Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (6 page)

If endangered and threatened species are to coexist with humans, adults and children do need to tread lightly. But poor land-use decisions, which reduce accessible nature in cities, do far more damage to the environment than do children. Two examples: Each year, 53,000 acres of land are developed in the Chesapeake Bay watershed; that’s about one acre every ten minutes. At that rate, development will consume more land in the Chesapeake watershed in the next twenty-five years than in the previous three and a half centuries, according to the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. Similarly, the Charlotte, North Carolina, region lost 20 percent of its forest cover over the past two decades; between 1982 and 2002, the state lost farmland and forests at the rate of 383 acres a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects forests declining from 767,000 acres in 1982 to 377,000 in 2022. Amazingly, developed land in North Carolina increased at a rate twice that of the state’s population growth.

As open space shrinks, overuse increases. This is true even in those metropolitan regions considered, by the public, to be more suburban than urban. Ironically, people who move to Sun Belt cities expecting more elbow room often find less of it. Eight of the nation’s ten highest-density metropolitan areas are in the West. In some of those cities, typical 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 a
chilling 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.”

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 children
because 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 communities so they stimulate people of all ages to be more active. The studies are focusing on such sites as urban parks, recreation centers, streets, and private homes. “Based on previous studies, we can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” says Sallis, “and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.”

I asked him what he had learned about how children use woods, fields, canyons, and vacant lots—in other words, unstructured natural sites.

“We don’t ask about those places,” he said.

If the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation isn’t collecting such data, it’s unlikely that studies funded by commercial interests would finance such research. One of the great benefits of unstructured outdoor recreation is that it doesn’t cost anything, Sallis explained. “Because it’s free, there’s no major economic interest involved. Who’s going to fund the
research? If kids are out there riding their bikes or walking, they’re not burning fossil fuel, they’re nobody’s captive audience, they’re not making money for anybody. . . . Follow the money.”

Nonetheless, evidence of a generational break from nature—gathered since the late 1980s—is growing in the United States and elsewhere.

Robin Moore, a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, first charted the shrinkage of natural play spaces in urban England, a transformation of the landscape of childhood that occurred within a space of fifteen years. Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokémon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree. Similarly, Japan’s landscape of childhood, already downsized, has also grown smaller. For almost two decades the well-known Japanese photographer Keiki Haginoya photographed children’s play in the cities of Japan. In recent years, “children have disappeared so rapidly from his viewfinder that he has had to bring this chapter of his work to an end,” Moore reports. “Either indoor spaces have become more attractive, or outdoor spaces have become less attractive—or both.”

In Israel, researchers revealed that nearly all adults surveyed indicated that natural outdoor areas were the most significant environments of their childhood, while less than half of children ages eight to eleven shared that view. Even accounting for romanticized memories, that’s a startling difference in perception. The Netherlands, often associated with greener-than-average thinking is, nonetheless, a highly urbanized country where the young “have little contact with nature,” according to a survey of students from seven Dutch secondary schools by Wageningen scientist Jana Verboom-Vasiljev. “There is little sign that a love of nature is inculcated at home. Indeed, about three-quarters of the pupils thought there was only ‘a bit of interest’ for nature at home, and eleven per cent said there was none.” More than half never go to nature reserves
and parks, zoos or botanical gardens. Most students were unable to name a single endangered plant species and knew only a few endangered animals. “The list of wild animals or plants they would miss if they became extinct was dominated by cuddly mammals or animals featured on television. . . . It was a surprise to find even pets and domesticated animals on the list,” said Verboom-Vasiljev, reporting the research findings. Although the research was conducted in the Netherlands, “the picture we obtained may also apply to at least the more urbanized regions of Europe where the cultural, economic and social climates are broadly similar.” Indeed, in Amsterdam, a study compared children’s play in the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s to child’s play in the first years of the twenty-first century: Children today play outside less often and for briefer periods; they have a more restricted home range and have fewer, less diverse playmates.

In the United States, children are spending less time playing outdoors—or in any unstructured way. From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Also, Hofferth reports that children’s free play and discretionary time in a typical week declined a total of nine hours over a twenty-five-year period. Also, children spend less time playing outdoors than their mothers did when they were young, according to Rhonda L. Clements, a professor of education at Manhattanville College in New York State. She and her colleagues surveyed eight hundred mothers, whose responses were compared to the views of mothers interviewed a generation ago: 71 percent of today’s mothers said they recalled playing outdoors every day as children, but only 26 percent of them said their kids play outdoors daily. “Surprisingly, the responses did not vary a great deal between mothers living in rural and urban areas,” Clements reported. “However, this finding coincides with research conducted in England and Wales.” The results of those studies negated the assumption that children living in rural areas would have access to greater public space for play and
recreation. They found that farmlands, with their restricted use and lack of local supervision for children’s activities, did not offer the rural child more opportunities for outdoor experiences.

Some researchers have suggested that the nature deficit is growing fastest in English-speaking countries. That may be true, but the phenomenon is occurring in developing countries in general. The
Daily Monitor
, published in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, issued a plea in March 2007 for parents to get their children out of the house and into the outdoors, noting that “many Ethiopians will have reached adulthood far removed from outdoor experiences.”

One U.S. researcher suggests that a generation of children is not only being raised indoors, but is being confined to even smaller spaces. Jane Clark, a University of Maryland professor of kinesiology (the study of human movement), calls them “containerized kids”—they spend more and more time in car seats, high chairs, and even baby seats for watching TV. When small children do go outside, they’re often placed in containers—strollers—and pushed by walking or jogging parents. Most kid-containerizing is done for safety concerns, but the long-term health of these children is compromised. In the medical journal the
Lancet
, researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland reported a study of toddler activity where the researchers clipped small electronic accelerometers to the waistbands of seventy-eight three-year-olds for a week. They found that the toddlers were physically active for only twenty minutes a day. Similar patterns were found among Ireland’s rural children. Clearly the childhood break from nature is part of a larger dislocation—physical restriction of childhood in a rapidly urbanizing world, with nature experience a major casualty.

As the nature deficit grows, another emerging body of scientific evidence indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

The overarching importance of this research combined with our knowledge of other changes in the culture demands a shorthand description. So, for now, let’s call the phenomenon
nature-deficit disorder
. Our culture is so top-heavy with jargon, so dependent on the illness model, that I hesitate to introduce this term. Perhaps a more appropriate definition will emerge as the scientific research continues. And, as mentioned earlier, I am not suggesting that this term represents an existing medical diagnosis. But when I talk about nature-deficit disorder with groups of parents and educators, the meaning of the phrase is clear. Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities. Nature deficit can even change human behavior in cities, which could ultimately affect their design, since long-standing studies show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies.

As the following chapters explain, nature-deficit disorder can be recognized and reversed, individually and culturally. But deficit is only one side of the coin. The other is natural abundance. By weighing the consequences of the disorder, we also can become more aware of how blessed our children can be—biologically, cognitively, and spiritually—through positive physical connection to nature. Indeed, the new research focuses not so much on what is lost when nature fades, but on what is gained in the presence of the natural world. “There is a great need to educate parents about this research—to awaken or inspire the parents’ pleasure with nature play—as the necessary context for continued nature experiences for their children,” says Louise Chawla.