Book Review on Last Child in the Woods


Christie Manisto Book Review Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2006 Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods deals with a subject matter that is near and dear to my heart—namely how to connect children with nature. He convincingly deals with this subject on several different fronts, illuminating beyond a shadow of a doubt the immense separation children in the U.S. have experienced connecting with nature. Louv illuminates how our current environmental crisis can be linked in many ways to some startling trends that have developed over the past two decades with regard to our actions and attitudes toward both our natural environment and the future generations who will become its stewards. Last Child in the Woods is, for those of us who are parents, educators, pastors or simply people who care about our world and it’s children, a must read. Louv begins this book first by taking the reader on a trip back in time. He describes in some detail, his childhood which, much like my own, existed in a world far different than the one we live in today. He presents this information not in a nostalgic “good old days” manner, but instead to show how in a short period of time our society has radically changed. How we have moved from the days when kids ran excitedly out to play and could tell you what it felt like to squish their toes in the mud to a time when kids know all about global warming and the Antarctic glaciers but may never see an open body of water much less play in the mud. He describes a world gone by where “as a boy [he] was unaware that [his] woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950’s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But [he] knew [his] woods and [his] fields; [he] knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths…” (1). He describes a world that, although I am quite a bit younger than he, I can connect to growing up in the 1970’s. I too lived in a world where I was connected with nature and had a great degree of freedom. I lived in a world where as a kindergartener I walked to school “all by myself” and did not worry that someone was going to come and take me away. A world where my grandparents still lived on the farm, a place where my cousins and I would go every weekend and spent the entire time outside exploring and running in the fields—pretending to fish in the little creek, digging in the dirt, picking giant wood ticks off the fat farm dog, looking at the stars and picking wild raspberries which would then be mixed with whole milk and eaten with a spoon. A place where in the winter, when the crick would freeze over, we’d go ice skating and build snowmen and my uncles would pull us through the woods on a giant wooden sled attached to the back of a snowmobile. It was a world where my sister and I could leave the house early in the morning and often not come inside until dinner and our parents, who were good, kind, loving people, often didn’t think twice about it. It was a time when all my neighbors sat out on their porches in the summer twilight talking and us kids ran and played hide and seek or slept out in our yards in tents. According to Louv, the world he and I experienced as children has now, in most places, totally transformed to something unrecognizable. Several factors contribute to this and those which Louv sites run the gamut from logical to totally shocking. To summarize, some of the reasons he finds behind this change in the past two decades are: as a result of an economic shift, children are no longer connected to family members who live on family farms; a change in our culture with regard to trust—he discusses at length what he deems (and I would agree) is the trend toward a largely media influenced fear of stranger-danger on the part of both parents and children; lack of unstructured time for overbooked children and parents; the increase of people living in more urban or (Louv says 80% of our population lives in urbanized areas) suburban “cooperatives” with housing associations that place stiff regulations on everything from walking on the grass to building basketball hoops (in some places both are strictly prohibited); the loss of open space to play; decrease of nature based camping in favor of “computer camp” or “space camp” or perhaps somewhat telling “weight loss camp”; the decrease of school based curriculum which focuses on the natural world, free play and the arts in favor instead of a rigid testing model where student testing outcomes (driven and often written by the business world) measure student achievement at ages as young as seven and are the driving force behind instruction; an increased dependency on computers and media as an avenue to the world rather than first hand experience. As a result, children no longer go out to play on the block, explore empty lots, and run through the woods like I did as a child. Many parents, acting out of a place of fear or scheduling conflicts due to increasingly complex, busy lives (and Louv is not judging them in this citing his own fears around allowing his kids to run free) strictly restrict their children’s freedom away from home. Instead of sending kids out to play the increasing trend is to schedule “play dates” for their children which often take place in widely popular giant enclosed, human-made climbing structures where children can interact for a specified amount of time in a controlled environment. Less and less are kids able to just say, “hey mom I’m leaving and I’ll be back later” to go and play and explore and be outside. Instead organized sports and organized everything has replaced unstructured free time. When they do have time to just play, computers, TV’s and computer games played indoors, in front of giant screens occupy a large majority of kid’s time and attention. One of the most poignant quotes Louv includes to drive home this point is one that he calls “typical” of the children he interviewed for his research. The girl interviewed was an eleven-year-old fifth grader who says of free play: “I don’t really have much time to play at all because of piano lessons. My mom makes me practice for about an hour every day, and then I have my homework, and that’s about an hour’s worth, and then I got soccer practice, and that’s from five-thirty to seven, and then there’s no time left over to play…” (118). More and more this is the norm instead of the exception in the lives of our nations children. I