One parent’s hike is another’s forced march, and the same is true for children. Parents must walk a fine line between presenting and pushing their kids to the outdoors. A trip to buy expensive camping equipment for a two-week vacation in Yosemite is not a prerequisite or, for that matter, any substitute for more languid natural pastimes that can be had in the backyard.
The dugout in the weeds or leaves beneath a backyard willow, the rivulet of a seasonal creek, even the ditch between a front yard and the road—all of these places are entire universes to a young child. Expeditions to the mountains or national parks often pale, in a child’s eyes, in comparison with the mysteries of the ravine at the end of the cul de sac. By letting our children lead us to their own special places we can rediscover the joy and wonder of nature. By exploring those places we enter our children’s world and we give these patches of nature a powerful blessing for our children. By expressing interest or even awe at the march of ants across these elfin forests, we send our children a message that will last for decades to come, perhaps even extend generation to generation. By returning to these simple yet enchanted places, we see, with our child, how the seasons move and the world turns and how critter kingdoms rise and fall.
“Your job isn’t to hit them with another Fine Educational Opportunity, but to turn them on to what a neat world we live in,” writes Deborah Churchman in the journal American Forests, published by the nation’s oldest nonprofit citizens’ conservation organization. She recommends re-creating all the dopey, fun things you did as a kid: “Take them down to the creek to skip rocks—and then show them what was hiding under those rocks. Take a walk after the rain and count worms (they’re coming up to get air, since their air holes are clogged with water). Turn on the porch light and watch the insects gather (they’re nuts about ultraviolet light—for some reason scientists haven’t yet figured out). Go to a field (with shoes on) and watch the bees diving into the flowers.” Find a ravine, woods, a windbreak row of trees, a swamp, a pond, a vacant and overgrown lot—and go there, regularly. Churchman repeats an old Indian saying: “It’s better to know one mountain than to climb many.”
In The Thunder Tree, Robert Michael Pyle describes his childhood haunt, a century-old irrigation channel near his home. The ditch, he writes, was his “sanctuary, playground, and sulking walk,” his “imaginary wilderness, escape hatch, and birthplace as a naturalist.”
Many of us can remember the small galaxies we adopted as children, the slope behind the neighborhood, the strand of trees at the end of the street. My first special place, like Pyle’s, was a ditch, a ravine—dark with mystery, lined with grapevine swings, elms, and tangled bramble. I sat with my dog for hours at the edge of the ravine, poking the dirt, listening to unseen creatures move far below, studying ants as they marched into the abyss. To a four-year-old, such a ravine is as deep and wide and peculiar as the Grand Canyon will be to that same boy decades later.
These are the “places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin,” Pyle writes. These are the “secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have to look hard to find something to love.” Richard Mabey, a British writer and naturalist, calls such environments, undeveloped and unprotected, the “unofficial countryside.” Such habitats are often rich with life and opportunities to learn; in a single decade, Pyle recorded some seventy kinds of butterflies along his ditch.
What if your child has yet to discover such a special place? Then form a joint expedition into the small unknowns—not a forced march, but a mutual adventure. “The kid who yawns when you say ‘Let’s go outside’ may be intrigued enough” to follow you on a trip to gather twigs for making tea, counsels Deborah Churchman.
Encourage your child to get to know a ten-square-yard area at the edge of a field, pond, or pesticide-free garden. Look for the edges between habitats: where the trees stop and a field begins; where rocks and earth meet water. Life is always at the edges. Together, sit at the edge of a pond in August—don’t move; wait. Wait some more and watch the frogs reappear one at a time. Use all of your senses. Wander through an overgrown garden, woods, or field in October. Together, keep a journal; encourage your child to describe, in words and pictures, that tattered bumblebee staggering across autumn leaves, or the two gray squirrels rushing to gather moss and twigs for their winter nests. Ask each other: What was happening in this same spot in June? Did that bumblebee, a bumblebee-lifetime ago, bend flowers as it gathered pollen? If she wishes to, your child can draw outlines of leaves or clouds—or frogs. Later, at home, she can color the drawings and press a flower between the pages, and add details about the weather. Or, she can write a tale from the point of view of the bee: What was it thinking as it looked at you looking at it? What would its summer diary say?
Take a “moth walk,” Churchman suggests. “In a blender, mix up a goopy brew of squishy fruit, stale beer or wine (or fruit juice that’s been hanging around too long), and sweetener (honey, sugar, or molasses) . . . Then take a paintbrush and a child or two, and go outside at sunset. Slap some of this goo on at least a half-dozen surfaces—trees are best, but any unpainted and untreated wood will do. Come back when it’s really dark, and look at what you lured. You’ll usually find a few moths, along with several dozen ants, earwigs, and other insects.” With help from Internet sites dedicated to birding, track bird migrations. In the winter, look for hibernating insects, galls, or the burrows of animals in or near trees. In the spring, with your child, catch tadpoles, transfer them to an aquarium, and watch them transform into frogs—then return the frogs to the wild. Visit them in August. And hunt for nests abandoned by birds in the fall, and search for the big nests that squirrels make in the fall—because they usually bear their young in the winter.
