Nature Child

There is a new anxiety afoot. If you are a parent, you might want to sign on for this now so you can get a head start on all the worrying and despairing. According to family studies professor, Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, there was a 50% decline between 1997 to 2003 in the proportion of children 9 to 12 who spent time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play and gardening). Hofferth's study indicated increased play time devoted to television (bad) video games (bad), as well increased time spent in sleep (good), studying (good) and reading (really good). In short, kids are camping indoors and are, increasingly, failing to enjoy the pleasures waiting out in nature.

Apparently, unlike generations of the past, today's kids no longer spend time climbing trees and riding bikes downhill without brakes or hands (four stitches in my forehead). Children of the present prefer to stay inside, closer to a reliable source of electricity, HVAC and the pantry.

[Not like those good old days - those days when we kids made our own fun by building tree houses from scrap lumber, making telephones out of cans and string and playing sand lot ball. Those days when we were happy just to be barefoot and sitting by the old fishing hole, eating our waxed-paper wrapped sandwiches and drinking lemonade from a Mason jar.]

There are great fears that we have spawned a generation of "indoor children largely disconnected from nature" that may lead to long-term bad things. The dire consequences include diminished emotional well-being, poor physical health, learning disabilities, obesity, attention deficit disorder, and depression (none of which existed before the current era, of course). Additionally, children are missing out on the "spiritual, emotional and psychological benefits of exposure to the wonders of nature, including reduced stress and improved cognitive development, creativity and cooperative play." (Because, as we all know, those of us who grew up in the sticks with nothing to do but look at clouds and play in the mud are so much happier and healthier than our urban counterparts.)

Not to mention all of that "cooperative play" when the playgrounds and neighborhoods of America were filled with sensitive, fair-minded children committed to character-building, self-esteem enhancing, healthful activities. (Yes, that was a lovely time. Let's get back to that.)

As you can probably guess, civic leaders, governors, mayors, the video gaming industry, Walt Disney Co., Sesame Workshop and others have launched a $20 million dollar campaign "that will ultimately fund 20 initiatives across the country to encourage children to do what once seemed second nature: go outdoors." Larry Selzer, president of the Conservation Fund, which organized the alliance of leaders, said, "If we really want to make a difference in this area, we need a shift in the culture." (Oh my, yes. Let's shift culture. At only $20 million, shifting culture will be quite a bargain.)

Author Richard Louv has even written a best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods in which he advocates an organized, elite outdoor experience for kids; not really the wild banshee sort of play that kids will devolve into if left to themselves. In the book he warns us, "I think we are going to pay the price if we don't turn this around." (Altogether now...wring hands...and...OBSESS!)

Understand that I agree that the constant stimulation of a plugged in life can overload the fragile system of a susceptible kid. Nor do I question the potential healing powers available in nature. Our bodies evolved to move in the natural world, and we do ourselves and our children a disservice to ignore our mammalian roots. But Louv and Company seem to suggest that all will be well if your kids build a fort and hike more often. This strikes me as a tremendous simplification of the complex issues of depression and obesity, and a type of agitating that sells books and anxiety to well-meaning parents.

First of all, I thought it was remarkably disingenuous that the video gaming industry and the Walt Disney Co. are funding programs to persuade kids to start ignoring the very industries that they promote. Because they care, I guess, that all that time spent on the Disney Channel and Mario Brothers can make a kid torpid and tubby.

My second thought was that organizations like the Conservation Fund need to increase their public exposure and profiles by creating a crisis, which only they can then solve. It reminded me of an expensive study launched to determine why small children fall off their tricycles - after big funding and years of gathering data based on "caring about the welfare of children", the researchers concluded that tricycles tip over.