can relate to these stories very well being a parent and an educator myself. I recognize first hand the motivation fear plays in parenting and I will guiltily admit that I do not at all afford my children anything close to the freedom I was given as a child. One example that sticks in my mind with regard to Louv’s research has to do with our moving to Chicago’s Southside from North Minneapolis to attend seminary. Looking back I can see distinctly how some of the rhythms of my two children’s play changed drastically in some ways and not so drastically in others. For example, in Minneapolis we lived in a home with a fenced in backyard. The girls were able to play there and I could watch them out the window, so they had free play time but were not ever unsupervised (I surprise myself in that I would NEVER have allowed my oldest to walk to school alone at age six even though I was given that very same freedom just two decades before). I justified my vigilance to their age and our urban surroundings (they were 4 and 6) and left it at that. We then moved to Chicago, an even denser urban area where we have a fenced in courtyard (god forbid I let the girls out of the fence). It is mostly concrete but does have some vegetable gardens and a couple trees and some grass that never manages to grow under the constant trample of feet—but “it’s better than nothing” I reasoned and sent them out to play. The girls were again allowed to “run” (it’s pretty small but they were small so they were able to at least jog around) and play in the yard with occasional checks from me until two incidents occurred. The first was the discovery (joyfully by them—not so joyfully by me) that there was a hole in the fence where folks could come freely in and out without using a key. I discovered it one morning when I awoke to see one of our neighborhood’s homeless men collecting cans from our recycling. He smiled and waved and I waved back. His presence isn’t what bothered me--discovering that the yard wasn’t as secure as I thought it was TOTALLY bothered me—if he could get in, anybody could get in! All kinds of crazy scenarios raced around my mind. The second was the straw that broke the camel’s back. One afternoon one of the boys in our yard (who, if he had lived in a different decade probably wouldn’t have even been back there cooped up with children much younger than he but instead running free with his friends) decided, out of boredom and curiosity, (I do not believe he did this to hurt anyone) to heft a giant cinderblock down from a third story balcony narrowly missing one of my daughters. I ran out to the sound and quickly found myself dragging my girls inside, shuddering at what could have happened if that block had made contact with my little one’s head. Fear took over and the girls were no longer allowed to play in the yard—I will admit after those two incidents, I often kept them inside until we could walk together to a city park or the lakefront. In fact, after that summer—which also consisted of my two girls attending an expensive (and unaffordable on a seminary budget) organized summer sports camp while I worked and studied, I gave up doing Chicago summers all together and shipped them up to my sister’s in Minnesota for weeks at a time where they could play in her giant suburban backyard and go on “play dates.” They are no more “free” with my sister than they are here but somehow my security worries are lessened. Do I think all this is a problem? You bet I do which is why I appreciate Louv’s book in that it helps me to recognize that I am no better than the rest of the parents (Louv included) out there struggling to figure out a way to raise our kids (both rationally and irrationally) and keep them safe. Something has to change because my feeling is, this is no way to live. The other places where Louv’s description of the problem of the child-nature relationship resonates with me are both as a former public school educator and in my current position as a trauma chaplain at the University of Chicago hospitals. The U of C is the only Trauma One unit for Children in the tri-state area. As a chaplain it is my job to respond to traumas and be there for parents while they wait for sometimes very difficult information about their children who come into the ER for treatment. I have done this job for the past three years and while I know that isn’t enough time for my data to be empirical—it is enough, at least in my mind and the mind of the doctors, nurses and other chaplains I work with, to recognize a trend. Beginning in about May and lasting at least until September or October the majority of cases we see in the Trauma One unit are children from the surrounding communities who have been hit by cars. Why does this happen at such an alarming rate? On the one hand, I have heard some folks cry out that it is lack of proper parental supervision of these children that is the cause. It very well may be in a few cases, but I do not believe this is the reason in the majority of cases. In fact I would argue that this is a racist assumption made on behalf of those who do not live in or have any sense of the neighborhoods surrounding the U of C—which are largely low income, black neighborhoods beyond what they see on the highly hyped up evening news. Instead, the majority of the cases I see, parents and family members are out watching the children run and play while sitting with friends on porches (just like the grownups in my neighborhood used to do) and drivers who are speeding or not paying attention because they are talking on cell phones or are paying attention and can’t stop in time hit kids who are either crossing streets or playing near the street. A question for those of us who don’t live in these neighborhoods might be “well why are these kids on the street to begin with?” The answer, because there is literally nowhere else to be! In some ways, especially around the desire to run free and roam kids haven’t changed (we may try to take it out of them but we can’t squash it completely) but the space they have to play on has and quite literally the kids in these neighborhoods in the city do not have any place to play. There are few safe parks, no yard space and empty lots are often fenced off or straight up dangerous so kids—even 21 st century kids—who want to be outside and play figure out ways to do this and lack of space vs. kids looking to play in the city often sadly equals disaster. Finally, as a former educator