Gardening is another traditional way to introduce children to nature. Judy Sedbrook, a master gardener at Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, advises parents to encourage youthful enthusiasm by planting seeds that mature quickly and are large enough for a child to handle easily: “Vegetables are a good choice for young children. They germinate quickly and can be eaten when mature. . . . Children may even be encouraged to eat vegetables that they have grown and would otherwise avoid. If you have enough room in the garden, gourds are a good choice. After harvesting, they can be decorated and used as bird-houses.” A unique gardening project is the sunflower house. In an eight-by-eight-foot square, parents and kids can plant sunflower seeds or seedlings in a shallow moat, alternating varieties that grow about eight feet high with ones that grow to four feet. You can also plant a few corn plants among the sunflowers; corn discourages Carpophilus beetles, and the sunflowers protect the corn from army worms. Inside, plant a carpet of white clover. As a child plays within the containing protection of the sunflower house, bees, butterflies, and other insects will congregate at the blooms above. Plant seeds of indigenous pollinating plants that provide nectar, as well as roosting and nesting sites, and also help increase the number of pollinating birds and insects. This activity can strengthen interrupted pollination corridors and help reestablish the migration paths of butterflies and hummingbirds; and your child can become a participant in the winged migration, not just an observer.
Capturing Time
Time is the key. It’s far easier to recommend that parents take more time for nature than it is for the families to capture that diminished resource. Still, this is not an insurmountable obstacle. For example, a single mother, Teri Konars, tells how she overcame the obstacles of time and lack of nature knowledge:
Some of my son Adam’s earliest memories are of camping. This was when we were living in student housing, and Adam was about five or six. I found an organization called Parents Without Partners, and we began to go on camping trips with them. The first trip was Adam’s favorite: the desert. He has big memories of seeing a coyote, and learning to make a needle and thread from a yucca leaf, and [seei
ng] the stars. Today, he’s in his twenties, and he says that experience changed him in profound ways. I had a great time too, but my car died when it was time to come home. It had been daring or foolish to take my old beater on such a trip, but knowing we’d be with other people made it okay. As a single mom, going with a group was the only way to do any camping, because of the fear of the unknown out there and the economics of gas, camping equipment, food and all the rest of the expenses, which were not easy on our budget.
Of the stories from other families I have collected over the years, one has special resonance—because of its simplicity. “My family fell into the high-achievement trap,” one woman, a PTA officer in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, told me.
Our son was overstressed. We were overstressed. This realization came to us on one of those nights when all of our voices had raised an octave and all of our eyes were opened just a little wider than normal and we all were just . . . it was just too much. We peaked out. Suddenly we realized we were giving our son the message that he had to achieve in order to be lovable. My husband and I were doing it, too: he was working long hours to be lovable and I was doing all these extracurricular activities to be lovable in the community, and it was just crazy. We were getting less lovable.
So the members of the family made a list of everything they loved to do, and everything they hated to do, and then compared lists. The son surprised them: He didn’t really like soccer, which was news to his parents. What he really loved was working in the backyard garden. That surprised his parents, too. Together, they discovered that they all loved being outside, camping, and walking, with no particular destination in mind. The parents cut their overtime work and some of their outside social engagements, and together began going on long walks through the trees, listening to the wind. They won back some time, and reestablished a connection within their family and with nature.
Of course, closing the nature divide is not as simple as making a list. Nor does the solution rest entirely with parents. Parents can work small miracles within their families, but they generally cannot close the divide by themselves. Parents need the help of schools, nature organizations, city planners—and each other.
14. Scared Smart: Facing the Bogeyman
WHEN MY SONS were younger and wished to play in the canyon behind our house, swing on the rope, or explore the seasonal creek that winds through the eucalyptus grove, I preferred they explore the canyon with friends, not alone, and that they take their cell phone. They resisted taking the phone, but they knew that submitting to my vigilance was the price of their liberty.
As they grew, I tried to compensate for what was, at times, unfounded fear. I emphasized to them the importance of their experience in nature. I took them on hikes in the Cuyamaca mountain forests or the Anza-Borrego desert, and let them run ahead while I purposefully remained just at the edge of sight and sound. I put them deliberately in nature’s way. I took my older son with me on research trips for books: we went fly-fishing for sharks off San Diego’s coast; we rode with Mexican cowboys to Baja’s Rio Santo Domingo. There, we caught and released genetically rare trout, and I watched as Jason scrambled over boulders along the lost river, almost out of earshot—but never out of sight.
The trick for me has been to offer controlled risk.
I would take Matthew, my younger son, to the Sierras; or we would glide in a skiff on the bay a few miles away, across the flats, while he watched stingrays scatter like bats; or we would head to the giant inshore kelp forest, richly populated with fish larger than men. Over the edge of the boat, peering down into vertigo-inducing columns of water and light between the waving strands of giant kelp, Matthew saw into the beating heart of Earth. I would watch him from the other end of the boat; in his absorption, he might as well have been miles away.
