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

it. “I structure some unstructured time for [my students], times when they can just draw or paint or read and dream, or especially to go outside, with no deadlines or commutes to lessons,” says Kafka. “I realize that sounds paradoxical—structuring unstructured time, but you’ve got to do it.”

Sympathetic employers can help. Kafka has the summers off since she works as a teacher. Other parents work at home, either with home businesses or in the traditional stay-at-home role. Today, most parents don’t have that kind of flexibility, but they need more (flexible summer workplace hours, for instance) if they’re going to guide their kids to use boredom wisely.

Parents can also help push for additional funding for community-based summer recreation programs. Summer camps are godsends to many working parents, especially single parents. A good summer program can literally mean survival for some children who live in rough neighborhoods. Some programs make room for dreamtime. “Adventure playgrounds” provide kids with a supervised (by an adult, at a distance) vacant lot filled with old tires, boards, tools—and places to build and dig. Supervised nature programs help children explore without excessive direction. And teen centers allow teenagers, rather than adults, to create the recreation. Such programs deserve extra support.

Most of all, children need adults who understand the relationship between boredom and creativity, adults willing to spend time in nature with kids, adults willing to set the stage so that kids can create their own play and enter nature through their own imaginations.

Backyard Nature and a Walk in the Woods

Ordinarily, the first physical entry point into nature is the backyard; next come adjacent natural areas, if we’re lucky enough to live near them. Yet, many parents who live next to woods, fields, canyons, and creeks say their children never play in those areas—either because of the parents’ or child’s fear of strangers, or because the kids are just not interested.

Billy Campbell, a South Carolina physician and conservationist, understands that a child’s interest in the frontiers around his own home is not usually accidental. He believes the biggest problems faced by children are not the absence of experiences in dramatically picturesque wilderness, but the lack of day-to-day contact with the elements. In addition to the usual barriers, Campbell believes that lack of interest in the outdoors may have something to do with the media’s presentation of nature, which can be wonderfully educational, but also overwhelmingly dramatic and extreme. “So kids feel they’re not getting enough action. If they don’t see a grizzly bear rip apart a caribou calf, then it is boring.”

Campbell grew up in the woods—playing army; catching minnows; collecting bird eggs, snakeskins, and bugs. He believes these experiences had a drama all their own and profoundly shaped who he became as an adult. Today, his family’s yard joins several hundred acres of woods in a rural area, but he has not assumed that his daughter, Raven, now a teenager, would find the mystery of those woods on her own. He and his wife have consciously introduced her to that more intimate drama:

We took Raven on long hikes before she could walk. We walked to the creek or pond five days a week. We invented games where she would run ahead—we would do sign language of where to go next. She still walks through the one-hundred-year-old woods several times a week to visit her cousins (about 250 yards away). We picked up treasures and brought them home. By the time she was ten, she thought nothing about a six- to ten-mile hike with two thousand feet of climbing. . . . The point is that for Raven, it is just a part of her world. She never remembers it being some once-a-year thing. She appreciates natural beauty.

One parent’s hike is another’s forced march, and the same is true for children. Parents must walk a fine line between presenting and pushing their kids to the outdoors. A trip to buy expensive camping equipment for a two-week vacation in Yosemite is not a prerequisite or, for that matter, any substitute for more languid natural pastimes that can be had in the backyard.

The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between a front yard and the road—all of these places are entire universes to a young child. Expeditions to the mountains or national parks often pale, in a child’s eyes, in comparison with the mysteries of the ravine at the end of the cul de sac. By letting our children lead us to their own special places we can rediscover the joy and wonder of nature. By exploring those places we enter our children’s world and we give these patches of nature a powerful blessing for our children. By expressing interest or even awe at the march of ants across these elfin forests, we send our children a message that will last for decades to come, perhaps even extend generation to generation. By returning to these simple yet enchanted places, we see, with our child, how the seasons move and the world turns and how critter kingdoms rise and fall.

“Your job isn’t to hit them with another Fine Educational Opportunity, but to turn them on to what a neat world we live in,” writes Deborah Churchman in the journal American Forests, published by the nation’s oldest nonprofit citizens’ conservation organization. She recommends re-creating all the dopey, fun things you did as a kid: “Take them down to the creek to skip rocks—and then show them what was hiding under those rocks. Take a walk after the rain and count worms (they’re coming up to get air, since their air holes are clogged with water). Turn on the porch light and watch the insects gather (they’re nuts about ultraviolet light—for some reason scientists haven’t yet figured out). Go to a field (with shoes on) and watch the bees diving into the flowers.” Find a ravine, woods, a windbreak row of trees, a swamp, a