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

landscape architect Robin Moore studied the San Francisco Bay region in 1980, he combined his findings with a review of international research and came to “one inescapable conclusion”: Increasing residential and arterial traffic “was the one universal factor above all others that restricted the development of children’s spatial range, thereby limiting children’s knowledge of the community environment—including its natural characteristics and components.” Other researchers have pointed to deteriorating parks and the trend toward larger houses filled with electronic toys and gadgets.

My unscientific hunch, however, is that since 1980, fear of strangers—and beyond that a generalized, unfocused fear—has come to outrank the fear of traffic. For all of these reasons, many children never get to know their neighborhoods or parks or the surviving natural areas at their fringes.

Long before the terror of 9/11 magnified our generalized fear, I spent a day with the Fitzsimmons family in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They lived in a Victorian house; the porch swing in front creaked slightly in the wind. Swarthmore is an idyllic town filled with old trees and young children and wide sidewalks, where, as Beth Fitzsimmons told me later, there is one rule: Nobody can hurt trees or children. This is, in short, the last place where one would expect parents to express fear. Yet, Beth said:

When I was a little kid, there were woods at the foot of my street, and I would get up at six o’clock in the morning and go down there for two or three hours and pick blueberries by myself, and nobody ever had to worry about it. . . . Guns and drugs are the reasons that we say no to things that our kids would probably like to do. There are a lot of lunatics out there. It’s so different. Even if [my daughter] Elizabeth goes down to Crum Creek behind the college, I want her to take the dog and make sure she’s with at least one friend.

I was surprised to find the fear as intense in Kansas as it was in Pennsylvania. One father said:

I have a rule. I want to know where my kid is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I want to know where that kid is. Which house. Which square foot. Which telephone number. That’s just my way of dealing with it. Both of my kids have heard my preaching that the world is full of crazy people. And it is. There’re nuts running loose. People that need to go through years of therapy and need to be incarcerated. They’re out there driving around in cars and they’ve got guns on their seats. They’re out there. And you have to deal with that situation. I’d be hesitant to let my kids go over to the park alone. Everyone tells you to never leave your kids alone.

Also in Kansas, a pleasant middle-aged teacher spoke with sorrow about how daily life is colored by fear.

I was standing in line the other day at the airport and a little kid was going around to look behind the counter, and his mother said to him, “Do you want somebody to snatch you? Don’t walk away from me like that.” And here I’m standing behind them in line, and I’m saying to myself, well, I really didn’t look like a child snatcher. But we teach our kids so young to be aware of everything. They lose their time to be innocent. My seventh-graders have had to deal with situations that we didn’t know about until we were adults. Teaching kids intelligent caution around strangers is certainly important; how to say “no” to potential child abusers is essential. But we need to create a balanced view of danger. The damage that has been caused when you have families teaching their kids never to talk to another adult in a society where you desperately need more communication—what does that do to the kid?

In the oddest ways, many Americans’ view of the woods has reverted to ancient irrationality, conjuring dread behind the branches.

Scared Stupid

In the early 1990s, Joel Best, then a professor and chairman of the Sociology Department at California State University, Fresno, had conducted a study of stranger-danger—Halloween terrorism, in particular; all those reports of candy laced with drugs or pins, razor blades or poison. He reviewed seventy-six specific stories and rumors reported from 1958 to 1984 in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Fresno Bee. “We couldn’t find a single case of any child killed or seriously injured by candy contamination,” he said. “The Halloween sadist is an urban myth.” In 2001, Best—now a professor at the University of Delaware—updated his findings in his book Damn Lies and Statistics. “Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.” So goes a widely quoted statement, which originated in a Children’s Defense Fund report in the mid-1990s. Best calls it the most inaccurate social statistic ever circulated. “If the number doubled each year, there must have been two children gunned down in 1951, four in 1952, eight in 1953, and so on,” he writes. In 1983, the number of American children gunned down would have been 8.6 billion (about twice the Earth’s population at the time). By this doubling process, the number of American kids shot in 1987 alone would have been greater than the estimated total of the world’s population—from the time of the first humans. “Monster hype,” Best calls this.

At the time, I dubbed the phenomenon the “Bogeyman syndrome.”

At the height of the first missing-children panic, a decade ago, some missing-children organizations were claiming that four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction. Wrong, said David Finklehor, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, who conducted the National Incidents Study of Missing Children with the Justice Department in 1990, considered the most comprehensive and accurate report on this subject. By a wide margin, most of the abductors