Dangerously Underdiagosed: "Nature-Deficit Disorder"

[I]n a world of intractable problems and social malaise, his encouragement to parents is simple and easily achieved: Take your kids outside.

That's Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, in an interview in Grist, the online environmental magazine.

After tens of thousands of years of children playing and working primarily outdoors, the last few generations have seen such interaction with nature vanish almost entirely. The implications -- for children's physical and mental health, and for the future of environmentalism -- are immense, Louv argues.

To me, this cannot be too strongly emphasized. If that makes me "crunchy," then proudly I crunch.

We know that the human brain, sensorium and soul evolved in intimate immersion in, and interaction with, a natural world of infinitely finer detail and subtlety than any human creation -- yes, even HDTV! -- can remotely approach. Human survival, attention, and awe are all the offspring of the indissoluble, so you'd think, marriage between the natural and the social worlds. (Am I leaving God out? Well, who made it that way?)

We've dissolved it. Divorced them, and driven one parent away. Our children's brains today are activated by a marriage between the social and technological worlds. In other words, one of our "parents" is married to a robot, and that "parent" too -- society -- is accordingly degraded. The kids go haywire.

That's a general observation on the macro scale. On the micro scale, I grew up in a part of a big city -- Chicago's south side -- that was still immersed in nature. We all had not just front lawns -- yawns -- but drowsy, overgrown back yards that drifted ankle deep in cottonwood fluff, where a riot of weeds and flowers pushed up out of the black prairie earth and were visited by many kinds of butterflies; where you could sit for hours watching birds mate, beetles trundle, and spiders rush out along their webs to truss up their struggling prey. Across from my house was a whole block of open park, and on one side of that was a half-block of fenced-in, original wild prairie that some rich guy owned and had never developed. Naturally we found, or made, a hole under the fence and we'd wriggle in there and lose ourselves in Indian fantasies, always with an edge of risk that the rich guy's German shepherds would get us. I netted, chloroformed and mounted butterflies; caught caterpillars and watched them pupate in a jar of leaves; filled jars with fireflies and punctured the lid, then let them go again; filled the pockets of my raincoat with rescued earthworms that had emerged onto the sidewalk to breathe. (Don't even get me started on my childhood experiences in Florida, which are all being reactivated as we speak, along with grief and anger at the extent to which this natural paradise has been developed and exploited to the brink of destruction. James Hillman thinks this is a major unacknowledged source of the current epidemic of depression. Can't find a handy link but I know it's in his book with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.)

Boys had a special relationship to the outdoors. Not only baseball games but snowball forts, war games, tree climbing (me too!), scouting expeditions through the wilderness. Books and nature fed back and forth into each other: books gave us stories to act out in our mini-wild, from "Maya the Bee" to "White Fang."

I wouldn't know myself without those experiences. I suspect I'd be at best mentally impoverished, restless, hungry for I knew not what, and at worst slightly retarded, ADD'd, quite possibly psychotic or psychopathic.

Louv has nailed something terribly, terribly important that, like global warming, has been going on under our noses unnoticed.

This is my seventh book, and the second was called Childhood's Future. I went across the country to interview 3,000 parents and kids about the landscape of family life, which was radically changing. One theme that surprised me was this sense that something profound was changing in the relationship between children and nature.

One little boy said the reason he preferred playing indoors was that's where all the electrical outlets are. I heard that kind of thing over and over. And the parents were saying, "I don't understand -- how come the kids won't go outside?" [ . . . ]

We know what kids do: 44 hours a week plugged into electronic media, more time in the car, organized sports, all of that. [ . . . ] There's empirical work measuring the radius kids tend to go away from their house. I think between 1970 and 1994 it shrunk to one-ninth of what it had been. There are a few studies like that.

But the really interesting research is linking nature to healthy child development. Oddly enough, this topic has not been studied. Now it's starting to be. A lot of it comes out of the biophilia hypothesis. ["A somewhat controversial hypothesis put forward by Edward O. Wilson [ . . . ] that humans evolved as creatures deeply enmeshed with the intricacies of nature, and that we still have this affinity with nature ingrained in our genotype."] In all the studies -- prisoners in prisons, people in the infirmary -- those who have a view of a natural landscape heal faster. Now they're observing kids playing on natural playgrounds, as opposed to concrete playgrounds. On a natural playground, children think more creatively and are much more likely to invent their own games and play more cooperatively.

There's research on attention-deficit disorder at the University of Illinois, ongoing studies showing that a little bit of exposure to nature decreases ADD symptoms -- even in kids as young as 5. The researchers suggest we add nature therapy to the other two traditional therapies: behavioral modification and Ritalin and other stimulants.

I would also turn it around and ask: Could it be that at least some of the huge increase in ADD has something to do with the fact we took nature away from kids? [ . . . ]

When you think about it, for tens of thousands of years children spent much of their childhood playing or working in natural settings. Within the space of two or three decades in Western society, particularly in the United States, that's in danger of ending. This is a radical change in a very short period of time. It's got to have important, perhaps profound implications for mental health, physical health, and spiritual health -- for who we are.

