Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Louv, Richard

  Touching the Sky with a Stick

  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.

  PART III

  THE BEST OF INTENTIONS:

  WHY JOHNNIE AND JEANNIE DON’T PLAY OUTSIDE ANYMORE

  Our children no longer learn how to read

  the great Book of Nature

  from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively

  with the seasonal transformations of the planet.

  They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes.

  We no longer coordinate our human celebration with

  the great liturgy of the heavens.

  —WENDELL BERRY

  9. Time and Fear

  NOW THAT WE KNOW more about the wide-ranging value of direct experience in nature, it’s time to look deeply into the hurdles that must be crossed to increase that exposure. Some of these obstacles are cultural or institutional—growing litigation, education trends that marginalize direct experience in nature; some are structural—the way cities are shaped. Other barriers are more personal or familial—time pressures and fear, for example. A shared characteristic of these institutional and personal barriers is that those of us who have erected them have usually done so with the best of intentions.

  When my son Jason was nine, I picked him up from school one afternoon and we stopped at a neighborhood park to play catch. The expanse of grass was filling up with children’s soccer teams. Jason and I moved from the center to the edge of the park and found a patch of green with no soccer players. We began to toss a ball back and forth. A mother of one of Jason’s classmates approached. I knew this athletic woman; she was extremely committed to her children’s academic and athletic achievements. She drove herself even harder.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked, with a smile. “Waiting for a team?”

  “Nope. Just playing catch,” I answered, tossing the ball to Jason.

  “Ah . . . killing time,” she said.

  When did playing catch in a park become a form of killing time? This mother had the best of intentions, of course. Most of us do. Yet, as the pace of life, especially for children, has quickened—as we have striven to improve schools, increase productivity, accumulate wealth, and provide a more technological education—the consequences of our intentions are not always what we intend.

  Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive. In an effort to value and structure time, some of us unintentionally may be killing dreamtime. In our worry about our children’s safety we may take actions that, in some ways, decrease our children’s safety. Institutions that have traditionally introduced the young to the outdoors are now adopting policies that, in some cases, actually separate children from nature. Even some environmental organizations are hastening that separation—unconsciously, with the best of intentions—and risking the future of environmentalism and the health of the earth itself.

  Okay, back to the park.

  My purpose in telling this anecdote is not to diminish the importance of soccer. Certainly, organized sports get kids outside, and these activities offer attributes all their own. Still, we need to find a better balance between organized activities, the pace of our children’s lives, and their experiences in nature. That mission will be difficult, but attainable.

  Eighty percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas, and many of these areas are severely lacking in park space. Support for existing parks atrophied in recent decades. For example, only 30 percent of Los Angeles residents live within walking distance of a park, according to the Trust for Public Land.

  More to the point, parks increasingly favor what Robin Moore calls the “commercialization of play.” Moore charts a broad “international trend toward investing public funds in sports areas rather than in multi-choice space for free play.” He adds, “For-profit indoor play centers are developing around the world. Until now, they have offered a narrow range of gross motor activity.” Meanwhile, vacant lots are vanishing, and the nature of suburban development is changing. Suburban fields that might have been left open in earlier decades are being erased, replaced by denser, planned developments with manicured green areas maintained through strict covenants. “Most countries do not even have a general guideline for play space allocation,”
Moore reports.

  From 1981 to 1997, the amount of time children spent in organized sports increased by 27 percent. In 1974, the U.S. Youth Soccer Association had approximately 100,000 members; today, the association has nearly 3 million. Demand for playing fields is up. Expenditures on parks are falling. When parks are offered, the designers focus on reducing liability. Encouraging a variety of play styles is less of a priority. A flat patch of grass or synthetic turf (approved for several parks by the city of Seattle) may be perfect for organized sports, but not for unstructured or natural play. When a park is graded to create a playing field, children gain soccer capacity, but they lose places for self-directed play. Indeed, research suggests that children, when left to their own devices, are drawn to the rough edges of such parks, the ravines and rocky inclines, the natural vegetation. A park may be neatly trimmed and landscaped, but the natural corners and edges where children once played can be lost in translation.

