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Nature-Deficit Disorder: Nature Helps Kids Keep Their Eyes On The Ball



 
 
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Old July 24th 06, 10:13 PM posted to misc.kids,misc.kids.health,alt.parenting.solutions,rec.scouting.usa,rec.backcountry
Fred Goodwin, CMA
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Default Nature-Deficit Disorder: Nature Helps Kids Keep Their Eyes On The Ball

Nature-Deficit Disorder: Nature Helps Kids Keep Their Eyes On The Ball

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/10120/

By Todd Wilkinson, 7-24-06

When was the last time you heard local law enforcement officials blame
violent behavior and drug use in our kids on teenagers spending too
many hours outdoors, recreating, in nature?

When have you ever been warned by pediatricians that kids who like to
hike with their parents have higher rates of obesity and juvenile
diabetes than their slacker, video game playing, cola-drinking
counterparts?

In the daily newspaper, I read an observation from a county sheriff who
expressed his opinion that many recent young offenders committing
criminal acts had a passion for playing video games in which simulated
murder and virtual bloodletting were the skill sets needed to
"win".

Mow down the competition using an Uzi or AK; watch the targets hit the
ground on their backs with a thud and marvel at the flash of red for
added special effects. Steel the eyes, pull the trigger without
reflection, enter the tunnel of catatonia.

Now swagger forth though the hallways of your school afterward,
reminding your best buds how cool it was to splatter those dudes.

Gosh, it seems "so real."

Should any of us be surprised by what the sheriff said?

Are we parents paying attention?

Apparently not.

Even in the relatively rural wild West, in communities where
opportunities for enjoying nature abound, many of our kids are
chronically detached from an environment that sharpens their senses
rather than deadens it.

The problem of "nature-deficit disorder", the subject of Richard
Louv's book, "Last Child in the Woods," struck home a couple of
summers ago when I helped organize a camping trip for pre-teen players
on the hockey team I coach. The mom and dad of one of the boys
graciously invited us out to their ranch on the edge of a mountain
range for a retreat.

My goal was to try and build team camaraderie by removing the boys from
an environment that was routinely familiar to them. I had no idea how
radical it would be.

We spent a couple of days there hiking, swimming, shooting hockey pucks
against a makeshift net along the side of a barn, catching snakes,
watching badgers, feeding the horses, being out exposed to the ambient
elements and natural sounds instead of having the lads plopped on a
couch, in a darkened room, killing simulated cops and make-believe
brown-skinned terrorist foes in which the object of their role playing
and hand-eye coordination, it would seem, is to be a gang banger.

Let it be known that during my days as a violent crime journalist in
Chicago, I interacted with lots of detectives who were called to the
aftermath of real-life gangsta gunplay. I challenge anyone to argue
that those grim scenes had any redeeming virtue in them. At the Cook
County Morgue, I can tell you there was no adrenalin-driven euphoria or
high fives. The smell of formaldehyde, the wails of moms and dads (some
of them single women abandoned by their spouses), and the face of
blunt-trauma carnage were the terminus for what the sheriff, above, was
talking about.

For those who think this is a subtle dig at guns, it isn't. I hunt. I
own shotguns stored out of reach under lock and key. I aim to teach my
son and daughter, when the times comes, the personal responsibility
that accompanies firearms, the consideration one must have with taking
an animal's life and eating it, obeying the law, the role we play in
making room for wildlife in the natural outdoor world, and the joy that
comes with simply being outdoors in the autumn.

During our hockey team's sojourn to the countryside, it quickly became
apparent that some of the kids, despite living in the Gallatin Valley
their entire lives, had never been on a hike or hunt to the national
forest that begins a few miles from their front door.

They had never seen a garter snake in the wild, never held a frog in
their hands, never swam in a farm pond, never enjoyed an evening
counting stars in the night sky.

They had never played in a natural setting long enough not to fear it.

These rough and tumble warriors, some of whom, like a significant
number of their peers across the nation who suffer from ADD, could
recite by rote the entire menu at McDonald's or the sexually
explicit, gender demeaning lyrics to a hip-hop song, or tell you, with
giddiness in their voices, how many virtual people they had dispatched
in their X-Box games (or other players they injured playing virtual NHL
with their thumbs), but they had trepidation putting a worm on a fish
hook.

I was floored.

Some were surprisingly out of shape and markedly overweight, dubious of
any reward that could come from trekking a couple of miles to the top
of a bluff for views of an uncluttered, breathtaking panorama. I was
dumbstruck when one boy declared, as we crested the hill and witnessed
the sunset: "This is boring. When can we get back to the tent so I
can play my Game Boy."

His thoughts were lost to a different horizon.

Was I missing something?

Is it right for me to judge? Perhaps not.

I apologize to any guilty parents I'm offending who believe that
raising latchkey kids and surrendering their mentorship duties to a
joystick is their God-given right. If espousing fitness and expecting
parents to get theirs kids outdoors more is elitist, then explain how
the budget allows for Nintendo GameCubes, big-screened TVs, premium
cable and a diet of fast food?

Here's a revelation Westerners may also find of interest which Louv
offered in an interview with Sarah Karnasiewicz of Salon.com. She asked
if nature-deficit is most acute in cities. "A major study came out a
few months ago that said that the rate of obesity in children is
growing faster in rural areas than it is in cities and suburbs," Louv
said. "Again, it seems counterintuitive. But it's not so
counterintuitive when you think about the fact that the family farm is
fairly nonexistent now. Kids in rural areas are playing the same video
games, watching the same television, and they're on longer car
rides."