And my third, and perhaps most perceptive, thought was that if you want your kids to go play in nature, you don't need a $20 million initiative. You just unplug them, and do what mothers across America used to do - they pushed their kids outdoors at dawn and, literally, locked the doors so they couldn't get back inside until supper time. A few of the more compassionate mothers in my childhood would permit re-entry for bathroom purposes (just barely), but even lunch was passed out through the screen door. You want a drink?...there's the garden hose. This is not difficult.

We know that fewer down-time hours are left for kids to recreate. Between the increased demands of school, the variables of weather and daylight, the rise of allergies and asthma, environmental pollution and the decline of wild space the window of opportunity for outdoor play is fairly narrow.

Private property owners concerned with liability and insurance issues are not pleased to see a pack of young trespassers, and parents are certainly not encouraged to loose their offspring on the flora and fauna in campgrounds or public wilderness areas. Parents also discourage free-range play because of realistic concerns over predators, criminal activities and traffic. When your kids are electronically manacled to a screen, you know where they are.

Additionally, parents are working more and have less time to initiate camping trips and weekend hikes, presuming they are, or ever were, even interested in those sorts of activities themselves. Most kids 9 to 12 need transportation and adult involvement to fish, hike, garden and get to the beach, and this sort of time is becoming increasingly expensive and harder to achieve even for families living on an island.

But before you panic, consider that according to the Children's Society in the 60s and 70s didn't really roam about either. Forty-three percent of kids 9-14 years did not stray from their homes more than about 255' in 1970.

By 1997, this distance was reduced to less than 74' in industrialized countries. While these figures can be misleading given that city kids have different play spaces than their suburban or rural counterparts, it suggests that outdoor time that would allow for the sorts of woodland activities that Louv endorses has not been available to children for a couple of generations.

Reformers also seem to, conveniently, overlook the obvious fact that while constant indoor entertainment holds the potential of negative physical and psychological results, the outdoors can kill you. I mean, did you see "Bridge to Terabithia" with all of that unsupervised running around in the woods? Early in the film, my immediate thought was, "Oh, this isn't going to end well." And it didn't.

While I don't doubt that kids have fewer opportunities for unsupervised outdoor play than their fore-youngsters, I would note that Louv and organizations committed to turning the momentum of culture back to a more nature-centric time may be falling into the trap of revisionist history.

You know, when everything in the past was suffused with goodness and things have been going to hell in a hand basket ever since. I take issue with the premise that a childhood spent out of doors was just one enriching moment after another. Let's take a nostalgic trip back, shall we, to the 60s and 70s when we had electricity but hadn't really learned how to use it.

Kids went in and out. If we were bored inside, we went outside. When we were bored outside, we tried to get back inside. If it was summer, we were near heat exhaustion and chewed up by bugs. If it was winter, our extremities were dangerously numb and our hair was frozen. Farm kids didn't have any other choice but to go outdoors according to the demands made by livestock and agriculture. Those kids couldn't wait to get back to the warmth and light inside.

My childhood was spent on 30 acres in rural Michigan. I cannot imagine an environment more conducive to an unplugged life. This wasn't a choice, mind you. I would have spent more time on indoor media amusements if entertainment of the day had not been so primitive.

Four-channel television reception, pre-cable, was dependent on some sort of highly mercurial Antennae Spirit, and my dad spent a lot of time on the roof worshipping it. Appeasing the Spirit required turning the holy aluminum spire this way and that and yelling down, "Do you see anything yet? How 'bout now?" The answer was invariably "No." I could have hardly flopped down in front of the Zenith black and white and spent a decade lost in "Flipper" reruns even if I'd been permitted.

There was radio, but in my house it was eternally stuck on a polka music station from Saginaw. We had a few albums and a hi-fi, but that home entertainment center was largely dominated by German recordings, Bing Crosby and a lone copy of "Stan Kenton Plays for Today" (I often wondered if the album was part of a larger series that included "Stan Kenton Plays for Midweek" or "Stan Kenton Plays for the Apocalypse").