  Ironically, as mentioned earlier, the childhood obesity epidemic (with a complex set of causes) has coincided with a dramatic increase in children’s organized sports. This does not mean, of course, that organized sports contribute to obesity, but that an over-scheduled, over-organized childhood may. Such a childhood, without nature, is missing vital ingredients.

  IT TAKES TIME—loose, unstructured dreamtime—to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, because time is consumed by multiple invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play. During my travels across the country to research Childhood’s Future, I asked a class of fifth- and sixth-graders at Jerabek Elementary in San Diego to describe their schedules. The comment of one girl was typical:

  I don’t really have much time to play at all because I have piano lessons. My mom makes me practice for about an hour every day, and then I have my homework, and that’s about an hour’s worth, and then I got soccer practice, and that’s from five-thirty to seven, and then there’s no time left over to play. On weekends we usually have soccer games, and I have to practice piano and then I have to do yard work, and then I have the chores, and then I’m free to play—which is only about two hours, three hours, something like that.

  I was intrigued with the way children defined play: often, their definition did not include soccer or piano lessons. Those activities were more like work.

  How do young people feel when they do have extra, unscheduled time?

  “I sort of feel free, like I can do anything in the world that I want to. It’s a good feeling,” one boy told me. “I know I don’t have homework, and I know I don’t have soccer practice or anything like that, and it’s just a really good feeling that you can get out and go hike or bike ride.”

  In a classroom at Kenwood Elementary School in Miami, I asked if anybody worried about getting into good colleges or getting good jobs in the future. More than half of the children raised their hands. These were fourth-graders. A serious little girl, eyebrows scrunched up behind her glasses, explained, “Well, you should not stare out the window or dream. You should get your mind on your work because you can never get a college education if you don’t.” A central concern is how parents model their own use of time—their attitude about where time fits into their busy lives. In a classroom in Potomac, Maryland, ninth-grader Courtney Ivins clearly expressed this effect. As people grow older, nature’s magnificence “gets easier to overlook,” she surmises. “Snow not only brings a chance to miss school, but it also provides a means for adventure. . . . snowmen, igloos, and snowball fights.” But for many adults, she observes, “snow is just another one of life’s many hassles. The roads are slippery, traffic is increased, and sidewalks are ready to be shoveled.”

  So where has all the time gone, or shifted to? In recent years, several studies have offered a fairly clear snapshot of time use. Researchers at the University of Maryland found that, between 1981 and 2003, children during the typical week lost over nine hours of discretionary time (that is hours not spent in school, child care, and so forth). They spent less time in unstructured indoor and outdoor play; computer use doubled. Time-analysis studies done at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that from 1981 to 1997, the amount of time American children up to age twelve spent studying increased by 20 percent. As with the growth of organized sports, the increase in homework and study time is not necessarily a bad trend—except that, so often, mounting pressure eclipses unstructured time and natural play.

  Television remains the most effective thief of time. Studies conducted in association with the Kaiser Family Foundation, released in 2005 and 2006, found that nearly one-third of children from six months to six years of age lived in households where the TV was on all or most of the time. Children between the ages of eight and eighteen years old spent an average of nearly 6.5 hours a day plugged in electronically—that’s forty-five hours a week, more time than once was considered an adult work week. The study also found that about a quarter of the time, young people were using more than one medium simultaneously, leading the researchers to dub today’s young as Generation M—for multitasking.