I saw too often first hand what Louv is talking about when he discusses the move away from hands on curriculum in favor of outcome based, testing based education. I worked for a wonderful district in Minnesota that won awards for student achievement. We had marvelous teachers and concerned, involved parents willing to share both their time and talent with us. Yet that wasn’t enough. Every year at our first faculty meeting we were given “the talk” about test scores and how to improve them. Month after month we spent time sitting in in-services intended to teach us how to best teach to the test, tests that were created in part by Minnesota businesspeople in hopes of creating an informed job-force. Despite this, in Minnesota where I taught for ten years, we were still lucky enough to have PE everyday as well as music, art and recess. Here in Chicago, where my children attend a “top 25” school, we see something very similar to what Louv cites in his book as an increasing national trend, PE has been cut to once a week, there is no art and music class consists of drilling the kids on what type of instruments one finds in an orchestra—almost every moment is dedicated to the outcomes which will be measure on the ISAT test. Even the smallest children do not escape, a fact we uncovered when we enrolled our youngest daughter in Kindergarten. After a few weeks of school we were shocked to find that she came home almost every night with homework. (I don’t remember homework in Kindergarten, do you?) When we questioned her teacher we were told (very kindly) that we were lucky—our school was one of the last “play based” Kindergarten’s in the city. Most were moving to a model where the kids sat in desks all-day and studied. To say I was shocked by this information is an understatement. I naively had thought (as does Louv, as do most educational professionals both in the U.S. and abroad) that the best way to learn, especially at a young age was through hands-on playing. Sadly, this is not the case. According to Richard Louv through his study, research, and interaction with children, the result of all of this is something he calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” While he admittedly does not want to add yet another “disorder” into the mix of all the childhood disorders out there, he thinks that this is the best way to describe what is happening. Children are becoming disconnected with nature and in it’s place they are staying indoors, becoming stressed out mini-adults who no longer have time for free play or imagination. They aren’t thrilled by the outdoors any more; they are afraid of it or at best ambivalent. On top of this, despite the largest growth in organized sports (over the past two decades Louv states that membership went from 100,000 to 3,000,000) the incidence of childhood obesity is rising at a staggering level. The massive number of children on medication for behavioral disorders is also on the rise. Kids are getting fatter; more stressed, disconnected and no longer have time for imagination. If this continues to be the trend, where is our society going? Where is the future of our environment going if our children don’t learn to connect with nature, who will be the future voting force to continue the care and stewardship of the wild lands that still exist? As a parent and educator himself, Louv understands all of this and does not begrudge parents but encourages us all—parents or not--to do better by our future generation. Throughout the book Louv offers suggestions and stories of hope that indicate a slow but increasing concern on the part of everyone to counter this trend. Parents, teachers, artists, legislators, and folks from all walks of life who remember living a childhood different from the one faced currently by our children are waking up and offering creative solutions and hope to get kids back in touch with nature. Spanning the gamut from programs that take inner city kids out of the city and into the wild to therapeutic remedies for ADHD and other behavioral disorders that include nature play and freedom to educational systems that are admitting that being “nature smart” may just help test scores more than intense study methods, people are working together to do better. In closing, to quote Louv in his conclusion of the importance of childhood attachment to the environment as vital to physical, spiritual and emotional health: “healing the broken bond between children and nature may seem to be an overwhelming, even impossible task. But we must hold the conviction that the direction of this trend can be changed, or at least slowed. The alternative to holding and acting on that belief is unthinkable for human health and for the natural environment. The environmental attachment theory is a good guiding principle: attachment to land is good for child and land” (303). Louv quotes Joel Best, sociology professor at the University of Delaware in his 2001 study on childhood safety in his book Damn Lies and Statistics. He tracked misinformation the public received regarding stranger danger such as the statistic that “four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction.” What really was occurring was that most of the abductors weren’t strangers but family members or someone the family knew, and the statistic was more like 300 rather than 4000” (126) “Between early 1999 and September 2001, educational technology attracted nearly $1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company. One software company now targets babies as young as one day old. Meanwhile, many public school districts continue to shortchange the arts, and even more districts fail to offer anything approaching true hands-on experience with nature outside the classroom” (137). Louv cites a 1991 study of three generations of nine year olds which “found that between 1970 and 1990, the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970” (123). One study cited with regard to this is that of Frank Gilliam, a professor of political science at UCLA who found that “local TV news is creating a powerful ‘crime script’ in the public’s mind—a distorted shorthand that we carry around in our heads. The nightly news, much more visceral and powerful than prime media, actually promotes racism and violence, he says. Viewers automatically link race with crime” (127). For an interesting treatise on why this happens and why cities don’t do much about it see Dwight Hopkins work on Environmental Racism.

