Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv Read Free Book Online Page A

development methods favor decapitated hills, artificial landscaping, yards the size of gravesites, and few natural play areas. The disappearance of accessible open space escalates the pressure on those few natural places that remain. Local flora is trampled, fauna die or relocate, and nature-hungry people follow in their four-wheel-drive vehicles or on their motorcycles. Meanwhile, the regulatory message is clear: islands of nature that are left by the graders are to be seen, not touched.
    The cumulative impact of overdevelopment, multiplying park rules, well-meaning (and usually necessary) environmental regulations, building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends achilling message to our children that their free-range play is unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields are the only officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation. “We tell our kids that traditional forms of outdoor play are against the rules,” says Rick. “Then we get on their backs when they sit in front of the TV—and then we tell them to go outside and play. But where? How? Join another organized sport? Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.”
    Not every youngster automatically conforms. When Rick asked his students to write about their experiences in nature, twelve-year-old Lorie described how she loved to climb trees, particularly ones on a patch of land at the end of her street. One day, she and a friend were climbing in those branches and “a guy comes along and yells, ‘Get out of those trees!’ We were so scared; we ran inside and didn’t come out again. That was when I was seven, so that old man seemed pretty frightening. But it happened again last year in my own front lawn—but this time it was someone else, and I decided to ignore him, and so nothing happened.” Lorie thinks all of this is pretty stupid, limiting her opportunities to be “free and not have to be clean and act like girls who are afraid of a scratch or mud all the time.” She adds, “To me, still being considered a kid, it can’t be too much to ask. We should have the same rights as adults did when they were young.”
Measuring the De-natured Childhood
    Over the past decade, a small group of researchers has begun to document the de-naturing of childhood—its multiple causes, extent, and impact. Much of this is new territory; the criminalization of natural play, for example, which is both a symptom and cause of the transformation, is occurring without much notice. Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by modern families, more time in front of the TV and the computer, and growing obesity among adults and childrenbecause of diet and sedentary lifestyles. We know these things. But do we know exactly how much less time children spend
specifically in nature
? No. “We also don’t know if there is any geographic or class divide, in terms of which kids spend time in nature,” says Louise Chawla, a Kentucky State University environmental psychology professor and a tireless champion for increasing children’s experiences in nature. Good longitudinal studies that span the decades are missing. “We don’t have older data to compare. No one thought to ask these questions thirty or fifty years ago,” she says.
    Like many of us, too many researchers have taken the child-nature connection for granted. How could something so timeless change in such a short time? Even if some researchers asked that question, others dismissed it as an exercise in nostalgia. One reason is that there’s no commercial incentive to ask. For years, James Sallis has been studying why some children and adults are more active than others. He is program director of the Active Living Research Program for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a multi-year effort to discover how to design recreational facilities and whole