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Must reads - our book reviews on children's health
Last child in the woods
Richard Louv. Atlantic Books, 2009 (UK edition) ISBN: 978 1 84887 083 3
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This book is a cogent, well-researched explanation of the many ways that kids benefit from contact with nature, the problems if they don’t, and ways to tackle the problem.
Louv coined the term nature deficit disorder (NDD): this is a persuasive and upsetting account of a widespread problem. He cites numerous studies, from the US and Europe: for example, the percentage of children regularly playing outdoors has dropped dramatically. For example, a US study showed that 70% of today’s mothers recall playing outdoors every day as children, but only 26% said their own kids play outdoors daily. Also the area of outdoors where children play has been hugely constricted: instead of the great outdoors, many kids are only playing in their small backyard or school playgrounds.
Why is this happening? He observes that many parents convey fear messages about nature, for example ‘stranger danger’. Many ‘play’ activities of 40 years ago – climbing trees, lighting bonfires, building tree houses, may now be seen as dangerous, damaging, even illegal: his third chapter is called The Criminalisation of Natural Play.
And even nature education may be a problem. David Sobel, one of the US experts in this field, says: ‘If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering… dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.’
Louv also quotes a chilling comment by leading environmentalist Theodore Roszack: ‘Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last 30 years, mainly scaring and shaming people…’. Put another way, it’s easy for environmentalists to see children as part of the threat to nature, not as the potential future guardians of it.
The damaging effects of nature deficit disorder can be deduced from numerous studies showing the benefits of contact with nature. So read on!
Louv offers numerous solid examples of this. A 10-year study in 160 US schools showed that environment-based education had substantial benefits on academic learning and such wider skills as critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making, social skills, and also reduced disciplinary issues. Both children and adults gain a greater sense of wellbeing from time in nature – and even from views of it.
The Finnish school system puts high emphasis on play and outdoor learning, and doesn’t start formal education until age 7.
Yet in a 2003 OECD review, Finland scored first out of 32 countries for literacy, and in the top five for maths and science.
Louv also highlights the particular benefits of nature contact for children with behavioural problems, learning difficulties, and physical disability.
There is also good research in the US showing the benefits of nature contact on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) which is now a major issue for many children.
Louv points out that the major growth in problems of nature deficit disorder and obesity among US children have coincided with major growth in the number of kids participating in organised outdoor sports, so one of his key points is that the need is for unstructured experiences, and exposure to wild nature where possible. He quotes the ‘loose-parts’ theory of play, invented by UK architect Simon Nicholson: ‘In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it’. Natural settings can potentially be the ultimate loose-parts toy, but this clearly needs children to be free to interact, eg making shelters, digging and planting, playing with mud and water etc. Possible examples include:
• more stimulating open spaces in urban contexts, including school playgrounds and parks
• longer wilderness experiences providing a ‘restorative environment’: US research has identified a widespread problem of ‘directed-attention fatigue’. longer periods of simply being quiet in wild nature can offset this and improve wellbeing and thinking skills
• enjoying ‘back yard nature’, and getting to know one space really well
• using gardening to connect kids with nature, including the ‘sunflower house’ idea: growing sunflowers in a square so they create a semi-enclosed space
• more nature contact in teaching: both in the indoor classroom, and outdoors
• wildcrafting: ‘the hunting and gathering of plants in their wild state, of food, herbal medicines or crafts’
• observation of birds, plants etc: Louv emphasises the value of encouraging children to record their own observations and keep a journal, instead of swamping them with external information.
In general, parents/adults should find ways to offer ‘controlled risk’ experiences for children: ‘modern life narrows our senses until our focus is mostly visual…By contrast, nature accentuates all the senses’. The skills children develop in assessing and handling natural risks, eg scrambling down slopes, crossing streams, walking on ice, are applicable very widely. Linked to this is the need for children to have interactive sensory experiences, not the passive visual experiences which are now so common.