Christie Manisto

Book Review

Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.
Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2006

Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods deals with a subject matter that is near and dear to my heart—namely how to connect children with nature. He convincingly deals with this subject on several different fronts, illuminating beyond a shadow of a doubt the immense separation children in the U.S. have experienced connecting with nature. Louv illuminates how our current environmental crisis can be linked in many ways to some startling trends that have developed over the past two decades with regard to our actions and attitudes toward both our natural environment and the future generations who will become its stewards. Last Child in the Woods is, for those of us who are parents, educators, pastors or simply people who care about our world and it’s children, a must read.

Louv begins this book first by taking the reader on a trip back in time. He describes in some detail, his childhood which, much like my own, existed in a world far different than the one we live in today. He presents this information not in a nostalgic “good old days” manner, but instead to show how in a short period of time our society has radically changed. How we have moved from the days when kids ran excitedly out to play and could tell you what it felt like to squish their toes in the mud to a time when kids know all about global warming and the Antarctic glaciers but may never see an open body of water much less play in the mud. He describes a world gone by where “as a boy [he] was unaware that [his] woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950’s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But [he] knew [his] woods and [his] fields; [he] knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths…” (1). He describes a world that, although I am quite a bit younger than he, I can connect to growing up in the 1970’s. I too lived in a world where I was connected with nature and had a great degree of freedom. I lived in a world where as a kindergartener I walked to school “all by myself” and did not worry that someone was going to come and take me away. A world where my grandparents still lived on the farm, a place where my cousins and I would go every weekend and spent the entire time outside exploring and running in the fields—pretending to fish in the little creek, digging in the dirt, picking giant wood ticks off the fat farm dog, looking at the stars and picking wild raspberries which would then be mixed with whole milk and eaten with a spoon. A place where in the winter, when the crick would freeze over, we’d go ice skating and build snowmen and my uncles would pull us through the woods on a giant wooden sled attached to the back of a snowmobile. It was a world where my sister and I could leave the house early in the morning and often not come inside until dinner and our parents, who were good, kind, loving people, often didn’t think twice about it. It was a time when all my neighbors sat out on their porches in the summer twilight talking and us kids ran and played hide and seek or slept out in our yards in tents.

