Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Louv, Richard (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

I wanted of outdoors and glorious summer weather. I had all the weather I needed in Tolkien’s books.” She was swept away, especially, by J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of nature, and cites this wonderful passage:

They were on an island in a sea of trees, and the horizon was veiled. On the southeastern side the ground fell very steeply, as if the slopes of the hill were continued far down under the trees, like island shores that really are the sides of a mountain rising out of deep waters. . . . In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow boughs were creaking.

Page after page of Tolkien’s books go on like this, using “more words in English to describe place than most of us use in a lifetime,” Kramer says. She read the trilogy to her seven-year-old son, giving him the gift of this story and, through it, her enthusiasm for the natural world.

A Brief History of Boredom

Especially during summer, parents hear the moaning complaint: “I’m borrrred.” Boredom is fear’s dull cousin. Passive, full of excuses, it can keep children from nature—or drive them to it.

In summers past (at least through the fog of memory), children were more likely to be pulled or forced out of their boredom. Most of the day, TV offered nothing except soaps and quiz games and an occasional cowboy movie—which made you want to leap up and head outside.

“Well, times have changed,” says Tina Kafka, the teacher I quoted earlier. A mother of three, she says, “Even if kids have all the unstructured time in the world, they’re not outside playing. They’re inside with their video games.” She recognizes how carefully planned activities pale in comparison to more spontaneous experiences in her children’s long-term memories. She wants to nurture magic in her children’s lives. But she’s also a realist. “Today, kids just don’t go out and play and ride their bikes that much. They’re more interested in electronics,” Kafka explains. “I’m uncomfortable with them lolling around watching TV, but to be honest, I also get tired of feeling that I have to keep them entertained.”

“The word ‘bored’ isn’t in my vocabulary,” some of us remember our grandmothers saying. In fact, the word wasn’t in anybody’s vocabulary until the nineteenth century, according to Patricia Meyer Spacks, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. In medieval times, according to Spacks, if someone displayed the symptoms we now identify as boredom, that person was thought to be committing something called “acedia,” a “dangerous form of spiritual alienation”—a devaluing of the world and its creator. Who had time for such self-indulgence, what with plague, pestilence, and the labor of survival? Acedia—or, accidie—was considered a sin. Then came the invention of labor-saving machinery, the valuing of the individual, and the “pursuit of happiness.” Forget the sin of acedia; now we could afford the emotional state of boredom. And just in time, too. Professor Spacks considers boredom a good thing, at least most of the time. “If life was never boring in pre-modern times,” she writes, “neither was it interesting, thrilling or exciting, in the modern sense of these words.”

At its best, boredom forces creativity. Today, kids pack the malls, pour into the video arcades, and line up for the scariest, goriest summer movies they can find. Yet, they still complain, “I’m borrrred.” Like a sugared drink on a hot day, such entertainment leaves kids thirsting for more—for faster, bigger, more violent stimuli. This insidious, new kind of boredom is one reason for the rising number of psychiatric problems among children and adolescents, according to an article in Newsweek by Ronald Dahl, a professor of pediatrics at the Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dahl suggests this syndrome leads to more doctors prescribing Ritalin and other “stimulants to deal with inattentiveness at school or antidepressants to help with the loss of interest and joy in their lives.”

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