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

Courtney Ivins clearly expressed this effect. As people grow older, nature’s magnificence “gets easier to overlook,” she surmises. “Snow not only brings a chance to miss school, but it also provides a means for adventure. . . . snowmen, igloos, and snowball fights.” But for many adults, she observes, “snow is just another one of life’s many hassles. The roads are slippery, traffic is increased, and sidewalks are ready to be shoveled.”

So where has all the time gone, or shifted to? In recent years, several studies have offered a fairly clear snapshot of time use. Researchers at the University of Maryland found that, between 1981 and 2003, children during the typical week lost over nine hours of discretionary time (that is hours not spent in school, child care, and so forth). They spent less time in unstructured indoor and outdoor play; computer use doubled. Time-analysis studies done at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that from 1981 to 1997, the amount of time American children up to age twelve spent studying increased by 20 percent. As with the growth of organized sports, the increase in homework and study time is not necessarily a bad trend—except that, so often, mounting pressure eclipses unstructured time and natural play.

Television remains the most effective thief of time. Studies conducted in association with the Kaiser Family Foundation, released in 2005 and 2006, found that nearly one-third of children from six months to six years of age lived in households where the TV was on all or most of the time. Children between the ages of eight and eighteen years old spent an average of nearly 6.5 hours a day plugged in electronically—that’s forty-five hours a week, more time than once was considered an adult work week. The study also found that about a quarter of the time, young people were using more than one medium simultaneously, leading the researchers to dub today’s young as Generation M—for multitasking.

As for parents, as Internet use grows, adults spend more time working for their employers at home, without cutting back their hours in the office. As sprawl pushes the urban envelope, Americans spend more time on the road; the proportion of workers who commuted for thirty minutes or more a day jumped 14 percent just between 1990 and 2000. Typical Americans spend 101 minutes in their car daily, five times the amount of time they spend exercising. They also take fewer vacation days and work harder than the Japanese or Europeans. (In Germany, France, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, and in several eastern European nations, hours on the job decreased between 2000 and 2005. As of this writing, France has legislated a thirty-five-hour-maximum workweek.) Weekends are no longer for recreation, but for the undone chores that pile up during the week. And in a landmark Canadian survey, researchers found that both parents cut back on sleep to handle all their responsibilities. No time to sleep. No time for snow.

Or so it seems.

Nature Time Is Not Leisure Time

Our seeming inability to control the remote control is certainly one cause, a major one, for our perceived time poverty. But other factors are also at work, among them: employers who attempt to squeeze the last drop of employees’ energy, limited recreation facilities, and dangerous parks in lower-income neighborhoods. As Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, reported in 2007, more families have a single head of household or two working parents; college admissions pressures begin earlier; the belief has increased that good parents equip their children with every possible skill and aptitude. “Even parents who wish to take a lower-key approach to child rearing fear slowing down when they perceive everyone else is on the fast track,” according to Kenneth R. Ginsburg, who authored the report.

These forces are difficult to resist, especially when a family’s economic security seems chronically at risk. Bottom line: We want to do what’s best for our children. If working more helps us do that, so be it. If enrolling Suzie in Suzuki violin lessons develops her musical capabilities and self-discipline, so be it.

This understandable impulse is one reason why the emerging evidence of nature’s necessity to children’s healthy development is so important. We can now look at it this way: Time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health (and also, by the way, in our own). American parents have become too accustomed to the media mantra that dismisses us as selfish strivers who care more about our Lexuses than our children. But, if anything, most parents have an acutely tuned sense of responsibility—to the point where they consider relaxation and leisure, for themselves or their children, a self-indulgent luxury. By taking nature experience out of the leisure column and placing it in the health column, we are more likely to take our children on that hike—more likely to, well, have fun. Such a change in outlook is crucial. The stakes are high, and the consequences more evident when children reach their teen years. Tonia Berman, a high school biology teacher in my city, describes the usual roster of teen problems. She sees kids who don’t get enough to eat at home, who brave neighborhood violence after school, and increasingly she witnesses another kind of suffering: what she calls the Superchild syndrome. “We’ve heard all about the Super-mom,” she says, “the woman who tries to do everything perfectly, who pursues a high-pressure career, agonizes over the family’s dinner menu, drills her kids with flash cards, rushes to charity events . . . and so on.” Indeed, parenting magazines are full of cautionary tales about how Super-moms (and Superdads, too) can crash and burn. “But what about the kids who are running on the same treadmill, sometimes even faster?”

When Berman asked her students to write essays about their time pressure, one teenager itemized her schedule, as well as her response to it. Here, she said, is a partial list: “I play tennis during tennis season, lead a