Last Child in the
Woods:
Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Spotlight on a Landmark Publication
Richard Louv's national bestseller, Last Child in the Woods:
Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, is a must-read for nature
enthusiasts and anyone concerned about our children's health or the
environment. Mr. Louv states, "A growing body of research links our
mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with
nature--in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that
thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of
therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. 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." He
cites research that has shown that exposure to nature may reduce symptoms of
ADHD, improve children's cognitive abilities, creativity, and productivity,
while also increasing resistance to negative stresses and depression.
Mr. Louv has coined his own phrase, Nature-Deficit Disorder, to
not act as a formal medical diagnosis, but instead to reflect the "human
costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses,
attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional
illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and
communities. Nature deficit can even change human behavior in cities,
which could ultimately affect their design, since long-standing studies show a
relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space
with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies."
Several chapters in the Last Child in the Woods account
for how this decreased connection with nature has occurred over time, citing
many areas including children and adults' increased dependence on electronics,
less accessibility to natural areas due to less space and more restrictions
placed by government and private agencies to use space, fears related to safety
concerns regarding allowing children outside to explore independently, and the
busy over-scheduled lives of families. Mr. Louv describes how visits to
national parks have decreased dramatically despite the long history of parks
being safe for families. He notes how these changes are leading are
younger generations to not be as connected to nature and less concerned with
protecting our environment.
In the expanded version of Last Child in the Woods, Mr.
Louv also provides a list of many steps that children, families, community
members, and government officials can take to preserve nature and positively
impact the lives of children and adults. He cites the No Child Left
Inside Act as a positive step being taken on a national level to address the negative
impact of losing our connection with nature. Mr. Louv also provides a
clear list of several actions we can take to celebrate nature including:
viewing nature as an antidote to stress, encouraging kids to camp in the
backyard, engage in cloud watching, have a "green hour" as a family
tradition as a time for unstructured play and interaction with the natural
world, institute a "sunny day rule" where children's inside time is
highly limited when the weather is nice, hike, plant a garden, send your child
to camp, spend family vacations in state or national parks, read outside, work
to transform communities to be places with lots of green space, and to be an
advocate for the environment. Mr. Louv's message is clear--nature matters
and we need to do our part to protect it for ourselves and future
generations.