Children NOT at play

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

It obviously can take years to know the result, if any, of childhood experiences that may only manifest in the adult years. That’s why data is limited in many long-term studies that are only a few years old – the results simply aren’t in yet.
Some of those studies are looking at what Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder, a range of conditions he and others say can result from the increasing lack of childhood experiences in the outdoors that previous generations had in abundance and took for granted.
And while the full implications of so-called nature deficit on individuals can’t be fully known until it shows up in significant numbers of people in the future, concern is mounting that we won’t like what we see.
Veteran journalist, author and now columnist for the San Diego Union Tribune, Louv is generating much of that concern with his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. The future holds for indoors-reared children both psychological and physical maladies and disregard if not disdain for the natural world.
For Louv, as a result, that future is as bleak for these outdoors-naïve adults as it is for endangered species, clean air and water, conservation programs, green spaces and national parks, none of which will have the political or financial support of those who never learned to value them or their goals.
At present, though, Louv also sees implications for student education and performance in decreased exposure to the outdoors.
But unlike for many childhood maladies, no shots, therapists or agencies are needed. The cure is as close as the back door, the neighborhood park, a farmer’s woodlot, or best of all, the national forest.
“Never before in history have kids been so disconnected from nature,” Louv said recently.
Louv is hesitant to use the word “movement” in reference to the strong response to his and others ideas about what can happen when people lose connection with nature. But he says that response itself is evidence that the loss can have harmful consequences.
“With its nearly universal appeal, this issue seems to hint at a more atavistic motivation,” Louv wrote in the March/April issue of Orion magazine. “It may have something to do with what Harvard professor E.O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which is that human beings are innately attracted to nature: biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers, and there is something in us, which we do not fully understand, that needs an occasional immersion in nature. We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow.”
Children’s physical activity specialist Rae Pica sees biological underpinnings to Wilson’s behavioral observations, writing for Health News Digest, “…the outside light stimulates the pineal gland, which is the part of the brain that helps regulate the biological clock, is vital to the immune system, and simply makes us feel happier. Outside light triggers the synthesis of Vitamin D. And a number of studies have demonstrated that it increases academic learning and productivity!”
What’s keeping kids indoors?
Parental Fear
A combination of things are conspiring to keep kids inside, a number of sources indicate, including parents who are fearful of that children outdoors will become victims of crime, injury, bird flu, Lyme disease or West Nile virus.
“No wonder that our kids are disconnected and alienated from the natural world, when adults have decided that most places outside the car and the home are dangerous and that every hour needs to be scripted,” Carl Pope wrote in the November 2000 issue of Sierra magazine.  “It’s rarer and rarer for kids to have access to fields or streams or woodlots or even decent city parks, so instead of joyfully mucking about outside they’re offered a physically safe world of video games and television. As a result, nature and place are losing out to the virtual world. Who needs mud puddles when your computer can provide you with dozens of imaginary planets full of gory combat with scary monsters?”Louv concedes “there are risks outside our homes,” yet he sees greater risks to their larger wellbeing indoors. He wrote for Orion that “there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth—and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents.”
“Videophilia”
Pair parental fears for their children in the outdoors with Pope’s plethora of pastimes available inside, and the natural world begins to become distant in children’s lives.
In 2003, one study suggested, the race was a dead heat between outside, physical play and sedentary, electronic time-passing indoors. Children six and under spend an average of two hours a day using screen media (1:58), about the same amount of time they spend playing outside (2:01), and well over the amount they spend reading or being read to (39 minutes), the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported.
New interactive digital media have become an integral part of children’s lives, the study said. Nearly half (48 percent) of children six and under have used a computer (31 percent of 0-3 year-olds and 70 percent of 4-6 year-olds). Just under a third (30 percent) has played video games (14 percent of 0-3 year-olds and 50 percent of 4-6 year-olds). Even the youngest children – those under two – are widely exposed to electronic media. Forty-three percent of those under two watch TV every day, and 26 percent have a TV in their bedroom (the American Academy of Pediatrics “urges parents to avoid television for children under 2 years old”). In any given day, two-thirds (68 percent) of children under two will use a screen media, for an average of just over two hours (2:05).
“It’s not just teenagers who are wired up and tuned in, its babies in diapers as well,” said Vicky Rideout, vice president and director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health and lead author of the study. “So much new media is being targeted at infants and toddlers, it’s critical that we learn more about the impact it’s having on child development.”
“Anecdotally, any number of baby-boomer-run blogs report these children born between 1946 and 1964 finding, when they return to their old neighborhoods, fewer if any signs of children playing where they themselves once did. Even where urban growth has not taken over former play spaces, trails no longer lead into woods, and bats and balls don’t often lie on lawns.
Pope agrees. “There are few people for whom a visit to their childhood home is not a heartbreaking experience, because its connection to the land around it has been broken,” he wrote. “Sprawl and malls are filling in the vacant lots and woodlands where we used to play; rivers and streams are culverted, channelized, and barren; and the coasts, lakesides, and mountains are spotted with trophy homes and locked gates.”
Even in rural Southwest Virginia, where woods, mountains and fields define the region, children are not immune from “videophilia,” Louv said. The threat is as universal as the television, the game console, fearful parents and other forces separating children from nature.
Locally, it seems less common than before to see children playing in the snow that keeps them home from school, and the staff of a community-centered Web site in Santa Barbara, Calif., http://www.edhat.com, noted similar findings. “We drove our green car around neighborhoods with wide streets and clear sidewalks that were near elementary schools … Foothill, Kellogg, Hollister, and Harding.  We drove slow because the signs said so, but in reality there were no children to endanger … not much of anything else except for a couple of gardeners, some people walking to their cars, and a mailman. The lack of human activity was borderline spooky … like something out of an old B movie.