The book has a whole chapter on the relevance of green urbanism. Many of the best examples are from the Netherlands, drawn from the book Green Urbanism: Learning from European
Cities by Timothy Beatley, who comments that kids in such cities feel much freer and safer than kids in US cities. Louv points out that ‘most urban theory ignores non-human species, and that there is great potential to encourage wildlife and increase nature contact through good urban design’: he comments that ‘landscape urbanism is one conceptual framework’.
Louv highlights the benefits of city trail networks, as in Portland, Oregon, which not only increase contact with nature, but can prevent green pockets from being built on by joining them up in a functional network.He shares the view of other experts that there is good potential for new, nature-linked, sustainable rural settlements to be created.
The spiritual necessity of nature for the young is one of Louv’s chapter headings. He quotes the research of Edward Hoffmann, an American psychologist, demonstrating that many children have spiritual experiences, and that ‘most transcendent childhood experiences happen in nature’. Louv mentions a number of American religious groups, Christian and other, who promote good stewardship of nature, and children’s contact with it, however he admits that these tend to be fringe rather than mainstream.
Louv hopes that a mainstream movement will emerge and is the chairman and co-founder of the Children and Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org). He sees the movement to ban smoking in public places as an encouraging precedent: it arose from the combination of authoritative scientific research with grass roots concern among individuals and local communities.
The UK edition of Last Child in the Woods ends with a field guide, specially researched for the UK, including relevant books, organisations, and potential action points for parents, schools, business etc. A few of the good ideas in this include:
• establish a ‘green hour’ as part of the family routine: 30 or 60 minutes every day where the family spend time outdoors together
• numerous ways to enrich wildlife activity in the back garden
• websites to find green spaces near you: bbc.co.uk/ breathingplaces; www.green-space.org.uk
• encourage older children to volunteer in conservation projects, eg with the National Trust or Wildlife Trust.
REVIEWER: Alan Heeks, Chairman, Hazel Hill Trust. This review first appeared on the Hazel Hill Trust website www.hazelhill.org.uk
The gardener and the carpenter
Alison Gopnik Farrar. Straus and Giroux, New York: 2016 ISBN: 978 0 37422 9 702
I bought Alison Gopnik’s book because I liked her central theme: that ‘caring for children is like tending a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener’. This sort of garden focuses on
creating a protected and nurturing space in which plants can grow and thrive and become whatever they are destined to become. The carpenter, on the other hand, shapes her materials into a final product designed in advance according to her own preferences and the demands of the market. The Americans call this ‘carpenter way’ parenting. The designed child trend is also here in the UK. Gopnik argues vigorously against this and in favour of the parent as gardener. It has happened, she says, because of smaller and more dispersed families – the practical wisdom of grandparents and aunts and uncles is not on the doorstep as they once were. The experience in the extended family is being replaced by supposed expertise from various professionals and writers of the thousands of parenting manuals. She calls instead for giving children more freedom to do their own thing. This is messier, but has deep and far-reaching benefits. The positive value of diversity and emergence is nature’s way.
In Chapter 2 she marshalls impressive arguments from the study of the evolution of the human child: that the evolutionary focus of our species is in adapting to the very fact of change itself. She finishes her arguments with this summary statement: ‘Shaping [children] in our own image, or in the image of our current ideals, might actually keep them from adapting to changes in the future.’
Chapter 3 starts with an intriguing discussion of pair-bonding and co-operative breeding in humans and a few other species. The human and the gibbon are the only apes to pair-bond – that is, they share their lives, conceive and care for offspring together, though neither achieve total monogamy! Beyond this pairing is the importance of grandmothers. Gopnik is obviously strongly influenced by her own active role as the grandmother to her son’s two children, Augie and Georgie. Caring for children by individuals other than the mother is called ‘alloparenting’, again setting humans apart from most mammals, though not elephants – they do it like us. It certainly seems that with humans ‘we don’t care for children because we love them, we love them because we care for them’.