Perhaps trips like these made up for some of the freedom they did not have, and at least partially met their need for solitude in nature. I hope so, for I believe that nature is one of the best antidotes to fear.
WE KNOW THAT parks generally build social cohesion. The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that works to conserve land, argues that access to public parks and recreational facilities “has been strongly linked to reductions in crime and in particular to reduced juvenile delinquency.”
Park design that incorporates a more natural environment can make children safer by changing adult behavior—specifically, by encouraging adults to supervise children. Trees and grass do more than decorate the landscape. For example, in the midst of a public housing complex in inner-city Chicago, greenery enhances children’s creative play and encourages the presence of adult supervision. In 1998, the journal Environment and Behavior reported that in sixty-four outdoor spaces at a Chicago housing development, almost twice as many children (ages three through twelve) played in areas that had trees and grass than played in barren spaces, and their play was more creative. This complex has fifty-seven hundred residents and is in one of the ten poorest neighborhoods in the nation.
From a policy standpoint, “the findings about more play are exciting, because play in general has important implications in children’s development,” according to Frances E. Kuo, the co-director of the University of Illinois Human-Environment Research Laboratory, whom I cited earlier.
The implication for safety was also important. The investigation found that children’s access to adult supervision was doubled in areas with vegetation. Such studies determine how large numbers of people behave, but what about the individual child?
Modern life narrows our senses until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to about the dimension of a computer monitor or TV screen. By contrast, nature accentuates all the senses, and the senses are a child’s primal first line of self-defense. Children with generous exposure to nature, those who learn to see the world directly, may be more likely to develop the psychological survival skills that will help them detect real danger, and they are therefore less likely to seek out phony danger later in life. Play in nature may instill instinctual confidence.
Hyperawareness in Nature: Enhancing Instinctual Confidence
In many of my conversations with parents and their children, the issue of self-confidence came up, and my notebooks offer anecdotal evidence that nature does build self-confidence in children. Janet Fout’s daughter, Julia, is one example. Julia was a student at George Washington University, majoring in International Affairs with a specialty in Security and Defense. Recently, Julia took the officer candidate test. She is choosing a career that will require her to face fear and uncertainty. Mother and daughter agree that nature, with a little help from her mother, helped shape Julia’s confidence:
When Julia was very little, when we went outdoors, rather than telling her to “be careful,” I encouraged her to “pay attention”—which doesn’t instill fear, but works against fear. Of all the times we were together outdoors, we never encountered any creatures (outside of some humans) that made either of us fearful. I hope that I taught her to use good judgment. For instance, when climbing around on rocks, it isn’t prudent to put your fingers into a crevice that you haven’t first examined.
I tried to instill in her a healthy respect for other living creatures, teaching her that, like most humans, animals were territorial, and were just out there doing what we were—trying to survive. Whether she encounters a growling dog in D.C. or a cougar in the wild, my advice is the same: back away slowly and don’t run. Providing her with opportunities to be a “wild child,” I believe, helped her hone her natural instincts for survival, not only for life in the woods, but life in the big city. Humans are sometimes the most dangerous creatures and the most difficult to read. I’ve always taught her about the important survival skill of listening to gut feelings—somewhat different than psychological survival skills. If you get an “uh-oh” feeling, it’s real, and if you want to stay safe and survive, listen to it!
Julia agreed that childhood experiences in nature had made her a stronger, more observant, safer adult:
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You asked what lessons I learned from nature, but first I must share what lessons I learned from my mother. Believe it or not, I was so comfortable in nature that my mother had to curb my behavior. Once, she was within seconds of dragging me to the hospital to test for parasitic infection when I told her I had been drinking from the creek near our house. I was seven and had stolen the litmus paper she used in her scientific work. I knew that the water had a safe pH reading and thought nothing of a luxurious drink. I knew which plants tasted good—in addition to which plants tasted good and would make me sick. There were firmly imposed restrictions—most memorably: Don’t ever climb a one-hundred-foot rock face without a rope; it will give your mother a heart attack. This was followed closely by: Don’t urinate in the backyard. However, all of these things are secondary and not particularly pertinent to my adult life (although I’m sure everyone appreciates that my mother broke me of personally fertilizing the garden). Nature awakened in me a kind of hyperawareness, which I encounter in very few people.
Julia’s use of the word “hyperawareness” is instructive. Usually hypervigilance—behavior manifested by always being on guard and ready to fight or flee—is associated with trauma in childhood. But the hyperawareness gained from early experience in nature may be the flip side of hypervigilance—a positive way to pay attention, and, when it’s appropriate, to be on guard. We’re familiar with the term “street smart.” Perhaps another, wider, adaptive intelligence is available to the young. Call it “nature smart.”
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Page 19
