tothesource You talk about "nature-deficit disorder." What's that?

Richard Louv: Nature-deficit disorder is a term I use to describe the human costs of alienation from nature. Among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. I don't suggest that nature-deficit disorder represents a medical diagnosis, but the descriptive quality of the phrase helps us get a handle on what children lose when they lose direct contact with the outdoors. It's not overstating the case to say nature-deficit disorder also affects adults, neighborhoods, whole communities, and the future of humankind's relationship to nature. The term offers people a useful way to describe in just a few words what so many are experiencing.

tts: Early in the book, you quote a fourth-grader who says, "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." Does that describe childhood today?

Louv: To a large degree, yes, and increasingly so. This book describes the growing gap between children and nature, and its destructive implications. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is quickly fading. At no other time in our history have children been so separated from direct experience in nature.

Last Child in the Woods also reports some good news. Studies conducted within the past five to ten years indicate that nature can be a powerful antidote to such maladies as depression, obesity and attention-deficit disorder -- problems associated with alienation from nature. We also know that experience in nature can increase a child's (and an adult's) powers of concentration. In addition, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that creativity and spiritual development are stimulated by childhood experiences in nature. Everyone who lives with or works with children needs to know about these researchers' studies, about the growing deficit of nature experience, and the implications for our society as a whole.

tts: What are the top reasons why kids no longer connect with the outdoors?

Louv: Many parents are directly or instinctively aware of the change, and they sense its importance. They typically cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including competition from television and computers, more homework and other time pressures, and lack of access to natural areas. And fear plays a part in this -- fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger, of nature itself. As a result, the boundaries of children's lives grow ever tighter. A 1991 study of three generations of nine-year-olds found that between 1970 and 1990, the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam had shrunk to one-ninth of what it had been in 1970.

Good parents are doing their best, but information about the value of nature experience to child development has not been widely available. Indeed, there are many parents out there who have deliberately or intuitively exposed their kids to nature, but without the proof of how important that is. I hope Last Child in the Woods will make them feel very good about what they did or what they're doing. But the wider societal message often unwittingly teaches children to avoid nature.

tts: You talk about the Bogeyman syndrome -- that fear of strangers is the chief reason parents don't let their kids play outside. You also suggest media have greatly exaggerated the risk of stranger danger. But parents want their children to be safe…

Louv: Of course they do. As a parent,
I feel that way about my boys, as well. There are perils in this world, but they can be surmounted. And there are more certain dangers if nature is removed -- threats to our children's physical, emotional and spiritual health; to the full development of their senses; to their appreciation of beauty and their nascent imaginations; to their understanding of their place in the universe. Last Child in the Woods, by the way, recommends several ways families can sensibly reduce the fear that interferes with children's involvement in nature.

tts: You note that places of worship could potentially be more important than schools in connecting the young with the natural world. What role might the church play in the child-nature reunion?

Louv: Parent education and encouragement is key. One of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is his or her own infectious enthusiasm for the outdoors. Consider offering an adult class focused on skill building. One barrier often mentioned by parents who want to "get it right", is that they don't know even the basics of things like fishing or how to cook on a propane stove. Do some demonstrations and let people practice and then organize a camp out where more experienced people can coach others with less experience. This would also make it more likely children of single parents get opportunities for camping and hiking that are more difficult to achieve for one parent families. "Discovery Walks" could be organized for small groups to explore the natural areas surrounding or embedded in their communities with children. In addition, many churches offer vacation Bible school experiences that emphasize the wonder of the created world and family camps that foster time spent together exploring natural settings.

San Diego rejects exclusive Secularism

"Despite fifteen years of adverse court rulings, city council decisions to remove the cross, a local war memorial associations agreement to settle the case by removing the cross, and last week’s surprise decision by a state judge requiring a two-thirds vote of the people before the city would be forced to donate the cross and memorial to the federal government as a national war memorial, the citizens of San Diego spoke loud and clear -- keep the cross where it is as it is. With 100 percent of the precincts reporting, unofficial results show that over 75 percent of the voters voted to keep the cross and war memorial in yesterdays voting.

The 43 foot concrete Mt. Soledad Cross has been the center of a war memorial on city land since 1954. However, in 1989, an atheist filed a federal lawsuit challenging its constitutionality because it was located on public property."

The San Diego voter's decision will be challenged in the courts twice in the next 3 weeks. The constitutionality will be examined by a Superior Court judge on August 12th, and other arguments will be heard in a federal court on August 15th.

While some worry about the lack of connection between children and the natural environment, others worry about the lack of children period. Opinions vary widely about the causes and implications of depopulation trends both in the U.S. and abroad but the issue raises a fundamental question: Are we committed to children and their future? Eric Cohen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center insightfully reviews two recent books examining the issue of depopulation: Fewer by Ben J. Wattenberg and The Empty Cradle by Phillip Longman.

Where Have All The Children Gone?

"In a chapter entitled "The Cost of Children," Longman explains why raising a child in America will cost middle-class families over $1 million, due mostly to the "opportunity cost of motherhood" that is, the lost wages entailed in raising the young. He describes how our tax system punishes parents, who produce the "human capital" (the future citizens) who make national prosperity possible, but who as parents gain little economic reward for doing so. He also describes how dependent the nation's nonparents have become on other people's children, and how we consume more human capital (future workers) than we produce. As a response, Longman recommends a pro-child reform of the pension system, so that parents would get a one-third reduction in their payroll tax for each child under 18, but receive maximum retirement benefits only if their children graduate from high school.

Longman's analysis is both brilliant and perverse. In the end, he seems to forget the central role of culture in shaping procreation, which was (ironically) the reason he seems to have written the book in the first place, fearing that only the wrong kind of people (religious fundamentalists) will have children while the right kind of people (tolerant secularists) will not. But economic incentives will probably not move many secularists to be more fruitful than they other-wise would be. And while many individuals and couples believe they are having fewer children (or none at all) because of the expense of raising children responsibly, their behavior has much deeper roots: It is not fundamentally an economic issue, but a cultural one. For those who see children primarily as sources of personal fulfillment, other routes to happiness may seem more trouble-free. Children will often lose out in this utilitarian calculus, even if the state makes raising them less expensive.

In the end, neither Longman nor Wattenberg probes very deeply into the larger cultural question of the demographics of implosion. But they have gathered the data and usefully corrected certain widespread and longstanding misrepresentations: There will be no population explosion (neither in the developed West nor in the Third World), only a slow and steady decline in the human population. The economic and social effects of these trends will be enormous, but the deeper question is why so many modern people are choosing to live for themselves and for today, with so little thought for the human future."

What I’d really like to communicate to fellow parents is that we shouldn’t think about a child’s experience in nature as an extra-curricular activity. Childhood experience in nature is not a nice-to-have activity. It is a vital element, perhaps a necessity, for healthy child development and spiritual nurture.

Richard Louv

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