAKES TIME—loose, unstructured dreamtime—to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, because time is consumed by multiple invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play. During my travels across the country to research Childhood’s Future, I asked a class of fifth- and sixth-graders at Jerabek Elementary in San Diego to describe their schedules. The comment of one girl was typical:

I don’t really have much time to play at all because I have piano lessons. My mom makes me practice for about an hour every day, and then I have my homework, and that’s about an hour’s worth, and then I got soccer practice, and that’s from five-thirty to seven, and then there’s no time left over to play. On weekends we usually have soccer games, and I have to practice piano and then I have to do yard work, and then I have the chores, and then I’m free to play—which is only about two hours, three hours, something like that.

I was intrigued with the way children defined play: often, their definition did not include soccer or piano lessons. Those activities were more like work.

How do young people feel when they do have extra, unscheduled time?

“I sort of feel free, like I can do anything in the world that I want to. It’s a good feeling,” one boy told me. “I know I don’t have homework, and I know I don’t have soccer practice or anything like that, and it’s just a really good feeling that you can get out and go hike or bike ride.”

In a classroom at Kenwood Elementary School in Miami, I asked if anybody worried about getting into good colleges or getting good jobs in the future. More than half of the children raised their hands. These were fourth-graders. A serious little girl, eyebrows scrunched up behind her glasses, explained, “Well, you should not stare out the window or dream. You should get your mind on your work because you can never get a college education if you don’t.” A central concern is how parents model their own use of time—their attitude about where time fits into their busy lives. In a classroom in Potomac, Maryland, ninth-grader