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

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.

Hyperawareness in Nature: Enhancing 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