“No Child Left Inside”- new Bucktail Outdoors website

No Child Left Inside
Saving our kids from Nature Deficient Disorder
“Now I know the secret of making the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” Walt Whitman

When my husband was growing up in the suburbs, he and his friends habitually paid visits to the latest construction site with their wagon. They would load up with long, ungainly pieces of lumber and pull it for many blocks to the edge of the development, where their backyards ended and the woods began. There they built a fort. It taught them many things, about problem solving, working together, thinking creatively. But more importantly, it got them outdoors and it gave them a sense of wonder.

We did these kinds of things years ago without any thought—captured fireflies in a jar, turned over rocks in a creek, built dams, even conducted experiments like burning ants with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk. If we didn’t live “out” in the wilds, we managed to find a corner, an edge, a space left open, to explore and discover. We gravitated to them.

Kids aren’t outside anymore. Drive nearly anywhere in the country and you’ll find the yards are vacant of playing children. There are many culprits: television, computers, video games, too much structured, organized time, a fear of the bogeyman just waiting to snatch our children away, and lack of green space. The radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own land has shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970.

There is startling new evidence that spending time in nature is as important to children as good nutrition and adequate sleep. “To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen,” says author, Richard Louver, in his groundbreaking book, Last Child in the Woods—Saving Our Children From Nature Deficient Disorder. In it, he explains that in the course of a few decades, children’s physical contact with nature has faded at an alarming rate. New research is connecting the rapid increase in childhood depression and attention deficit disorders to this lack, for the rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled in the last five years.

In nature, children make full use of their senses, are inspired to be creative, learn visualization and concentration, reduce their stress, develop a deep sense of spirit and a sense of play, become more fit, and, evolve into better stewards of the land.

And, with the planet in the mess that it is today, we can’t expect to grow environmentally conscious kids when they have neither attached to the land nor made an intimate, personal connection with the natural world. We need to nurture magic in our children’s lives and detach them from electronics long enough to have their imaginations kick in. New findings from The Nielsen Company show kids spend half as much time outside as children did 20 years ago and average 44.5 hours a week in front of some type of electronic entertainment.

Time spent in the natural world will give your child so much more than any school book, computer program, television show (even the Nature Channel), or organized sports to better equip them to thrive in the world, let alone be self-assured, happy, and peaceful. Even very small doses of nature reap tremendous benefits.

Richard Louve said, “When we deny children nature, we deny them beauty.”

We need to teach our children to “see into the beating heart of the earth.” We need to instill in them a personal passion. Richard Louve believes this is the long distance fuel for the struggle to save what is left of the natural environment. For “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.”

SIDEBAR:
What to do? We, as adults must get outside with them. Relearn how to find wonder in the natural world. Take them fishing, hunting, wildlife watching, out for a hike, camp out, watch a meteorite shower, build a campfire, skip rocks. Buy some identification books and learn the trees, press flowers, pull out a microscope and look at a drop of pond water. Turn over rocks in the stream and look for critters, gather walnuts and bake something, follow animal tracks in the snow, plant a garden, feed the birds. Contact your local conservation agency and sign up for camps so the kids can learn outdoors with their peers. Investigate your local environmental education center and see what programs are available. Join the scouts or start your own troop and focus on the outdoors.

Check out:
Sharing Nature With Children (20th Anniversary Edition, Revised and Expanded) by Joseph Bharat Cornell (Paperback – Jan 1998)

Cindy Ross

Cindy Ross lives with her family along the Appalachian Trail in a log home she and her husband built from scratch. She is the author of six books on hiking and adventuring. www.cindyrosstraveler.com

This article appreared in the new websit, Bucktail Outdoors 

http://www.bucktailoutdoors.com/hunting-fishing-articles.html#nochildleftinside

And also, The Bay Journal News Service

• No Child Left Inside – Bay Journal News Service

   www.bayjournalnewsservice.com/article.php?artnum=19Cached