Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (16 page)

Some of the most important work in this area has been done at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Andrea Faber Taylor, Frances Kuo, and William C. Sullivan have
found that green outdoor spaces foster creative play, improve children’s access to positive adult interaction—and relieve the symptoms of attention-deficit disorders. The greener the setting, the more the relief. By comparison, activities indoors, such as watching TV, or outdoors in paved, non-green areas, increase these children’s symptoms.

In a survey of the families of ADHD children ages seven to twelve, parents or guardians were asked to identify after-school or weekend activities that left their child functioning especially well or particularly poorly. Activities were coded as “green” or “not green.” Green activities, for example, included camping and fishing. Not-green activities included watching television, playing video games, doing homework. Some activities, such as rollerblading, were labeled ambiguous. The controls in this study were more complex than space allows me to describe, but suffice it to say, the research team was careful to account for variables. They found that greenery in a child’s everyday environment, even views of green through a window, specifically reduces attention-deficit symptoms. While outdoor activities in general help, settings with trees and grass are the most beneficial. As they reported in the journal
Environment and Behavior
, “compared to the aftereffects of play in paved outdoor or indoor areas, activities in natural, green settings were far more likely to leave ADD children better able to focus, concentrate. Activities that left ADD children in worse shape were far more likely to occur indoors or outdoors in spaces devoid of greenery.”

They also found that the positive influence of near-home nature on concentration may be more pronounced for girls (ages six to nine) than for boys. On average, the greener a girl’s view from home, the better she concentrates, the less she acts impulsively, and the longer she can delay gratification. This helps her do better in school, handle peer pressure, and avoid dangerous, unhealthy, or problem behaviors. She is more likely to behave in ways that foster success in life, according to the researchers. Perhaps, if girls are less biologically prone to ADHD, as
some mental health professionals believe, they may exhibit milder symptoms and may also have a more robust, healthy response to the treatment—whether pharmaceutical or green.

Based on the study, the University of Illinois issued this informal advice regarding girls to parents, caregivers, and others. The information also applies to boys:

• Encourage girls to study or play in rooms with a view of nature.

• Encourage children to play outdoors in green spaces, and advocate recess in green schoolyards. This may be especially helpful for renewing children’s concentration.

• Plant and care for trees and vegetation at your residence, or encourage the owner to do so.

• Value and care for the trees in your community. Caring for trees means caring for people.

In addition to its work in the housing projects of inner-city Chicago, the Human-Environment Research Laboratory has also examined nature’s impact on children with ADHD in middle-class settings. There, as in the public housing development, parents reported that their children exhibited fewer symptoms of ADHD after spending time in green surroundings. “You could say that the kids who had greener settings were just richer,” says Kuo. “But that doesn’t explain the fact that even rich kids do better after being in green settings. . . .” In the report:

Participants were asked if they had had any experiences, either positive or negative, related to any aftereffects of green settings on their child’s attention. One parent said she had recently begun taking her son to the local park for 30 minutes each morning before school because the weather was nice, and they “had some time to kill.” She then said, “Come to think of it, I have noticed his attitude toward going to school has been better, and his schoolwork has been better this past week. I think it’s because spending time at the park is pleasurable, peaceful, quiet, calming.”

Another parent reported that his son could hit golf balls or fish for hours, and that during these times the boy was “very relaxed” and his attention-deficit symptoms minimal. “When I read the results of your study, they hit me in the face,” he told the researchers. “I thought, yes, I’ve seen this!”

So had some of the parents I interviewed. Noticing that their children’s ADHD symptoms were calmed by natural settings, they applied common sense; they were already encouraging their kids to spend more time outdoors, and they felt affirmed when I told them about the Illinois studies.

Taylor’s and Kuo’s more recent research findings are equally provocative. According to an unpublished study (which Taylor emphasizes is “a work in progress”), attention performance for unmedicated children clinically diagnosed with ADHD was better after a simple twenty-minute walk in a park, with a natural setting, than it was after a walk through well-kept downtown and residential areas.

Expanding such knowledge, and applying it in practical ways, will be the next challenge. Although today’s common medications for ADHD offer temporary gains, including sustained attention and academic productivity, these medications may do little for a child’s long-term success, either socially or academically. The medications can also have unpleasant side effects, among them sleep disruption, depression, and growth suppression of approximately half an inch per year on average, as reported in a large randomized trial funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. A second class of treatment—behavioral therapies—teaches children how to self-monitor attention and impulsive behavior, but the success of these therapies has been mixed.

More time in nature—combined with less television and more stimulating play and educational settings—may go a long way toward reducing attention deficits in children, and, just as important, increasing their joy in life. Researchers at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory believe that their findings point to nature therapy as a potential
third course of treatment, applied either in concert with medication and/or behavioral therapy, or on its own. Behavioral therapy and nature therapy, if used collaboratively, might teach the young how to visualize positive experiences in nature when they need a calming tool. One psychiatrist who works with ADHD children relates how he sometimes slides into mild depressions. “I grew up fly-fishing in Michigan, and that was how I found peace as a child,” he says. “So, when I begin to feel depressed, I use self-hypnosis to go there again, to call up those memories.” He calls them “meadow memories.” Though he is a firm believer in the proper use of the currently available medications for ADHD, he is encouraged by the possibility that nature therapy might offer him another professional tool. And, as Kuo points out, prescribing “green time” for the treatment of ADHD has other advantages: it’s widely accessible, free of side effects, nonstigmatizing, and inexpensive.