“In all we drove up and down 96 city blocks.  In all we saw 16 children…And that was it! No kickball games in cul-de-sacs, no chalk painting on sidewalks, no jump ropes, or hoola-hoops. There were over 10,000 elementary school kids not in class on Monday, and in over an hour of driving we only saw 16 of them.
The Effects Tomorrow
The fact that kids are apparently indoors more concerns researchers in the field of environmental psychology. At Cornell University, a study found that for adults to care about the environment, they need to have plenty of play time in it as children, before age 11. Cornell’s Susan Lang has written about that study conducted by environmental psychologist Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell.
“Although domesticated nature activities—caring for plants and gardens—also have a positive relationship to adult environment attitudes, their effects aren’t as strong as participating in such wild nature activities as camping, playing in the woods, hiking, walking, fishing and hunting,” Lang reported Wells as saying. “"Our study indicates that participating in wild nature activities before age 11 is a particularly potent pathway toward shaping both environmental attitudes and behaviors in adulthood.”
Louv wrote in “Leave No Child Inside” for Orion, “Studies show that almost to a person conservationists or environmentalists— whatever we want to call them—had some transcendent experience in nature when they were children. For some, the epiphanies took place in a national park; for others, in the clump of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. But if experiences in nature are radically reduced for future generations, where will stewards of the Earth come from?”
A world populated by what they called “videophiles” clearly “would not bode well for the future of biodiversity conservation,” researchers said.
In fact, the researchers say by some measures, interest in the out-of-doors is already waning. We’re visiting national parks three-fourths as often as we did in 1987, data show. At the same time, however, state parks show growth in attendance.
The Effects Today
At an Australian university, graduate student Rebecca Fletcher is measuring the benefits of outdoor play experiences for children in their early years as part of her Master of Education studies.
“Due to an increase in urbanization, indoor recreation and indoor schooling, young children have become isolated from the natural environment,” Fletcher said. “Early childhood is a powerful period of our lives. We need to look closely at the environments and experiences we are providing for children. Isolating children from gardens and restricting play with natural materials can lead to the child developing fears, dislike or even blindness to nature.”
While one can stick to hard data in making the case that children need outdoors play experiences, Fletcher makes the point poetically but with basis in research. This spring Fletcher wrote in an e-mail, “I think the main points are:
● “The natural world is multisensory, unlike indoor pursuits which are typically quite plastic. Even watching TV and computer games a person only touches plastic and cannot smell or feel what is going on.
● “Much is written about health implications from obesity to autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, depression, cancer etc., which are less likely if a person is active in outdoor natural pursuits.
● “Knowledge is gained through authentic experiences outdoors, such as observing seasons, watching animals being born, holding a newly hatched butterfly as light as air on the tip of your finger, planting and tending crops and producing food. Basically, so much is lost and missed out on if this is only learnt over the Internet or not learned/experienced at all.
“Children in my study clearly showed a great deal of pleasure in nature, it was an inborn curiosity and deep desire to be outside,” Fletcher wrote. “From my study, I showed that rich natural environments provide the greatest opportunities for rich play and learning experiences, so basically children or adolescents who have missed out on nature have missed out on a huge chunk of their education, not just in learning facts, but in developing skills in problem solving, planning, ordering, relationships, investigations, patience, etc. These are skills valued in the work force and in adult life.”
(Here’s an interesting paradox. Both Fletcher and Lang see educational value in caring for plants and gardening. Ironically, for ecological philosopher Paul Shephard, the invention of agriculture in human history that was “the crucial point at which human culture achieved a false sense of separation from the natural habitat,” according to the Ecopsychology Institute’s memorial to Shephard upon his death last year.)
While the future holds most of the answers to what effect is isolation from nature having on today’s children, immediately apparent to Louv are the benefits to outdoors experience, and plenty of it, on children while they’re still kids. Ten years of research points to reductions in attention deficit disorder’s symptoms and stress, and increases in cognitive functioning.
“Kids in outdoor classrooms in the 1990s had higher test scores across the board,” Louv said. “I think a strong case can be made linking this with the economic success of the nation.”The benefits of outdoors childhood experience go beyond better mental and physical health, Louv says, pointing to research showing improvements in grades of students in outdoor classrooms. Factoring out other variables,” he wrote in Orion, “studies of students in California and nationwide show that schools that use outdoor classrooms and other forms of experiential education produce significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math. One 2005 study by the California Department of Education found that students in outdoor science programs improved their science testing scores by 27 percent.
Louv: It’s not too late
While again deflecting the word “movement,” Louv wrote in Orion that “we do seem to have reached a tipping point. State and regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, have begun to form in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, St. Louis, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere.
“A host of related initiatives—among them the simple-living, walkable-cities, nature-education, and land-trust movements—have begun to find common cause, and collective strength, through this issue.
“The activity has attracted a diverse assortment of people who might otherwise never work together.”
While Louv supports governmental and community initiatives that promote childrens’ education and recreation taking place outdoors, parents and caregivers of children can perhaps do the most to provide the free, unstructured and abundant playtime in nature that researchers like Fletcher and others believe is the most important to response to nature deficit.
As Louv wrote in Orion, “Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming—and, especially, experiencing nature directly—could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young”— and threatens them, and the environment, researchers say, in their adulthood.