Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (25 page)

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.

W
HEN 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.

W
E 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.

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:

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.”

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.

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.”