I'm reading Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Louv says that it is only in the last thirty years or so that children don't have access to the outdoors. Partly because of the parents' fears, partly because of disappearing habitat, partly because of rules set by municipalities, children spend their days with their computers and indoor games. They don't take their bikes off on adventures. They don't play with other children at twilight, catching fireflies. They don't build tree houses.
It certainly wasn't like that when I was a child. By the time I was six or seven, I regularly hiked alone to the woods at the edge of our eighty acre farm. I wandered around looking for wild flowers, watching rabbits and squirrels. "The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses,” Louv said and it was true for me.
It was also true for my son. Chris and his friends built ramps to do tricks with their bikes. Today, the police would be there to tear down the ramps, to warn the boys that what they are doing is dangerous and send them home. Chris was out having adventures I knew nothing about which is as it should be.
But we saw the beginning of that obsession with safety. Soon after we moved to this house, someone in the neighborhood called me on the telephone and said, "Do you know what your son is up to? He's climbing a tree."
I went to the back yard and looked and sure enough, Chris had gone up a box elder. Furthermore, he and his friend Scott were building a tree house. They hadn't gotten very far.
I thought about it and realized that when we lived in duplex in a suburb in Illinois or when we lived in trailer parks, there were no trees worth climbing, just little "Charlie Brown" trees no taller than me.
There was only one thing to do.
The neighbor never called me again with a complaint about Chris. She figured out she was dealing with one crazy woman. Or a woman who didn't want a nature deficient child.
Louv says that it is only in the last thirty years or so that children don't have access to the outdoors. Partly because of the parents' fears, partly because of disappearing habitat, partly because of rules set by municipalities, children spend their days with their computers and indoor games. They don't take their bikes off on adventures. They don't play with other children at twilight, catching fireflies. They don't build tree houses.
It certainly wasn't like that when I was a child. By the time I was six or seven, I regularly hiked alone to the woods at the edge of our eighty acre farm. I wandered around looking for wild flowers, watching rabbits and squirrels. "The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses,” Louv said and it was true for me.
It was also true for my son. Chris and his friends built ramps to do tricks with their bikes. Today, the police would be there to tear down the ramps, to warn the boys that what they are doing is dangerous and send them home. Chris was out having adventures I knew nothing about which is as it should be.
But we saw the beginning of that obsession with safety. Soon after we moved to this house, someone in the neighborhood called me on the telephone and said, "Do you know what your son is up to? He's climbing a tree."
I went to the back yard and looked and sure enough, Chris had gone up a box elder. Furthermore, he and his friend Scott were building a tree house. They hadn't gotten very far.
I thought about it and realized that when we lived in duplex in a suburb in Illinois or when we lived in trailer parks, there were no trees worth climbing, just little "Charlie Brown" trees no taller than me.
There was only one thing to do.
The neighbor never called me again with a complaint about Chris. She figured out she was dealing with one crazy woman. Or a woman who didn't want a nature deficient child.
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