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A little encouragement from across the fence by J E F F L E E , M D
The call of the wild We all need nature, even the kids who say they’d rather be indoors using screens Our 10-year-old, Pippa, is showing some early Goth tendencies. If she had her way, she’d spend most of her time indoors, reading dark fantasy books and drawing scenes of elaborate dystopias ruled by ninjas and dragons. Sometimes, we have to practically force her out of the house just to get a little sunshine and exercise. The grounds for her resistance aren’t entirely clear, but she’s been known to mumble “I hate natural light” as she shuffles sullenly out the door. There must be a trace of vampire in that girl. In any case, we don’t give her a choice. As a parent, there are some hills you’re willing to die on, and this is one of them. Despite her purported hatred of the great outdoors, we’ve seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. We’ve seen her on backpacking trips, scrambling up steep granite slopes like a mountain goat. We’ve seen her plunge naked into ice-melt streams. We’ve watched her rappel down canyon walls, and spend long, lazy afternoons snatching frogs and garter snakes from mountain lakes. All this gives us faith that, somewhere beneath that petulant preteen veneer, the forest sprite we once knew is still hiding and waiting to re-emerge. When I was a kid, my mom used to push my brothers and me out the
door, too – mostly because there were four of us, and that was too much bottled-up energy to contain with mere wood and plaster walls. Most of my childhood was spent chasing little critters, in meadows and streams and puddles of mud, and peering at them through magnifying glasses, or smuggling them up to my bedroom in jelly jars. When we ran out of small animals to harass, we’d ride our bikes all over the neighborhood, kick field goals over the laundry line or play street hockey in some neighbor’s driveway. By the end of the day, when Mom clanged the big brass bell that was bolted to the side of the house, we’d run home and scramble through the front door, all grass stains, muddy sneakers and bloody noses, hungry enough to eat anything she plunked down in front of us. When we extol the virtues of outdoor play, we tend to do so on moral grounds. We lament the loss of nature in our lives, and its replacement with high-tech gizmos and flickering screens, mostly because it violates our sense of natural order, and contrasts with our nostalgic memories of the past. Lately, though, science has backed up our intuition. It turns out you can take the humans out of nature, but you can’t take nature out of human beings. Research shows that time spent in the natural world has profound and CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE >
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