Parents and other caregivers don’t have to teach young children so much as they have to let them learn… The gardener’s picture, that being a parent is fundamentally a relationship, a form of love, gives you a different take on how children learn from adults. And it actually fits better with the research. (p145-6)
Chapters 4 and 5 are about how children learn and its relevance to care-giving and education. She insists that even very young children combine information they receive with their own observations and experiences, building this into a synthesis of their own ‘in sophisticated ways’. The central paradox of learning is the tension between old knowledge (that’s ours) and new knowledge (theirs). Children create their own futures by building on the present, not copying it. She supports this with a mass of scientific data, mostly derived from reductionist experimental methods. Alongside these are stories from her own family life, and her philosophical and evolutionary knowledge. When these disparate sources gel they are compelling but they sometimes sit uncomfortably together and she clearly likes writing about her grandchildren! Chapter 6 is about the importance of play particularly when ‘spontaneous, random and by themselves’.
A standardised test score is the apotheosis of the goaldirected, child-shaping, carpentry picture of schooling.
The last three chapters (7–9) are packed with interest and wisdom. Chapter 7 is about the transition from pre-schoolers to school-age children. Of course, this transition at around 6–7 years (when adult teeth arrive) precedes the invention of schools by thousands of years. It has often been marked by rites of passage and the beginning of apprenticeships for mastering the particular skills of the child’s own culture.
In contrast to early childhood when the ‘evolutionary task is to explore as many possibilities as widely as possible’ (‘exploration learning’), Gopnik calls this next phase, ‘mastery learning’. This is about exploiting, not exploring. Developing and exploiting natural skills demands application, detailed instruction and relentless practice, failing and trying again. She calls this the ‘apprentice model’. This can work well in stable societies before the modern era, but brings major problems in the fast-changing society of the 21st century. ‘Mastery of scholastic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic isn’t an end in itself’, but it provides the tools for discovery later. So many school-aged children neither discover, not achieve mastery of anything approaching a natural human activity, except for some on the sports field or in the music room. The default focus becomes test-taking. Some manage this, many don’t. Even for those who are good at tests, this is not a useful skill for life.
To Gopnik, the educational system’s obsession with tests and examinations creates all sorts of problems. One of the most obvious is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For Gopnik, ADHD is a ‘particular point on a continuum of attention style’. We learn there is a spectrum of attention that children can achieve from very wide to very narrow. In early human societies there was room for children at both extremes and anything in between. But test- and examination-focused education leaves no room for those whose ability to focus comes late or not at all. The stimulant drugs used to ‘treat’ ADHD work by narrowing attention. But as Gopnik points out: ‘Narrowing attention may be part of growing up but wide attention is part of being young. It’s not something we need to fix.’ One of the answers, she suggests, is to couple schooling with apprenticeship.
In chapter 8 Gopnik revisits her paradox of tradition and innovation. She uses the challenges of electronic media as her platform. She argues that what the adolescent child needs has not changed – to establish a community of friends from among their peers, to distance themselves from parents, to gossip, experiment, rebel. The parents’ role is to provide a stable base from which children invent themselves and what is becoming their world. In case we are worried about the risks of the internet, she reminds us that Socrates was worried about the damage to memory, conversation and critical thought through the spreading habit of reading and writing!
The closing chapter is about why we have children and why all of this is so important. She makes a heart-felt plea for childcare to have unconditional high value. She argues from a philosophical standpoint that caring for children is a good in itself, meaning that the goodness has no need to justify itself through its outcomes. It must have high priority. Sadly this is not how things are in much of the developed world: 20% of children in the USA (and 19% in the UK) grow up in poverty. Similar lack of priority applies to other relationships, particularly to older people.
Finally she returns to play. Like relationships, the deeper benefits come later. Gopnik illustrates the importance of play and fun by referring to a classic silent film, Nanook of the North (www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoUafjAH0cg) made in the 1922 and tracing the life of an Inuit hunter and his family. Theirs was an isolated community in a hostile climate. At one point, Nanook builds a toy sled for his toddler son and uses this to play in the snow. The only immediate payoff is fun, but in the end it was the beginnings of the adult skills the child will need for survival. But their life had changed little for perhaps a thousand years, whereas our fast-moving society transforms every generation. But though we live and express ourselves in changing ways, the fundamental needs of our humanity are the same as Nanook’s. We are one family and the children are all our futures.
REVIEWER: William House, Retired GP
