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

by Louv, Richard

  John Johns, a California father and businessman, believes that a child in nature is required to make decisions not often encountered in a more constricted, planned environment—ones that not only present danger, but opportunity. A stronger adult emerges from a childhood in which the physical body is immersed in the challenge of nature. Organized sport, with its finite set of rules, is said to build character. If that is true, and of course it can be, nature experience must do the same, in ways we do not fully understand. A natural environment is far more complex than any playing field. Nature does offer rules and risk, and subtly informs all the senses.

  “Intuitively, I believe my kids are better equipped to detect danger because of their time in nature,” says Johns. “They’ve all had adrenaline-thumping whitewater experiences and spent moonless nights burrowed into their sleeping bags, imagining all manner of evils outside. Whatever neurons were firing then and whatever coping/adaptive responses they practiced now put them at some advantage in the world.” He wonders if this is one of the primal reasons he and his wife have taken their children on so many nature excursions. “We just seldom think about it in those terms, that we’re helping our kids sensitize themselves to the world. But we sense it.”

  Leslie Stephens, the Southern California mother who chose to live on the edge of a natural canyon, says her family made that decision in part because of the beauty there, but also because her children would be more likely to develop self-confidence, at their own speed, in such an environment. She says:

  I think fondness for wild places is best nurtured when children are young. Otherwise they are off-put by it, afraid of it, and even more strangely, somehow not curious about it. I see this reaction repeatedly in other kids and adults that I meet and get to know. They don’t feel comfortable in nature. They’re a little paranoid of going out and exploring it.

  Mothers in this neighborhood have asked me if I am, perhaps, foolish about my boys’ safety. They want to know why I allow my boys to run in our canyon unsupervised. What about the dangers, they ask? They are afraid of “scary people” down there and coyotes (in the middle of the day, no less), and of course, rattlesnakes. I haven’t seen a snake down there in twelve years, but custodians kill them over at the middle school playground regularly. Yes, there are dangers. I could tell you about the time my youngest son and his best friend stepped on the same rusty nail. Only boys could manage something so awkward and painful. The way they screamed made me think a snake had bitten them. This required a trip to the emergency room and a tetanus shot. But other than that, my kids’ injuries and their friends’ injuries have occurred playing organized sports. I think that’s where the danger is: kids egged on to be ever more aggressive in order to win, win, win. The wilderness provides an environment for a child’s interior life to develop because it requires him to remain constantly aware of his surroundings.

  The Most Important Thing Parents Can Do

  I am not suggesting that spending time in nature inoculates children against danger—certainly no scientific research supports that theory. But I do contend that nature-play offers residual safety benefits, and that some of the conventional approaches we take to protect children are less effective than we believe them to be. Parents can do other things, as well, to lessen the fear.

  During a wave of national stranger-danger fear, CNN’s Paula Zahn asked Marc Klaas what we can do to protect our kids. Like most of us, Klaas would have preferred never to think about the question. In 1993, on a moonlit night, his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, was snatched from her Petaluma, California, home and later murdered. Klaas went on to become a familiar face on television, a voice for missing children. Politicians paraded him as a poster-father for California’s Proposition 184—the “three strikes” law. Vote for it, he and they said, and you’ll be preventing future murders of children like Polly.

  Just before the balloting, however, Klaas changed his mind. The law, he had concluded, would fill already bulging prisons with pot smokers and poachers, and the deeper root of child endangerment was something that that particular law wouldn’t reach. When Zahn asked him for parental advice, he said, yes, we need to realize that if kidnappers can “get those children out of their bedrooms, every child in America is a child that is at risk.” But, he added, “we have to dispel this whole notion of stranger-danger and substitute some other rules.” Parents and children do have power. Children “should trust their feelings,” he said. “They should fight abductors. They should put distance between themselves and whatever is making them feel badly. And then certainly they should also understand that there are certain kinds of strangers that they can go to.”

  Others have made this point. Don’t just tell your kids about evil; teach them about good—teach them to seek out adults who can help them when they feel threatened. Teaching appropriate trust is more difficult than teaching fear, but just as important. As Klaas said, “Kids want the information that’s going to enable them to protect themselves. What we have to do as parents is get over our fears and address the issue and talk to the kids.” Such advice doesn’t really apply to those occasions when children are snatched from their homes, but those instances are exceedingly rare. In an increasingly agoraphobic society, parents are most fearful of the potential out there—down the street, at the mall, in the canyon behind the house.

  So how do we adapt without locking our kids away from the richness of community and nature?

  Klaas offered one suggestion. “I would say that one thing that we should really seriously consider for children that are ten years of age and over is to get them their own cell phone so that we can have 24/7 contact with them at all times. And I’m not shilling for any cell phone company. I truly believe that this is one of the answers that we’re seeking.”