If it’s true that nature therapy reduces the symptoms of ADHD, then the converse may also be true: ADHD may be a set of symptoms aggravated by lack of exposure to nature. By this line of thinking, many children may benefit from medications, but the real disorder is less in the child than it is in the imposed, artificial environment. Viewed from this angle, the society that has disengaged the child from nature is most certainly disordered, if well-meaning. To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

An expanded application of attention-restoration theory would be useful in the design of homes, classrooms, and curricula. New York’s Central Park, the first professionally designed urban park in America, was originally seen as a necessary aid to both civic consciousness and public health. It was construed as a place where all New Yorkers, regardless of class, age, or health, would benefit from fresh air. If nature-deficit disorder, as a hypothetical condition, affects all children (and adults) whether or not they have some biological propensity for attention deficit, then nature therapy at the societal and individual levels will do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Research on the impact of nature experiences on attention disorders and on wider aspects of child health and development is in its infancy, and easily challenged. Scientists doing some of the best of this research are the first to point that out. “For many of us, intuition emphatically asserts that nature is good for children,” write Taylor and Kuo, in an overview of the research to date. “Beyond these intuitions, there are also well-reasoned theoretical arguments as to why humans in general—and therefore children—might have an inborn need for contact with nature.” Yes, more research is needed, but we do not have to wait for it. As Taylor and Kuo argue, “Given the pattern of statistically reliable findings all pointing the same direction and persisting across different subpopulations of children, different settings, and in spite of design weaknesses, at some point it becomes more parsimonious to accept the fact that nature does promote healthy child development.” If, as a growing body of evidence recommends, “contact with nature is as important to children as good nutrition and adequate sleep, then current trends in children’s access to nature need to be addressed.”

Even the most extensive research is unlikely to capture the full benefits of direct, natural experience. One aspect sure to elude measurement—a phenomenon that will be discussed later in these pages—is the contribution of nature to the spiritual life of the child, and therefore to the adult. This we know: As the sign over Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton University read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” We don’t have to wait for more, needed, research to act on common sense, or to give the gift of nature—even when it might seem to be too late.

On a Sunday afternoon, a half-dozen teenagers gathered in defense attorney Daniel Ybarra’s office not far from where I live. These teenagers—several diagnosed with ADHD—were on probation. They
looked like your usual troubled teenage suspects: a gang member wearing a white net skullcap and black jersey; a girl with orange hair, her fingernails chewed to the quick; another boy with a black skullcap with a bandana tied around his head. He was wearing a sealskin Tlingit medicine pouch around his neck.

“You gonna carry your bus tokens in that, now?” one of the teens teased.

They had just returned from two chaperoned weeks living with tribal people in Ketchikan, Alaska, and in the southwestern Alaskan village of Kake, population 750. Kake is on an island served by a ferry that comes once every five days. The young people had been ordered to Alaska by a superior court judge who has an interest in alternative approaches to punishment.

For years, Ybarra had dreamed of pulling at-risk kids out of their urban environment and exposing them to nature. With the blessing of the judge, he acted. He persuaded Alaska Airlines to provide inexpensive airline tickets and raised contributions from law school classmates, a professional football player, and the United Domestic Workers union.

Some of the teenagers Ybarra took under his wing had never been to the mountains or beyond earshot of a combustion engine. The farthest one girl had been from her inner city home was a trip to a suburb. Suddenly they were transported to a place of glaciers and
takus
—storms that come out of nowhere, with winds that can blow a forest flat. They found themselves among grizzlies on the beaches, sea elephants that loomed up from the channel, and bald eagles that sat ten to a branch, as common as sparrows.

Tlingit villages face the sea, as they have for thousands of years, and life still revolves around the ocean’s harvest. Although the Tlingits have their own problems with substance abuse, they retain pieces of what so many young people have lost. The boy with the black skullcap said: “I never seen a place so dark at night. I seen seals, bears, whales, salmon jumpin’—and I caught crabs and oysters, and as soon as we caught ’em,
we ate ’em. I felt like I was in a past life.” A girl dressed in neo-hippie garb added: “I never saw a bear before. I’m scared of bears, but when I saw them, I had no stress. I was calm, free. You know what was great? Picking berries. It was addictive. Like cigarettes.” She laughed. “Just the picking, just being out in the bushes.”

One of the young men said he almost refused to get on the airplane to come home. But he returned determined to become an attorney specializing in environmental law.

They learned about
sha-a-ya-dee-da-na
, a Tlingit word that loosely translates as “self-respect,” by being in nature, and by associating with people who had never been separated from it.

“I met a little boy and spent a lot of time with him,” said one of the young women in the room. She had long, dark hair and eyes as bright as the midnight sun. “One day I was outside—this was right before we went into a sweat lodge—and he asked me, ‘Can you touch the sky with a stick?’ I answered, ‘No, I’m too short.’ He looked at me with disgust and said, ‘You’re weak! How do you know you can’t touch the sky with a stick if you don’t even try?’” Recalling the riddle, the young woman’s eyes widened. “This was the first time I’ve ever been spoken to like that by a four-year-old.”

When she came home, her mother was not at the airport to pick her up. She returned to an empty house.

“Last night, I looked out at the trees and I thought of Kake,” she said.

Anyone who has spent much time around addicts or gang members understands how disarming—and manipulative—they can be. Yet on this afternoon, I saw no evidence of the con artist in their eyes. At least for a while—a day, a week, a year, or perhaps even a lifetime—they were changed.