I acknowledge humbly: It is a constant battle in our family to remain
vigilant. It requires persistence. It means making your kids unhappy.
We've come close to getting rid of the television completely only to
retreat out of lack of will power. We succumb to hypocrisy. My wife and
I are not perfect parents.

But our kids are well aware that the universe does revolve around them.
They know that we control the kinds of foods that are in the pantry.
They know that skipping schoolwork means losing their sports and other
coveted privileges. They know the value of exercise. And, whenever
possible, we try consciously to have them take notice of things
happening in the outdoor green spaces, wherever we find them, and to
dwell in those moments.

Studies show and Louv's book makes clear the pandemic of future
health care costs, learning problems and an inability to relate to one
another on human terms that we're foisting on young people. Those
costs will come due on society itself. Simple actions taken to prevent
the onset of juvenile diabetes now prevents exponential financial
burdens later, not to mention thwarting lifestyle misery for the people
we love.

But more than that, we're compromising our kids ability to foster
connections to the world around them and stifling their emotional
development. Rather than showing them how to find solace or beauty in
the countryside, we've taught them to bond with a hand-held toy that
gives them instant gratification and reinforces a "me-first before
anyone else" sense of self.

Another insight that has revealed itself the longer I've been in the
youth coaching ranks: The parents who are the most indulgent with their
kids, who refuse to draw lines in the sand with their offspring's
personal behavior; who de-emphasize schoolwork, who shrug off good
nutrition and fitness, and who aspire to be their kids' best friends
rather than role models; these are the parents who also tend to be "the
screamers" along the sidelines who put themselves before the team and
who are the bane of coaches, fans and wring the lifeblood out of
amateur athletics.

A coincidence?

Where did we go wrong?

The catalysts, experts say, are many beyond the lack of attentive,
conscientious parenting. Louv says we're filling our kids' lives
up, in some cases, not only with over-choreographed activities and
electronic gadgetry that undermine their ability to think for
themselves, but we've made them fearful of going outside based upon
an exaggerated sense of danger.

How many times have you heard this: "Don't ride your bike to the park,
Johnny and Sally."

"Why not, mom?"

"Because you might get abducted by all the kooks who are out there."

Louv takes a shot at lawyers and overbearing parents who together have
forced governments and communities to design parks that don't hold the
same powerful allure to kids that they used to. God knows we certainly
don't want parks landscaped with schrubs and bushes that gangs of kooks
can lurk behind. And don't put a park near a body of water because,
gosh sakes, the kids might drown when they're enjoying themselves
fishing and swimming.

"What we usually design is really more 'lawyer-friendly' [parks] than
'child-friendly'," Louv says, noting that he supports tort reform.
"This is a litigious society, and a lot of the places you are talking
about have been designed by attorneys, not park designers. But there is
interplay between the fear of lawsuits and [parents'] fear of a
'bogeyman' that is going to hurt their children - indeed, they almost
have become one and the same."

The National Recreation and Park Association reports that 75 percent of
Americans live within a two-mile walking distance of a public park.
Public health officials will tell you there's far greater danger posed
to your kid's safety and health from physical inactivity and all the
grams of processed sugar they're ingesting than from child
predators-though it doesn't mean parents shouldn't pay attention or
not encourage their kids to play in groups.

During the 1990s, Louv observes, the radius around the home where
children were allowed to roam, due to parental paranoia, had shrunk to
one-ninth of what it had been two decades earlier.

We've also all heard of the rising asthma problem in kids. Our own
son was diagnosed with childhood asthma but it has become ameliorated
by spending more time outdoors being active and fit.

As Louv notes, kids today spend 90 percent of their time indoors where
air quality is generally between two and ten times WORSE than it is
outside. The irony is that parents may be stricter about not allowing
their children to recreate in nature but on the other hand they can be
completely permissive when it comes to video games.

How did we, proud and righteous Baby Boomer and Generation X parents
who vowed to never give our kids the same detached parenting given to
us, go from actually nostalgically recounting our carefree childhoods
during the Wonder Years to becoming so up tight about our kids' need
to be overachievers and sports stars?

When did we become so manically neurotic in programming their waking
hours, so hand's on in micromanaging their play dates and yet so
hands' off and oblivious about other things happening before our
eyes?

A hopeful sign for me was that being outdoors for only a couple of days
seemed to influence the souls of our young hockey players. Nature, in
hindsight, was an adventure. Later that year, my assistant coach and I
called a time out during the middle of a hockey game that started on
the outdoor rink before sunrise. We told our kids to look to the east
as the gloaming day dawned over the Bridger Mountains. In 40 years of
playing the sport, I had never, in my life, witnessed something so
beautiful during a hockey game as when the red light beams of morning
bathed the kids on the ice.

We can only try to believe some of it soaked into the kids and their
parents. The reality is that many of the boys and girls have gone back
to their old routines. They may grow up not having the tools to teach
their own kids how to go outside in a sentient way-and I don't mean
skating into the brisk north wind on an outdoor hockey rink.

Their lack of connection to nature means that they could just as well
be living in an urban jungle instead of the northern Rockies with a
mountain view.

As Louv notes in "Last Child In the Woods", restoring our kids'
relationship to the wild West may not be a balm for all of society's
ills but it's not a bad place to start. Teaching them to keep their
eye on the ball or the puck doesn't mean just the objects at the tip of
their fingers; it's reminding them to lift their heads up and see a
bigger horizon.

 




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