  Several years ago, during another wave of stranger-danger hysteria, I asked David Finklehor, the University of New Hampshire sociologist I cited earlier, what he considered the most important thing parents could do to protect their children. He touched on something at the core of the bogeyman syndrome. “There are an awful lot of programs out there today trying to teach personal safety to children,” he said. “But I honestly think the most important thing a parent can do is to have a good, supportive relationship with the child, because a child who has good self-esteem, good self-confidence, a closer relationship with the parents, is much less likely to be victimized. Our studies show that. Predatory people are not as likely to mess with them, because the predator senses that these are kids who will tell, who can’t be fooled or conned. The studies show that most kids who are victimized are also emotionally neglected, or they come from intensely unhappy families, or suffer other deprivations.”

  So there is one key to facing the bogeyman, not necessarily related to nature. The time we give our children builds their self-esteem and self-confidence, and this gives them armor they can take with them the rest of their lives. The most important protection we can give them is our love and our time. If curing the bogeyman syndrome were as simple as a five-step program (beyond the usual law-enforcement bromides), the cure might look something like this:

  • Spend more time with your children; educate them about the human dangers, but in the context of building self-confidence, sensory awareness, and knowledge of the many people they can trust.

  • Increase the amount of positive adult contact that your children receive from good adults.

  • Know your neighbors: reinvest in the life of the block and the surrounding community; encourage your children to know trustworthy adults in their neighborhoods.

  • If your child is going beyond your visual contact, encourage him or her to play with a group of peers rather than alone. (Unfortunately, solitary experience in nature must sometimes be discouraged, if the alternative is no nature at all.)

  • Employ technology. Tracking bracelets may be overdoing it, but a cell phone can be a life preserver. Just as children once carried Swiss army knives into the woods, today they should carry mobile ph
ones.

  As a parent, I must admit, even the act of making such a list feels inadequate and unsatisfying. On the one hand, I resist the idea that solitude is a luxury; on the other, I must be honest about the fact that my own fear is one of the reasons that my boys have not enjoyed as much physical freedom as I did when I was young. Still, I know it’s time to put fear in its place: to acknowledge that what happens to any of us is beyond our absolute control, and that 98 percent of what can go wrong never does. The 2 percent factor is no small thing. Nature, however, is part of the solution. Let me offer here an unconventional thesis, a sixth step: To increase your child’s safety, encourage more time outdoors, in nature. Natural play strengthens children’s self-confidence and arouses their senses—their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.

  Although we have plenty of reasons to worry about our children, a case can be made that we endanger our children by separating them too much from nature, and that the reverse is also true—that we make them safer, now and in the future, by exposing them to nature.

  Assessing Ice; Discovering Beauty

  Ideally, a child learns to negotiate both city and country. Mastering each environment builds the senses and common sense. Is there something special about the experience in nature, at least a quality that sharpens a young person’s senses? Wonderful possibilities await researchers wanting to explore that unknown frontier. Surely the width and depth of nature, the added mystery—the catalogue of sounds and smells and sights—is larger than the relatively short and known list of urban stimulations. In the city or suburb, much of our energy is spent blocking sounds and stimulants. Do we actually hear the honking of cabs—do we want to? In a forest, our ears are open—the honking of geese overhead enlivens us, and when enlivened, human senses grow and develop.

  Some parents see another connection—between positive nature-risk and openness to beauty. In New Hampshire, David Sobel consciously uses nature to teach his daughter safety. He calls it “assessing ice”:

  This experience is a rite of passage. I am trying to teach her the process of assessing thin ice, literally and metaphorically. We go out on the ice together and assess the structural integrity of the ice: what’s risky and fun, and what’s too risky. Through these experiences, I help her begin to be able to assess situations. Whether this began consciously or intentionally on my part, that’s the effect. Crossing the ice, I teach her to read cracks, the ways of figuring out ice thickness and texture, to see the places where there is current—this is where ice is thick; this is where it is thin. I teach her how you must spread out when you have to cross really thin ice, to carry a stick with you, all of these intentional ways of assessing risk on the ice and being prepared.

  A child could gain the same kind of experience and ability to assess a dangerous environment in a city, riding a bus or a subway. But Sobel, as an expert on nature’s role in education, suggests that nature’s life-instruction provides a mysterious and probably irreplaceable quality. He believes that the kinesthetic original experience of risk-taking in the natural world is closer to the natural organic way we’ve learned for millennia, and that the other experiences don’t reach as deeply.

  Listening to him, I wondered about this unnamed intensity of learning and hyperawareness. Is this quality, perhaps, linked simply to beauty, to those natural shapes and musical sounds that draw our souls to nature? Sobel thought about that question for a moment, and then said, yes, that made sense to him. He said he often cites a quote from a woman who narrowly survived California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, one that killed at least sixty-two people and injured another thirty-seven hundred. This woman believed that the earthquake, far from destroying her life, saved it. She had been combating a borderline psychological state at the time, and then the earthquake came. She said later that the process of coming to terms with this massive natural act was more effective than any of the therapy she had received. Something about that experience shook her back to earth. “The phrase that stood out, from what she said,” recalled Sobel, “is the diagnosis she came up with for herself. She said she had suffered from a ‘distance from beauty.’ That idea has become a part of me. I know when I am suffering from that distance from beauty. The solution for me is to find my way back to a closeness with nature.”