According to Louv, the world he and I experienced as children has now, in most places, totally transformed to something unrecognizable. Several factors contribute to this and those which Louv sites run the gamut from logical to totally shocking. To summarize, some of the reasons he finds behind this change in the past two decades are: as a result of an economic shift, children are no longer connected to family members who live on family farms; a change in our culture with regard to trust—he discusses at length what he deems (and I would agree) is the trend toward a largely media influenced fear of stranger-danger on the part of both parents and children; lack of unstructured time for overbooked children and parents; the increase of people living in more urban or (Louv says 80% of our population lives in urbanized areas) suburban “cooperatives” with housing associations that place stiff regulations on everything from walking on the grass to building basketball hoops (in some places both are strictly prohibited); the loss of open space to play; decrease of nature based camping in favor of “computer camp” or “space camp” or perhaps somewhat telling “weight loss camp”; the decrease of school based curriculum which focuses on the natural world, free play and the arts in favor instead of a rigid testing model where student testing outcomes (driven and often written by the business world) measure student achievement at ages as young as seven and are the driving force behind instruction; an increased dependency on computers and media as an avenue to the world rather than first hand experience.

As a result, children no longer go out to play on the block, explore empty lots, and run through the woods like I did as a child. Many parents, acting out of a place of fear or scheduling conflicts due to increasingly complex, busy lives (and Louv is not judging them in this citing his own fears around allowing his kids to run free) strictly restrict their children’s freedom away from home. Instead of sending kids out to play the increasing trend is to schedule “play dates” for their children which often take place in widely popular giant enclosed, human-made climbing structures where children can interact for a specified amount of time in a controlled environment. Less and less are kids able to just say, “hey mom I’m leaving and I’ll be back later” to go and play and explore and be outside. Instead organized sports and organized everything has replaced unstructured free time. When they do have time to just play, computers, TV’s and computer games played indoors, in front of giant screens occupy a large majority of kid’s time and attention. One of the most poignant quotes Louv includes to drive home this point is one that he calls “typical” of the children he interviewed for his research. The girl interviewed was an eleven-year-old fifth grader who says of free play: “I don’t really have much time to play at all because of piano lessons. My mom makes me practice for about an hour every day, and then I have my homework, and that’s about an hour’s worth, and then I got soccer practice, and that’s from five-thirty to seven, and then there’s no time left over to play…” (118). More and more this is the norm instead of the exception in the lives of our nations children.

I can relate to these stories very well being a parent and an educator myself. I recognize first hand the motivation fear plays in parenting and I will guiltily admit that I do not at all afford my children anything close to the freedom I was given as a child. One example that sticks in my mind with regard to Louv’s research has to do with our moving to Chicago’s Southside from North Minneapolis to attend seminary. Looking back I can see distinctly how some of the rhythms of my two children’s play changed drastically in some ways and not so drastically in others. For example, in Minneapolis we lived in a home with a fenced in backyard. The girls were able to play there and I could watch them out the window, so they had free play time but were not ever unsupervised (I surprise myself in that I would NEVER have allowed my oldest to walk to school alone at age six even though I was given that very same freedom just two decades before). I justified my vigilance to their age and our urban surroundings (they were 4 and 6) and left it at that.

