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

by Richard Louv

There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf . . . —WALT WHITMAN

I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are. —A FOURTH-GRADER IN SAN DIEGO

Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

IF, WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, we tramped through forests of Nebraska cottonwoods, or raised pigeons on a rooftop in Queens, or fished for Ozark bluegills, or felt the swell of a wave that traveled a thousand miles before lifting our boat, then we were bound to the natural world and remain so today. Nature still informs our years—lifts us, carries us.

“nature,” which comes from the Latin natura—birth, constitution, character, course of things—and beyond natura, nasci—to be born.

natural wildness:

biodiversity, abundance—related loose parts in a backyard or a rugged mountain ridge. Most of all, nature is reflected in our capacity for wonder. Nasci. To be born.

Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idle days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, we were always outdoors. The kids who stayed indoors were the odd ones.

“Something else was different when we were young: our parents were outdoors.

I’m not saying they were joining health clubs and things of that sort, but they were out of the house, out on the porch, talking to neighbors. As far as physical fitness goes, today’s kids are the sorriest generation in the history of the United States. Their parents may be out jogging, but the kids just aren’t outside.”

What we’re talking about here is a transition made by most of us who grew up surrounded by nature. Now, nature’s just not there anymore.”

I also learned this: Parents, educators, other adults, institutions—the culture itself—may say one thing to children about nature’s gifts, but so many of our actions and messages—especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver—are different. And children hear very well.

In the space of a century, the American experience of nature—culturally influential around the world—has gone from direct utilitarianism to romantic attachment to electronic detachment.

Farm population had dwindled so much—from 40 percent of U.S. households in 1900 to just 1.9 percent in 1990—that the farm resident survey was irrelevant.

1st Frontier: Exploration of American land. 2nd Frontier: Romanticization of nature.

This new, symbolic demarcation line suggests that baby boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.

For today’s young people, that familial and cultural linkage to farming is disappearing, marking the end of the second frontier.

Not yet fully formed or explored, this new frontier is characterized by at least five trends: a severance of the public and private mind from our food’s origins; a disappearing line between machines, humans, and other animals; an increasingly intellectual understanding of our relationship with other animals; the invasion of our cities by wild animals (even as urban/suburban designers replace wildness with synthetic nature); and the rise of a new kind of suburban form.

In the third frontier, Beard’s romantic images of the outdoor child seem as outdated as nineteenth-century depictions of the Knights of the Round Table.

In the third frontier, heroes previously associated with the outdoors are irrelevant; the real Davy Crockett, who symbolized the first frontier, and even Disney’s Davy, from the second frontier, are gone and nearly forgotten.

A generation that came of age wearing buckskin jackets and granny dresses is now raising a generation for whom all fashion—piercing...

“You look at these kids [in the animal-rights movement], and you largely see urban, disaffected, but still privileged people,”

“The only animals the young animal rightists have ever known are their pets,” he says. “The only ones they’ve ever seen otherwise are in zoos, Sea World, or on whale-watching [now whale-touching] expeditions. They’ve disconnected from the sources of their food—even from the sources of the soy and other vegetable proteins they consume.”

“there is a sense that cities are and ought to be places where nature occurs. In the United States, a challenge remains to overcome the polar distinction between what is urban and what is natural.

Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order.

Public government also restricts children’s access to nature. For the most part the criminalization of natural play is more suggestive than real. However, in some communities, young people who try to recreate their parents’ childhoods may face misdemeanor charges or see their parents sued. In Pennsylvania, three brothers, ages eight, ten, and twelve, spent eight months and their own money to build a treehouse in their backyard. The district council ordered the boys to tear it down because they had no building permit. In Clinton, Mississippi, a family happily spent four thousand dollars to build an elaborate, two-story, Victorian-style tree house. They asked the city if a permit was necessary, and a city official said no. Five years later, the city planning and zoning department announced that the tree house must be demolished because it violated an ordinance prohibiting construction of an accessory building in front of a house.

Like our experience with our chickens and nasty neighbors! Discouraging children from the joys of being part of nature.

“We tell our kids that traditional forms of outdoor play are against the rules,” says Rick. “Then we get on their backs when they sit in front of the TV—and then we tell them to go outside and play. But where? How? Join another organized sport? Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.”

“To me, still being considered a kid, it can’t be too much to ask. We should have the same rights as adults did when they were young.”

“Based on previous studies, we can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” says Sallis, “and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.”

They found that farmlands, with their restricted use and lack of local supervision for children’s activities, did not offer the rural child more opportunities for outdoor experiences.

For example, new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.

Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.

Such knowledge may inspire us to choose a different path, one that leads to a nature-child reunion.

I bet I can live to a hundred if only I can get outdoors again. —GERALDINE PAGE AS CARRIE WATTS, in The Trip To Bountiful

She believed people are unlikely to value what they cannot name. “One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.”

By 1699, the book English Gardener advised the reader to spend “spare time in the garden, either digging, setting out, or weeding; there is no better way to preserve your health.”

Because of this fundamental concern, pediatricians now warn that today’s children may be the first generation of Americans since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents.

The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children’s sports in history.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

In Norway and Sweden, studies of preschool children show specific gains from playing in natural settings. The studies compared preschool children who played every day on typically flat playgrounds to children who played for the same amount of time among the trees, rocks, and uneven ground of natural play areas. Over a year’s time, the children who played in natural areas tested better for motor fitness, especially in balance and agility.

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child’s life.

over one hundred studies that confirm that one of the main benefits of spending time in nature is stress reduction.

But with landscape, it’s much more engaging, and you’re giving the child ways of expressing what’s within.”

As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything.

But the logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of “true” nature—the certainty that it’s not even worth looking at.

True, our experience of natural landscape “often occurs within an automobile looking out,” as Elaine Brooks said. But now even that visual connection is optional.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it?

More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching?

There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.

In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently.