Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (24 page)

We need to draw an important distinction between a constructively bored mind and a negatively numbed mind. Constructively bored kids eventually turn to a book, or build a fort, or pull out the paints (or the computer art program) and create, or come home sweaty from a game of neighborhood basketball. There are a few things that parents and other caregivers can do to nurture constructive boredom, which can often increase children’s openness to nature.

• First: A bored child often needs to spend more time with a parent or other positive adult. Indeed, complaints of boredom may be cries for a parent’s attention. Parents or other adults need to be there for their kids, to limit the time they play video games or watch TV, to take them to the library or on long walks in nature, to take them fishing—to help them detach from electronics long enough for their imaginations to kick in.

• Second: Turn off the TV. Any parent who has punished a child by taking away TV privileges and then watched that child play—slowly at first, then imaginatively, freely—will recognize the connection between time, boredom, and creativity. “There’s something about television—maybe that it provides so much in the way of audio and visual stimulations that children don’t have to generate very much on their own,” says Aletha Shuston, co-director of the Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children at the University of Kansas.

• Third (and this advice pertains to summer programs as well as to time at home): Find a balance between adult direction and child boredom. Too much boredom can lead to trouble; too much supervision
can kill constructive boredom—and the creativity that comes with it. “I structure some unstructured time for [my students], times when they can just draw or paint or read and dream, or especially to go outside, with no deadlines or commutes to lessons,” says Kafka. “I realize that sounds paradoxical—structuring unstructured time, but you’ve got to do it.”

Sympathetic employers can help. Kafka has the summers off since she works as a teacher. Other parents work at home, either with home businesses or in the traditional stay-at-home role. Today, most parents don’t have that kind of flexibility, but they need more (flexible summer workplace hours, for instance) if they’re going to guide their kids to use boredom wisely.

Parents can also help push for additional funding for community-based summer recreation programs. Summer camps are godsends to many working parents, especially single parents. A good summer program can literally mean survival for some children who live in rough neighborhoods. Some programs make room for dreamtime. “Adventure playgrounds” provide kids with a supervised (by an adult, at a distance) vacant lot filled with old tires, boards, tools—and places to build and dig. Supervised nature programs help children explore without excessive direction. And teen centers allow teenagers, rather than adults, to create the recreation. Such programs deserve extra support.

Most of all, children need adults who understand the relationship between boredom and creativity, adults willing to spend time in nature with kids, adults willing to set the stage so that kids can create their own play and enter nature through their own imaginations.

Ordinarily, the first physical entry point into nature is the backyard; next come adjacent natural areas, if we’re lucky enough to live near them. Yet, many parents who live next to woods, fields, canyons, and creeks say their children never play in those areas—either because of
the parents’ or child’s fear of strangers, or because the kids are just not interested.

Billy Campbell, a South Carolina physician and conservationist, understands that a child’s interest in the frontiers around his own home is not usually accidental. He believes the biggest problems faced by children are not the absence of experiences in dramatically picturesque wilderness, but the lack of day-to-day contact with the elements. In addition to the usual barriers, Campbell believes that lack of interest in the outdoors may have something to do with the media’s presentation of nature, which can be wonderfully educational, but also overwhelmingly dramatic and extreme. “So kids feel they’re not getting enough action. If they don’t see a grizzly bear rip apart a caribou calf, then it is boring.”

Campbell grew up in the woods—playing army; catching minnows; collecting bird eggs, snakeskins, and bugs. He believes these experiences had a drama all their own and profoundly shaped who he became as an adult. Today, his family’s yard joins several hundred acres of woods in a rural area, but he has not assumed that his daughter, Raven, now a teenager, would find the mystery of those woods on her own. He and his wife have consciously introduced her to that more intimate drama:

We took Raven on long hikes before she could walk. We walked to the creek or pond five days a week. We invented games where she would run ahead—we would do sign language of where to go next. She still walks through the one-hundred-year-old woods several times a week to visit her cousins (about 250 yards away). We picked up treasures and brought them home. By the time she was ten, she thought nothing about a six- to ten-mile hike with two thousand feet of climbing. . . . The point is that for Raven, it is just a part of her world. She never remembers it being some once-a-year thing. She appreciates natural beauty.

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.

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 [seeing] 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.