We then moved to Chicago, an even denser urban area where we have a fenced in courtyard (god forbid I let the girls out of the fence). It is mostly concrete but does have some vegetable gardens and a couple trees and some grass that never manages to grow under the constant trample of feet—but “it’s better than nothing” I reasoned and sent them out to play. The girls were again allowed to “run” (it’s pretty small but they were small so they were able to at least jog around) and play in the yard with occasional checks from me until two incidents occurred. The first was the discovery (joyfully by them—not so joyfully by me) that there was a hole in the fence where folks could come freely in and out without using a key. I discovered it one morning when I awoke to see one of our neighborhood’s homeless men collecting cans from our recycling. He smiled and waved and I waved back. His presence isn’t what bothered me--discovering that the yard wasn’t as secure as I thought it was TOTALLY bothered me—if he could get in, anybody could get in! All kinds of crazy scenarios raced around my mind. The second was the straw that broke the camel’s back. One afternoon one of the boys in our yard (who, if he had lived in a different decade probably wouldn’t have even been back there cooped up with children much younger than he but instead running free with his friends) decided, out of boredom and curiosity, (I do not believe he did this to hurt anyone) to heft a giant cinderblock down from a third story balcony narrowly missing one of my daughters. I ran out to the sound and quickly found myself dragging my girls inside, shuddering at what could have happened if that block had made contact with my little one’s head. Fear took over and the girls were no longer allowed to play in the yard—I will admit after those two incidents, I often kept them inside until we could walk together to a city park or the lakefront. In fact, after that summer—which also consisted of my two girls attending an expensive (and unaffordable on a seminary budget) organized summer sports camp while I worked and studied, I gave up doing Chicago summers all together and shipped them up to my sister’s in Minnesota for weeks at a time where they could play in her giant suburban backyard and go on “play dates.” They are no more “free” with my sister than they are here but somehow my security worries are lessened. Do I think all this is a problem? You bet I do which is why I appreciate Louv’s book in that it helps me to recognize that I am no better than the rest of the parents (Louv included) out there struggling to figure out a way to raise our kids (both rationally and irrationally) and keep them safe. Something has to change because my feeling is, this is no way to live.

The other places where Louv’s description of the problem of the child-nature relationship resonates with me are both as a former public school educator and in my current position as a trauma chaplain at the University of Chicago hospitals. The U of C is the only Trauma One unit for Children in the tri-state area. As a chaplain it is my job to respond to traumas and be there for parents while they wait for sometimes very difficult information about their children who come into the ER for treatment. I have done this job for the past three years and while I know that isn’t enough time for my data to be empirical—it is enough, at least in my mind and the mind of the doctors, nurses and other chaplains I work with, to recognize a trend. Beginning in about May and lasting at least until September or October the majority of cases we see in the Trauma One unit are children from the surrounding communities who have been hit by cars. Why does this happen at such an alarming rate? On the one hand, I have heard some folks cry out that it is lack of proper parental supervision of these children that is the cause. It very well may be in a few cases, but I do not believe this is the reason in the majority of cases. In fact I would argue that this is a racist assumption made on behalf of those who do not live in or have any sense of the neighborhoods surrounding the U of C—which are largely low income, black neighborhoods beyond what they see on the highly hyped up evening news.

Instead, the majority of the cases I see, parents and family members are out watching the children run and play while sitting with friends on porches (just like the grownups in my neighborhood used to do) and drivers who are speeding or not paying attention because they are talking on cell phones or are paying attention and can’t stop in time hit kids who are either crossing streets or playing near the street. A question for those of us who don’t live in these neighborhoods might be “well why are these kids on the street to begin with?” The answer, because there is literally nowhere else to be! In some ways, especially around the desire to run free and roam kids haven’t changed (we may try to take it out of them but we can’t squash it completely) but the space they have to play on has and quite literally the kids in these neighborhoods in the city do not have any place to play. There are few safe parks, no yard space and empty lots are often fenced off or straight up dangerous so kids—even 21 st century kids—who want to be outside and play figure out ways to do this and lack of space vs. kids looking to play in the city often sadly equals disaster.

Finally, as a former educator I saw too often first hand what Louv is talking about when he discusses the move away from hands on curriculum in favor of outcome based, testing based education. I worked for a wonderful district in Minnesota that won awards for student achievement. We had marvelous teachers and concerned, involved parents willing to share both their time and talent with us. Yet that wasn’t enough. Every year at our first faculty meeting we were given “the talk” about test scores and how to improve them. Month after month we spent time sitting in in-services intended to teach us how to best teach to the test, tests that were created in part by Minnesota businesspeople in hopes of creating an informed job-force. Despite this, in Minnesota where I taught for ten years, we were still lucky enough to have PE everyday as well as music, art and recess. Here in Chicago, where my children attend a “top 25” school, we see something very similar to what Louv cites in his book as an increasing national trend, PE has been cut to once a week, there is no art and music class consists of drilling the kids on what type of instruments one finds in an orchestra—almost every moment is dedicated to the outcomes which will be measure on the ISAT test.