  He is determined that his daughter not suffer from this distance, that she find nature, that she walk in beauty, and that she understand the ice. Though self-confidence and awareness can come from experiencing nature, the generations do not go to nature to find safety or justice. They go to find beauty. Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.

  15. Telling Turtle Tales: Using Nature as a Moral Teacher

  Let Nature be your teacher.

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  FOR MY FAMILY, spring brought tornadoes and turtles. Just as the twisters roared up from Oklahoma and crossed over to the hills of eastern Kansas and western Missouri, the box turtles began their migration. The blacktop roads and cement highways would be dotted with spinners, crawlers, and splotches. Spinners were what we called those turtles that, while traveling to turtle Mecca, took a glancing blow from a tire, flipped over, and spun like tops. Crawlers and splotches were . . . self-explanatory.

  Each year, my parents would load my brother and me into the Dodge and ride the road to save the turtles.

  When we saw a spinner or a crawler, my father would brake the car and my mother would jump out, white blouse fluttering in the wind, shoot across the pavement—sometimes dodging cars—and grab the turtle. Often she would race back to the car with a turtle in each hand. She would deposit these lonesome travelers on the backseat floor mat, at my brother’s and my feet. As we rode along on this mercy mission, we would collect as many as a couple dozen turtles.

  Then my father would turn the wheel and head back home, weaving to avoid the new waves of crawlers and spinners.

  The saved souls were deposited in what we called “the turtle pit” at the base of the backyard, under the shade of a hedge. Beyond the hedge were cornfields, and beyond those fields woods that went on forever (at least in my imagination). Under the hedge, my father dug a pit, lined it with chicken wire, pushed dirt back over the wire mesh, and then folded a flap of chicken wire over the top of the pit. He weighted the wire at the edges with stakes and rocks. Into the pit went the crawlers and the spinners. Each summer, I spent hours under the cool shade of the hedge, on my belly, peering into Turtle World. I fed berries and lettuce to the turtles, studied the patterns of their shells, the veined colors of their faces, the way they bobbed their heads, the way they defecated.

  A hefty old turtle named Theodore was my favorite. He was a circumspect turtle. At first frost, I would lift the flap of wire and pick the turtles up and walk down into the brown, crackling cornfield and release my summer friends. Except for Theodore, who hibernated in our basement. One spring, Theodore did not awaken. I cried and wrapped him in toilet paper and gave him a decent burial near Turtle World. My mother attended the funeral.

  I often think about the crawlers and spinners that would have been splotches, and sometimes I wonder if other parents cruise for box turtles in the spring, their children in the backseat, still in their pajamas.

  Today, some folks would frown at a boy collecting turtles. But unless a child is collecting endangered species, the aggregate of good outweighs the damage to nature. Turtle collecting (and later, collecting snakes, which lived temporarily in a terrarium in the garage) offered me a hands-on experience with nature, and it was one of those acts that brought my family together. Biologically, we are not that many generations removed from the hunting and gathering family, in which each member of a family or clan had important work to do. That may give turtle-collecting undue weight, but I do remember that strange and wonderful feeling on turtle road, and I felt it, too, when my parents and brother and I fished together, because then we were whole.

  The Case for Fishing and Hunting

  For r
easons that have more to do with emotion than reason, I don’t hunt, nor do I encourage my boys to hunt—and they are appalled at the idea that others hunt. I acknowledge that there is slim moral logic dividing hunting and fishing, but I am prejudiced in favor of fishing as a way for children and adults to experience something beyond the voyeurism that sometimes passes for nature experience. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” In my childhood family, there was no clear line between carp and the garbage can. Like many folks, I come from a family obsessed with fishing, but we weren’t snooty about it. In fact, we leaned toward carp, which, unless you know how to cook them, are inedible. We heard rumors that some people knew how to tenderize them with a pressure cooker. So, my father, being a chemist, experimented with this technique. A vague recollection of an explosion and flying carp pâté sticks in my mind.

  To my delight, both my sons understand the healing qualities of nature. Matthew has claimed fishing and now birding, too, as his own medicine, and I suspect these will help him thrive the rest of his life.

  Fishing is not a solely male activity. Women comprise the fastest growing segment of fly-fishing. “I almost hate to call it fishing,” says Margot Page, who lives in Vermont and calls herself a “fishermom.” A well-known fly-fisher, she’s passing the fishing tradition on to her daughter. “I’d rather call it water treatment. Yes, it’s about the line and these wild flashes of light you see in the stream, but it’s really the water that we go to and the water we’ve always gone to. When you become more familiar with the creatures that inhabit water, you are drawn to see them, to connect somehow. But it starts with the water.”