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

obstacle. For example, a single mother, Teri Konars, tells how she overcame the obstacles of time and lack of nature knowledge:

Some of my son Adam’s earliest memories are of camping. This was when we were living in student housing, and Adam was about five or six. I found an organization called Parents Without Partners, and we began to go on camping trips with them. The first trip was Adam’s favorite: the desert. He has big memories of seeing a coyote, and learning to make a needle and thread from a yucca leaf, and [seeing] the stars. Today, he’s in his twenties, and he says that experience changed him in profound ways. I had a great time too, but my car died when it was time to come home. It had been daring or foolish to take my old beater on such a trip, but knowing we’d be with other people made it okay. As a single mom, going with a group was the only way to do any camping, because of the fear of the unknown out there and the economics of gas, camping equipment, food and all the rest of the expenses, which were not easy on our budget.

Of the stories from other families I have collected over the years, one has special resonance—because of its simplicity. “My family fell into the high-achievement trap,” one woman, a PTA officer in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, told me.

Our son was overstressed. We were overstressed. This realization came to us on one of those nights when all of our voices had raised an octave and all of our eyes were opened just a little wider than normal and we all were just . . . it was just too much. We peaked out. Suddenly we realized we were giving our son the message that he had to achieve in order to be lovable. My husband and I were doing it, too: he was working long hours to be lovable and I was doing all these extracurricular activities to be lovable in the community, and it was just crazy. We were getting less lovable.

So the members of the family made a list of everything they loved to do, and everything they hated to do, and then compared lists. The son surprised them: He didn’t really like soccer, which was news to his parents. What he really loved was working in the backyard garden. That surprised his parents, too. Together, they discovered that they all loved being outside, camping, and walking, with no particular destination in mind. The parents cut their overtime work and some of their outside social engagements, and together began going on long walks through the trees, listening to the wind. They won back some time, and reestablished a connection within their family and with nature.

Of course, closing the nature divide is not as simple as making a list. Nor does the solution rest entirely with parents. Parents can work small miracles within their families, but they generally cannot close the divide by themselves. Parents need the help of schools, nature organizations, city planners—and each other.

14. Scared Smart: Facing the Bogeyman

WHEN MY SONS were younger and wished to play in the canyon behind our house, swing on the rope, or explore the seasonal creek that winds through the eucalyptus grove, I preferred they explore the canyon with friends, not alone, and that they take their cell phone. They resisted taking the phone, but they knew that submitting to my vigilance was the price of their liberty.

As they grew, I tried to compensate for what was, at times, unfounded fear. I emphasized to them the importance of their experience in nature. I took them on hikes in the Cuyamaca mountain forests or the Anza-Borrego desert, and let them run ahead while I purposefully remained just at the edge of sight and sound. I put them deliberately in nature’s way. I took my older son with me on research trips for books: we went fly-fishing for sharks off San Diego’s coast; we rode with Mexican cowboys to Baja’s Rio Santo Domingo. There, we caught and released genetically rare trout, and I watched as Jason scrambled over boulders along the lost river, almost out of earshot—but never out of sight.

The trick for me has been to offer controlled risk.

I would take Matthew, my younger son, to the Sierras; or we would glide in a skiff on the bay a few miles away, across the flats, while he watched stingrays scatter like bats; or we would head to the giant inshore kelp forest, richly populated with fish larger than men. Over the edge of the boat, peering down into vertigo-inducing columns of water and light between the waving strands of giant kelp, Matthew saw into the beating heart of Earth. I would watch him from the other end of the boat; in his absorption, he might as well have been miles away.

Perhaps trips like these made up for some of the freedom they did not have, and at least partially met their need for solitude in nature. I hope so, for I believe that nature is one of the best antidotes to fear.

WE KNOW THAT parks generally build social cohesion. The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that works to conserve land, argues that access to public parks and recreational facilities “has been strongly linked to reductions in crime and in particular to reduced juvenile delinquency.”

Park design that incorporates a more natural environment can make children safer by changing adult behavior—specifically, by encouraging adults to supervise children. Trees and grass do more than decorate the landscape. For example, in the midst of a public housing complex in inner-city Chicago, greenery enhances children’s creative play and encourages the presence of adult supervision. In 1998, the journal Environment and Behavior reported that in sixty-four outdoor spaces at a Chicago housing development, almost twice as many children (ages three through twelve) played in areas that had trees and grass than played in barren