Fewer young people are experiencing the joy of playing outdoors and exploring nature, says a noted author, who shows how such neglect can be harmful and how programs like Scouting can help to reverse the trend.

Can anyone remember those lazy childhood summer days spent roaming the woods and fields? When Mom said, “Go outside and play,” and everybody stayed outdoors until supper time?

For most youngsters today, those opportunities for exploring the outdoors are fewer or virtually nonexistent. And that, author Richard Louv believes, is depriving children of much more than fun and fresh air.

In his new book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books), Louv takes an in-depth look at the importance of children developing a connection with nature. He finds an alarming increase in what he calls “nature-deficit disorder,” a trend that’s keeping kids indoors much of the time, contributing to obesity, depression, hyperactivity, and attention problems.

“There’s something in us as human beings that needs to see natural horizons,” Louv argues. “When we don’t get that, we don’t do so well.”

Children today, he says, rarely get to experience the simple pleasures of nature, such as fishing in a stream, building a tree house, hiking in the woods, climbing a tree, watching a campfire, idling in a special hiding spot in the woods, or just gazing at a nighttime sky or a bug in a vacant lot.

Even the passive enjoyment of watching natural landscapes from the window of a car has been pre-empted by built-in video screens.

What children today are missing, Louv says, is more than just another form of fun.
Nature engages all of the senses in a way that few other experiences can. “We need natural experiences,” he writes. “We require fully activated senses in order to feel fully alive.”

Louv supports his argument with recent studies suggesting that direct exposure to the outdoors can reduce the incidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), decrease stress, and boost children’s creativity and concentration. Research has shown that “Kids who play outdoors were calmer, more open to conflict resolution, and did remarkably better in science and math,” he says.

Louv thinks parents need to be aware of the importance of this natural bonding with nature and make a greater effort to get their children outside. And he believes Scouting—from Tiger Cubs through Cub Scouting, Boy Scouting, and Venturing—offers a special opportunity to help address this “deficit.”

Stuck inside
Today’s younger generation is the first in history that isn’t spending big chunks of time outdoors, Louv observes, and we are only beginning to understand the negative ways this affects children.

“For tens of thousands of years, human beings’ first developmental stages were spent in nature, playing outdoors,” he says. “That has reversed in just a matter of decades…and it has enormous implications.”

Most parents are all too aware of why children aren’t enjoying the outdoors in ways previous generations did: Too many tightly scheduled, highly structured activities; lots more homework; too much pressure to succeed in academic pursuits and organized sports; and increased parental fears of “stranger danger.”

And there’s the siren lure of the PlayStation 2’s and Xbox 360’s and other electronic gizmos.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study, for example, found youngsters 8 to 18 average 44 hours a week plugged into some sort of electronic medium, whether it’s an IPod, computer, or video game.

“I interviewed a boy who said he preferred playing indoors because that’s where the electrical outlets were,” says Louv. “But that ‘plugged in’ environment promotes an atrophied perception. The world is reduced to a flat-panel screen.”

There are other reasons kids aren’t getting out: Neighborhoods that once ended at a woods or a field are now surrounded by expanding urban development.

And our litigious society makes any mildly risky outdoor activity off limits.

Freelance writer Mary Jacobs lives in Dallas, Tex.
Read More: http://www.scoutingmagazine.org/issues/0605/a-wndr.html