Amen, amen, amen. And why has this happened? Louv, no Luddite, admits that videogames and computers are part of the problem -- "fun, and very distracting, and very convenient for parents [ . . . but] I do think it's a little tough to have a sense of wonder while you're playing Grand Theft Auto" -- but that doesn't explain it all, nor does lack of access to nature: "if you go to the new edge of Kansas City, it looks just like where I grew up. Kids can walk out their back door into the woods if they want. Parents there say the same thing: kids aren't going outside."

The biggest reason, Louv says, is FEAR -- parental dread about child molestation and abduction, fanned by ratings-driven media sensationalism:

That fear is changing our lives. The irony is, when you look at the statistics on abductions, almost all are by family members, and the number of abductions has been going down for about a decade. There's a Duke University study from last year that says kids are safer outside the home than at any time since the 1970s.

If those numbers are going down, what's going up? I'm afraid it's people in our [media] profession. [ . . . ] You watch CNN or Fox or MSNBC and they take a handful of really terrible crimes against children and repeat them over and over and over again. When they get done telling us about the crime, they tell us about the trial over and over and over again. It's no accident people think there's a bogeyman on every corner. We're literally being conditioned to live in a state of fear.

Then he talks about other kinds of risk. The risk of falling out of a tree and breaking an arm compared to the risk of repetitive-stress injuries from working the joystick. Guess what? The former will heal. The latter may not.

And then there's the fear of litigation and all the safety regulations. One chapter in Louv's book is titled "The Criminalization of Natural Play."

Grist shrewdly asks, "Most of what you cite are instrumental benefits: better at school, or more well-adjusted. Is that tactical?"

That's what's been studied.

But there's a chapter near the end of the book called "The Spiritual Necessity of Nature for Children." The most important word in the book to me is "wonder." The root of all spiritual life is that early sense of wonder. When was the first time you had that sense of wonder? [ . . . I] remember going out and turning over rocks, and seeing a universe of bugs that lived underneath -- a parallel universe. [ . . . ]

One of the things that's surprised me: I thought I would get some grief from conservative Christians over nature worship. [ . . . ]

[A]s it turns out one of the big proponents of the book is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Whatever one's spirituality, I think we all understand deep down that a sense of wonder is the beginning of it.

Solutions? Some are being planned: "Green urbanism," "eco-towns." Some are readily found, but need to be preserved: "nearby nature."

Perhaps you have a ravine behind your house, or a little woods at the end of the cul-de-sac. That is hugely important to children. Adults sometimes can't see the importance of it because they expect nature to be so much bigger, but to that child, that ravine is a universe.

Read what happened to some San Diego gang members when they were taken out to the wilderness to cut brush by the Urban Corps. One of them made a very astute observation:

The first morning in the woods, I realized these guys were terrified. [ . . . ] One guy said, "It's too noisy out here." I said, "What are you talking about? You're from a neighborhood where you hear gunfire in the background." He says, "Yeah, but there's about four or five sounds in my neighborhood and I know what they all mean. There are a lot of sounds out here and they seem to mean something, but I don't know what it is."

He was hearing, for the first time, the forgotten language our senses and brain are pre-tuned to.

I call this the week's must-read. Here's Part I of the interview, and here's Part Two, and here's the single best line:

If we were really interested in education reform we'd have a "No Child Left Inside" movement.

(Hat tip: Perchance to Dream.)

It amazes me that E.O. Wilson's The Biophilia Hypothesis was published in 1984, (!) and only now are we able to hear lines like these:

I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.

(Oh irony -- I've just spent what feels like several hours inside at the computer, composing this post.)

Comments

[david]

Love this post. And it conforms to my thoughts as to why, as Jews, we're so alienated from from our religion: because it is a religion in and of the natural world, from which we Western Jews particularly are largely disassociated. (Hence the working title of my next book, "Judaism Unplugged", thanks to you;)).

[Tom Strong]

Damn, amba (Damnba?). That's powerful stuff.

You may be interested in this organization - they're based in Milwaukee and Chicago. I am, unsurprisingly, a fan.

[reader_iam]

Great Lost Words Of Motherhood:

"Go play outside. And don't come home unless you're bleeding."

Those were the days.

[reader_iam]

My son had a great time last year "growing" a butterfly from a caterpillar he'd found outside and put in a "nature-catcher" (screened sides and top, with door) box he'd gotten for his birthday.

Only problem was, when the the butterfly emerged (and boy, was that wondrous), its wings were too large to safely remove it through the door.

So THEN he got a lesson on how (using the proper tools--his dad's quite the handy dude, and we have child-size REAL tools to match his dad's) to dismantle the box without hurting the creature AND while making sure the box could then be repaired for re-use. Of course, this also included instruction and practice in organization, patience, yadda yadda yadda, which was the hardest part.

You should have seen his face when that butterfly flew free, unhurt!

So it used to go, regularly.

[Kevin]

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this. After reading this, I made sure to set aside some time yesterday, so my 2 1/2 year old daughter and I could just hang out in our back yard. We walked around and looked at all the new plants just starting to grow with the spring. Needless to say, she thought it was great.

[karen]

Thank you for the sacrifice of time in writing and linking this piece- it's great.

I'm lucky in that I grew up outside; just about. We even had an ol canvas tent that i can still smell in memory- where we'd sleep on summer nights.

Up here, we see ducks, geese, fox, deer, turkeys, bear and(last night) a moose. We are blest.