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

Leslie Stephens, the Southern California mother who chose to live on the edge of a natural canyon, says her family made that decision in part because of the beauty there, but also because her children would be more likely to develop self-confidence, at their own speed, in such an environment. She says:

I think fondness for wild places is best nurtured when children are young. Otherwise they are off-put by it, afraid of it, and even more strangely, somehow not curious about it. I see this reaction repeatedly in other kids and adults that I meet and get to know. They don’t feel comfortable in nature. They’re a little paranoid of going out and exploring it.

Mothers in this neighborhood have asked me if I am, perhaps, foolish about my boys’ safety. They want to know why I allow my boys to run in our canyon unsupervised. What about the dangers, they ask? They are afraid of “scary people” down there and coyotes (in the middle of the day, no less), and of course, rattlesnakes. I haven’t seen a snake down there in twelve years, but custodians kill them over at the middle school playground regularly. Yes, there are dangers. I could tell you about the time my youngest son and his best friend stepped on the same rusty nail. Only boys could manage something so awkward and painful. The way they screamed made me think a snake had bitten them. This required a trip to the emergency room and a tetanus shot. But other than that, my kids’ injuries and their friends’ injuries have occurred playing organized sports. I think that’s where the danger is: kids egged on to be ever more aggressive in order to win, win, win. The wilderness provides an environment for a child’s interior life to develop because it requires him to remain constantly aware of his surroundings.

The Most Important Thing Parents Can Do

I am not suggesting that spending time in nature inoculates children against danger—certainly no scientific research supports that theory. But I do contend that nature-play offers residual safety benefits, and that some of the conventional approaches we take to protect children are less effective than we believe them to be. Parents can do other things, as well, to lessen the fear.

During a wave of national stranger-danger fear, CNN’s Paula Zahn asked Marc Klaas what we can do to protect our kids. Like most of us, Klaas would have preferred never to think about the question. In 1993, on a moonlit night, his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, was snatched from her Petaluma, California, home and later murdered. Klaas went on to become a familiar face on television, a voice for missing children. Politicians paraded him as a poster-father for California’s Proposition 184—the “three strikes” law. Vote for it, he and they said, and you’ll be preventing future murders of children like Polly.

Just before the balloting, however, Klaas changed his mind. The law, he had concluded, would fill already bulging prisons with pot smokers and poachers, and the deeper root of child endangerment was something that that particular law wouldn’t reach. When Zahn asked him for parental advice, he said, yes, we need to realize that if kidnappers can “get those children out of their bedrooms, every child in America is a child that is at risk.” But, he added, “we have to dispel this whole notion of stranger-danger and substitute some other rules.” Parents and children do have power. Children “should trust their feelings,” he said. “They should fight abductors. They should put distance between themselves and whatever is making them feel badly. And then certainly they should also understand that there are certain kinds of strangers that they can go to.”

Others have made this point. Don’t just tell your kids about evil; teach them about good—teach them to seek out adults who can help them when they feel threatened. Teaching appropriate trust is more difficult than teaching fear, but just as important. As Klaas said, “Kids want the information that’s going to enable them to protect themselves. What we have to do as parents is get over our fears and address the issue and talk to the kids.” Such advice doesn’t really apply to those occasions when children are snatched from their homes, but those instances are exceedingly rare. In an increasingly agoraphobic society, parents are most fearful of the potential out there—down the street, at the mall, in the canyon behind the house.

So how do we adapt without locking our kids away from the richness of community and nature?

Klaas offered one suggestion. “I would say that one thing that we should really seriously consider for children that are ten years of age and over is to get them their own cell phone so that we can have 24/7 contact with them at all times. And I’m not shilling for any cell phone company. I truly believe that this is one of the answers that we’re seeking.”

Several years ago, during another wave of stranger-danger hysteria, I asked David Finklehor, the University of New Hampshire sociologist I cited earlier, what he considered the most important thing parents could do to protect their children. He touched on something at the core of the bogeyman syndrome. “There are an awful lot of programs out there today trying to teach personal safety to children,” he said. “But I honestly think the most important thing a parent can do is to have a good, supportive relationship with the child, because a child who has good self-esteem, good self-confidence, a closer relationship with the parents, is much less likely to be victimized. Our studies show that. Predatory people are not as likely to mess with them, because the predator senses that these are kids who will tell, who can’t be fooled or conned. The studies show that most kids who are victimized are also emotionally neglected, or they come from intensely unhappy