  As for parents, as Internet use grows, adults spend more time working for their employers at home, without cutting back their hours in the office. As sprawl pushes the urban envelope, Americans spend more time on the road; the proportion of workers who commuted for thirty minutes or more a day jumped 14 percent just between 1990 and 2000. Typical Americans spend 101 minutes in their car daily, five times the amount of time they spend exercising. They also take fewer vacation days and work harder than the Japanese or Europeans. (In Germany, France, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, and in several eastern European nations, hours on the job decreased between 2000 and 2005. As of this writing, France has legislated a thirty-five-hour-maximum workweek.) Weekends are no longer for recreation, but for the undone chores that pile up during the week. And in a landmark Canadian survey, researchers found that both parents cut back on sleep to handle all their responsibilities. No time to sleep. No time for snow.

  Or so it seems.

  Nature Time Is Not Leisure Time

  Our seeming inability to control the remote control is certainly one cause, a major one, for our perceived time poverty. But other factors are also at work, among them: employers who attempt to squeeze the last drop of employees’ energy, limited recreation facilities, and dangerous parks in lower-income neighborhoods. As Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, reported in 2007, more families have a single head of household or two working parents; college admissions pressures begin earlier; the belief has increased that good parents equip their children with every possible skill and aptitude. “Even parents who wish to take a lower-key approach to child rearing fear slowing down when they perceive everyone else is on the fast track,” according to Kenneth R. Ginsburg, who authored the report.

  These forces are difficult to resist, especially when a family’s economic security seems chronically at risk. Bottom line: We want to do what’s best for our children. If working more helps us do that, so be it. If enrolling Suzie in Suzuki violin lessons develops her musical capabilities and self-discipline, so be it.

  This understandable impulse is one reason why the emerging evidence of nature’s necessity to children’s healthy development is so important. We can now look at it this way: Time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health (and also, by the way, in our own). American parents have become too accustomed to the media mantra that dismisses us as selfish strivers who care more about our Lexuses than our children. But, if anything, most parents have an acutely tuned sense of responsibility—to the point where they consider relaxation and leisure, for themselves or their children, a self-indulgent luxury. By taking nature experience out of the leisure column and placing it in the health column, we are more likely to take our children on that hike—more likely to, well, have fun. Such a change in outlook is cru
cial. The stakes are high, and the consequences more evident when children reach their teen years. Tonia Berman, a high school biology teacher in my city, describes the usual roster of teen problems. She sees kids who don’t get enough to eat at home, who brave neighborhood violence after school, and increasingly she witnesses another kind of suffering: what she calls the Superchild syndrome. “We’ve heard all about the Super-mom,” she says, “the woman who tries to do everything perfectly, who pursues a high-pressure career, agonizes over the family’s dinner menu, drills her kids with flash cards, rushes to charity events . . . and so on.” Indeed, parenting magazines are full of cautionary tales about how Super-moms (and Superdads, too) can crash and burn. “But what about the kids who are running on the same treadmill, sometimes even faster?”

  When Berman asked her students to write essays about their time pressure, one teenager itemized her schedule, as well as her response to it. Here, she said, is a partial list: “I play tennis during tennis season, lead a community service club as president, take a community college course in how to work with people with disabilities, volunteer in the community, work as a child care helper at my place of worship, take six extremely advanced classes (for extra credit when I enter college), am a really good friend, and counsel my peers because I would not turn a friend or other person down.”

  Over winter and spring breaks, this student continues her volunteer work, and studies to get a head start on the next semester. She prides herself on personal honesty, but cries inside when she sees other students, who cheat, do better on tests. “I am a very worryful person (is that a word?),” she wrote. “I am the type of person that thinks about things a great deal.” After a particularly stressful few weeks, she fell into a slump that scared her. What if she couldn’t get back to her schedule? What then? “I considered suicide. I didn’t really care about myself and would rather hurt myself than my parents or friends. I suffered so they would not have to know what I was going through—my weaknesses, my failures, the hatred I felt at the world.” This isn’t just a reflection of eternal teen angst, but a singular example of why there is a growing rate of adolescent suicides and attempted suicides. Could she turn to her parents for help? She felt she could not. “They pass right by who I am, looking only for what they want to see.” She says that she might not be here today if not for people like Mrs. Berman, her biology teacher, who reached out to her in time.