Even the smallest children do not escape, a fact we uncovered when we enrolled our youngest daughter in Kindergarten. After a few weeks of school we were shocked to find that she came home almost every night with homework. (I don’t remember homework in Kindergarten, do you?) When we questioned her teacher we were told (very kindly) that we were lucky—our school was one of the last “play based” Kindergarten’s in the city. Most were moving to a model where the kids sat in desks all-day and studied. To say I was shocked by this information is an understatement. I naively had thought (as does Louv, as do most educational professionals both in the U.S. and abroad) that the best way to learn, especially at a young age was through hands-on playing. Sadly, this is not the case.

According to Richard Louv through his study, research, and interaction with children, the result of all of this is something he calls “Nature Deficit Disorder.” While he admittedly does not want to add yet another “disorder” into the mix of all the childhood disorders out there, he thinks that this is the best way to describe what is happening. Children are becoming disconnected with nature and in it’s place they are staying indoors, becoming stressed out mini-adults who no longer have time for free play or imagination. They aren’t thrilled by the outdoors any more; they are afraid of it or at best ambivalent. On top of this, despite the largest growth in organized sports (over the past two decades Louv states that membership went from 100,000 to 3,000,000) the incidence of childhood obesity is rising at a staggering level. The massive number of children on medication for behavioral disorders is also on the rise. Kids are getting fatter; more stressed, disconnected and no longer have time for imagination. If this continues to be the trend, where is our society going? Where is the future of our environment going if our children don’t learn to connect with nature, who will be the future voting force to continue the care and stewardship of the wild lands that still exist?

As a parent and educator himself, Louv understands all of this and does not begrudge parents but encourages us all—parents or not--to do better by our future generation. Throughout the book Louv offers suggestions and stories of hope that indicate a slow but increasing concern on the part of everyone to counter this trend. Parents, teachers, artists, legislators, and folks from all walks of life who remember living a childhood different from the one faced currently by our children are waking up and offering creative solutions and hope to get kids back in touch with nature. Spanning the gamut from programs that take inner city kids out of the city and into the wild to therapeutic remedies for ADHD and other behavioral disorders that include nature play and freedom to educational systems that are admitting that being “nature smart” may just help test scores more than intense study methods, people are working together to do better. In closing, to quote Louv in his conclusion of the importance of childhood attachment to the environment as vital to physical, spiritual and emotional health: “healing the broken bond between children and nature may seem to be an overwhelming, even impossible task. But we must hold the conviction that the direction of this trend can be changed, or at least slowed. The alternative to holding and acting on that belief is unthinkable for human health and for the natural environment. The environmental attachment theory is a good guiding principle: attachment to land is good for child and land” (303).

Louv quotes Joel Best, sociology professor at the University of Delaware in his 2001 study on childhood safety in his book Damn Lies and Statistics. He tracked misinformation the public received regarding stranger danger such as the statistic that “four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction.” What really was occurring was that most of the abductors weren’t strangers but family members or someone the family knew, and the statistic was more like 300 rather than 4000” (126)

“Between early 1999 and September 2001, educational technology attracted nearly $1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company. One software company now targets babies as young as one day old. Meanwhile, many public school districts continue to shortchange the arts, and even more districts fail to offer anything approaching true hands-on experience with nature outside the classroom” (137).

Louv cites a 1991 study of three generations of nine year olds which “found that between 1970 and 1990, the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970” (123).

One study cited with regard to this is that of Frank Gilliam, a professor of political science at UCLA who found that “local TV news is creating a powerful ‘crime script’ in the public’s mind—a distorted shorthand that we carry around in our heads. The nightly news, much more visceral and powerful than prime media, actually promotes racism and violence, he says. Viewers automatically link race with crime” (127).

For an interesting treatise on why this happens and why cities don’t do much about it see Dwight Hopkins work on Environmental Racism.