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

community service club as president, take a community college course in how to work with people with disabilities, volunteer in the community, work as a child care helper at my place of worship, take six extremely advanced classes (for extra credit when I enter college), am a really good friend, and counsel my peers because I would not turn a friend or other person down.”

Over winter and spring breaks, this student continues her volunteer work, and studies to get a head start on the next semester. She prides herself on personal honesty, but cries inside when she sees other students, who cheat, do better on tests. “I am a very worryful person (is that a word?),” she wrote. “I am the type of person that thinks about things a great deal.” After a particularly stressful few weeks, she fell into a slump that scared her. What if she couldn’t get back to her schedule? What then? “I considered suicide. I didn’t really care about myself and would rather hurt myself than my parents or friends. I suffered so they would not have to know what I was going through—my weaknesses, my failures, the hatred I felt at the world.” This isn’t just a reflection of eternal teen angst, but a singular example of why there is a growing rate of adolescent suicides and attempted suicides. Could she turn to her parents for help? She felt she could not. “They pass right by who I am, looking only for what they want to see.” She says that she might not be here today if not for people like Mrs. Berman, her biology teacher, who reached out to her in time.

Instilling self-discipline is an essential value in parenting, but so is the nurturing of creativity and wonder. With greater knowledge about the measurable value of exposing children to nature, parents may have an easier time finding that balance. Certainly many parents are concerned about overprogramming their children, and hunger for a different approach. Tina Kafka, the mother of college students, wonders if her children will remember much of what she has scheduled into their lives:

When I think of my own childhood, I particularly remember those special times when I was climbing my tree, or playing pirates in the wash behind my house, or sliding down the wash sides on a piece of cardboard. But I realize now, after talking with my mother—who said she scheduled a lot of my childhood, arranging for friends to come over, all that—that the free time in the wash may not have actually occupied that many hours of my childhood. But those hours are the moments I remember absolutely vividly. Even with my own children, I am often amazed how some activity that I have carefully planned pales in their long-term memories compared to another activity that was completely spontaneous and hardly memorable to me. As adults, we can plan a million things to take up our kids’ time in a meaningful way, but what really clicks into their inner being is beyond our control. Sometimes I wonder why we think we need so much control.

10. The Bogeyman Syndrome Redux

Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew

that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of

respect for humans too.

—LUTHER STANDING BEAR (C. 1868–1939)

FEAR IS THE MOST potent force that prevents parents from allowing their children the freedom they themselves enjoyed when they were young. Fear is the emotion that separates a developing child from the full, essential benefits of nature. Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger—and of nature itself.

The boundaries of children’s lives are growing ever tighter. In a 2002 survey, 56 percent of parents in the United States said that by the time they were ten years old they were allowed to walk or bike to school, but only 36 percent of those same parents said their own kids should be allowed to do the same, according to a national survey by TNS Inter-search for American Demographics magazine. The trend is documented abroad, as well. For example, in Amsterdam, researcher Lia Karsten compared children’s use of space over several decades. She found that, in the 1950s and 1960s, “playing meant playing outside” and that children had substantial freedom to move around on their own, had a relatively large territory to roam, played with children from diverse backgrounds, and used urban public space for many of their activities. In contrast, Karsten found that children in 2005 did not play outside as much or for as long a period of time, had a more restricted range in which they could move freely, and had fewer playmates, and those were less diverse. And in Great Britain, researchers have determined that the freedom of mobility experienced by a nine-and-a-half-year-old child in 1990 was comparable to the freedom of a seven-year-old in 1971.

In terms of child development, the shrinking home range is no small issue. An indoor (or backseat) childhood does reduce some dangers to children; but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to the child’s concept and perception of community, risk to self-confidence and the ability to discern true danger—and beauty. The child psychologist Erik Erikson described the child’s need, particularly in middle childhood, to establish a self beyond adult control, and the important role of forts, hideouts, and other special places near the home. Stephen Kellert, professor of social ecology at Yale, and a leading thinker on biophilia, describes how experience in the surrounding home territory, especially in nearby nature, helps shape children’s cognitive maturation, including the developed abilities of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. “A major challenge of childhood is developing the ability to translate and interpret experience by systematically assessing objective, empirical evidence,” he writes. “Indeed, no other aspect of a child’s life offers this degree of consistent but varied chances for critical thinking and problem solving—a steady diet for the mind as well as the body.”

When the educator and