Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv.
3/5 rating. 316 pages.
Book #36 of 2023. Read August 23, 2023.
Richard talks about our need to get kids back into nature.
This book helped launch the recent movement towards more nature, but it was less interesting or impactful than I was hoping it would be.
Many things have moved us away from nature and inside: some of them legal, some as a view of danger to kids, some technological (TV, video games, social media), but we need to deal with all of them to regain nature as the wonderful place it is.
Anyone over the age of about 40 probably has memories of climbing trees, building forts, doing a lot of semi-dangerous things. But these adults when asked about keystone memories of their childhoods bring these up. Somehow, when asked about their kids doing these things, they are too dangerous. Nature has become a scary place and apparently there is a kidnapper around every corner. It’s honestly ridiculous. Between this fear by parents, and their willingness to sue if their kid gets the smallest of injuries, it’s going to take a lot to regain nature.
But you don’t get to ruin everyone else’s chance to enjoy a playground or nature because you chose to do something stupid: for example, an 18 year-old dove into a pond that was marked as “no swimming” and broke his neck. He sued the county council claiming that they should’ve done something about the danger…as if telling people to not swim there didn’t exactly fulfill that. As the court who chose to side with the county said: “Does the law require that all trees be cut down, because some youth may climb them and fall?”
We NEED nature, and this book talks about the psychological and physical reasons for that. We’ve taken away kids’ time for free-play out in nature, their ability to learn, create, to be still, to watch, to feel awe.
As Richard says:
“Time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health (and also, by the way, in our own).”
“Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it.”
TV has been linked to concentration issues and a higher incidence of ADD diagnosis and TikTok is exponentially worse on ruining concentration!
Additional Quotes:
“A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.”
“As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.”
“Most of all, nature is reflected in our capacity for wonder. Nasci. To be born.”
“The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”
“‘Sure, the little things, they notice,’ she said. ‘But they’re distracted.’ She described the last time her family had gone skiing, in Colorado. ‘It was a perfect, quiet day, the kids are skiing down the mountain—and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them.’”
“Parents, educators, other adults, institutions—the culture itself—may say one thing to children about nature’s gifts, but so many of our actions and messages—especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver—are different. And children hear very well.”
“Today, more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by condominium, cooperative, and homeowners’ associations, according to the Community Associations Institute. The number of community associations burgeoned from 10,000 in 1970 to 286,000 today. These associations impose rules on adults and children (if children are allowed in them at all), ranging from mildly intrusive to draconian.”
“From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. Also, Hofferth reports that children’s free play and discretionary time in a typical week declined a total of nine hours over a twenty-five-year period.”
“In the medical journal the Lancet, researchers from the University of Glasgow in Scotland reported a study of toddler activity where the researchers clipped small electronic accelerometers to the waistbands of seventy-eight three-year-olds for a week. They found that the toddlers were physically active for only twenty minutes a day.”
“The mortality rate of heart-disease patients with pets was found to be one-third that of patients without pets.”
“Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.”
“In 1998, a controversial Carnegie Mellon University study found that people who spend even a few hours on the Internet each week suffer higher levels of depression and loneliness than people who use the Net infrequently.”
“‘Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity observable in almost any group of children playing in a natural setting,’ says Moore.”
“Immersion in the natural environment cuts to the chase, exposes the young directly and immediately to the very elements from which humans evolved: earth, water, air, and other living kin, large and small. Without that experience, as Chawla says, ‘we forget our place; we forget that larger fabric on which our lives depend.’”
“The first study to link television-watching to this disorder was published in April 2004. Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle maintains that each hour of TV watched per day by preschoolers increases by 10 percent the likelihood that they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by age seven.”
“In a classroom at Kenwood Elementary School in Miami, I asked if anybody worried about getting into good colleges or getting good jobs in the future. More than half of the children raised their hands. These were fourth-graders.”
“Teaching kids intelligent caution around strangers is certainly important; how to say “no” to potential child abusers is essential. But we need to create a balanced view of danger. The damage that has been caused when you have families teaching their kids never to talk to another adult in a society where you desperately need more communication—what does that do to the kid?”
“Does the law require that all trees be cut down, because some youth may climb them and fall?”
“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.” – Walt Whitman
“‘To quote the words of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great teacher of our age,’ he said, ‘our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Heschel would encourage his students to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.’”
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