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

So there is one key to facing the bogeyman, not necessarily related to nature. The time we give our children builds their self-esteem and self-confidence, and this gives them armor they can take with them the rest of their lives. The most important protection we can give them is our love and our time. If curing the bogeyman syndrome were as simple as a five-step program (beyond the usual law-enforcement bromides), the cure might look something like this:

• Spend more time with your children; educate them about the human dangers, but in the context of building self-confidence, sensory awareness, and knowledge of the many people they can trust.

• Increase the amount of positive adult contact that your children receive from good adults.

• Know your neighbors: reinvest in the life of the block and the surrounding community; encourage your children to know trustworthy adults in their neighborhoods.

• If your child is going beyond your visual contact, encourage him or her to play with a group of peers rather than alone. (Unfortunately, solitary experience in nature must sometimes be discouraged, if the alternative is no nature at all.)

• Employ technology. Tracking bracelets may be overdoing it, but a cell phone can be a life preserver. Just as children once carried Swiss army knives into the woods, today they should carry mobile phones.

As a parent, I must admit, even the act of making such a list feels inadequate and unsatisfying. On the one hand, I resist the idea that solitude is a luxury; on the other, I must be honest about the fact that my own fear is one of the reasons that my boys have not enjoyed as much physical freedom as I did when I was young. Still, I know it’s time to put fear in its place: to acknowledge that what happens to any of us is beyond our absolute control, and that 98 percent of what can go wrong never does. The 2 percent factor is no small thing. Nature, however, is part of the solution. Let me offer here an unconventional thesis, a sixth step: To increase your child’s safety, encourage more time outdoors, in nature. Natural play strengthens children’s self-confidence and arouses their senses—their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.

Although we have plenty of reasons to worry about our children, a case can be made that we endanger our children by separating them too much from nature, and that the reverse is also true—that we make them safer, now and in the future, by exposing them to nature.

Assessing Ice; Discovering Beauty

Ideally, a child learns to negotiate both city and country. Mastering each environment builds the senses and common sense. Is there something special about the experience in nature, at least a quality that sharpens a young person’s senses? Wonderful possibilities await researchers wanting to explore that unknown frontier. Surely the width and depth of nature, the added mystery—the catalogue of sounds and smells and sights—is larger than the relatively short and known list of urban stimulations. In the city or suburb, much of our energy is spent blocking sounds and stimulants. Do we actually hear the honking of cabs—do we want to? In a forest, our ears are open—the honking of geese overhead enlivens us, and when enlivened, human senses grow and develop.

Some parents see another connection—between positive nature-risk and openness to beauty. In New Hampshire, David Sobel consciously uses nature to teach his daughter safety. He calls it “assessing ice”:

This experience is a rite of passage. I am trying to teach her the process of assessing thin ice, literally and metaphorically. We go out on the ice together and assess the structural integrity of the ice: what’s risky and fun, and what’s too risky. Through these experiences, I help her begin to be able to assess situations. Whether this began consciously or intentionally on my part, that’s the effect. Crossing the ice, I teach her to read cracks, the ways of figuring out ice thickness and texture, to see the places where there is current—this is where ice is thick; this is where it is thin. I teach her how you must spread out when you have to cross really thin ice, to carry a stick with you, all of these intentional ways of assessing risk on the ice and being prepared.

A child could gain the same kind of experience and ability to assess a dangerous environment in a city, riding a bus or a subway. But Sobel, as an expert on nature’s role in education, suggests that nature’s life-instruction provides a mysterious and probably irreplaceable quality. He believes that the kinesthetic original experience of risk-taking in the natural world is closer to the natural organic way we’ve learned for millennia, and that the other experiences don’t reach as deeply.

Listening to him, I wondered about this unnamed intensity of learning and hyperawareness. Is this quality, perhaps, linked simply to beauty, to those natural shapes and musical sounds that draw our souls to nature? Sobel thought about that question for a moment, and then said, yes, that made sense to him. He said he often cites a quote from a woman who narrowly survived California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, one that killed at least sixty-two people and injured another thirty-seven hundred. This woman believed that the earthquake, far from destroying her life, saved it. She had been combating a borderline psychological state at the time, and then the earthquake came. She said later that the process of coming to terms with this massive natural act was more effective than any of the therapy she had received. Something about that experience shook her back to earth. “The phrase that stood out, from what she said,” recalled Sobel, “is the diagnosis she came up with for herself. She said she had suffered from a ‘distance from beauty.’ That idea has become a part of me. I know when I am suffering from