All that outdoor time made me appreciative of the natural world, for sure, but I also met with accidents. It's dangerous out there and I wasn't even a reckless kid. From the ages of six to around thirteen, I fell through pond ice, cracked a couple of ribs after being thrown from a hostile pony, pierced an eardrum tripping into a thorny tree, had frostbite and landed on my neck when I flipped a sled.

Then there's the near-drowning, slashing my knee to the bone, getting caught out during a lightning storm, flesh-eating poison ivy over and over again, and all of those insect bites and stings. I met up with venomous snakes and scorpions and a feral pig (after a move to Texas). I was bitten by a couple of dogs.

I took a long walk on a camp-out once and found myself on a rifle range. I fell into a pen of hogs, and was threatened by one landowner with a gun. I developed seasonal allergies and fell out of innumerable trees. Additionally, I encountered unsavory people in the form of one flasher and a creepy man that lived down the road. Our parents thought he was a nice old gentleman who loved kids. He did, indeed, love kids but not in a nice way.

I don't believe that many vigilant modern parents would welcome those kinds of risks as an alternative to the PlayStation.

Among the engaging childhood outdoor pursuits I enjoyed?: collecting earthworms and delivering them to birds' nests in the orchard (I got the idea I was helping the robins feed their demanding young); setting up a piece of aluminum tubing between two chairs and jumping over it again and again - for years; rolling down a muddy creek embankment all summer; sitting on the tractor and pretending I was driving somewhere (please God, ANYWHERE!); jumping off of the shed roof; watching clouds; digging through the neighbor's trash dump; riding my bike around the yard. Good times.

Maybe some kids had great games and spent their languid summer days lost in happy camaraderie in their tree house, reading about the highly UNsupervised Nancy Drew going everywhere she pleased with her under-aged friends in her white roadster. But I didn't know them.

The kids I knew stood out on their front porches begging their mothers to let them in for just a little while, to no avail. The family cat had better success in crossing that threshold on a summer day than most of us.

Organized youth groups weren't any more innovative in engaging us indoors or outdoors. On one memorable field trip, my Brownie leaders (who weren't over-fond of the outdoors either) took us to a nearby men's prison. There we were, in beanies and knee sox, filing down the hall of cell block D between the inmates. As a special surprise, some of us were fingerprinted. Of course, this is an appalling place to take young girls and there wasn't a badge for Jail Craft, anyway. But by comparison, the Cartoon Network looks downright wholesome.

Am I a better adult for having been a nature child? Who knows? Some of my cognitive senses were, no doubt, heightened, and some of my intellectual abilities were, also, no doubt, completely ignored and under-stimulated. I know I was profoundly bored and there is just so much positive goodness you can wring out of any childhood - something is lost and something is gained no matter what path you choose, or are pushed down by your parents.

What I'm saying is that I don't think the doomsayers need to worry overmuch. History teaches us that we all come into the world at a specific point in time, and we grow up and live in accordance with the demands of those times. We have no power, or steam power, or nuclear power. There is slavery or emancipation, bigotry or equality. We listen to radio or we watch TV or we gather around a fire pit and dance to beating drums. We are being persecuted or we're persecuting some other group. We are declaring war, or we are defending ourselves from invading forces and tyranny. We plow the fields behind a team of harnessed oxen, or we drive through Wendy's. We go through cycles of religion and science; lean times are followed by plenty which is inevitably followed by recession. We are born during epidemics and plagues and enlightenments. We go indoors; we go outdoors. It was, eternally, "better then", and it's so much" worse now", or vice versa.

If you think that today's young people are obese and indolent because of their electronics, you might find some comfort in reading the words of Roman historians. Even back in the day, Empire parents were lamenting that their kids were too lazy to worship at the temple of Jupiter and that society was about to fall apart like a badly wrapped toga. I imagine senior Neanderthals sitting around the fire and bemoaning that Ice-Age teens just weren't bothering with cave drawings before the wooly mammoth hunt anymore. Standards, then and now, are constantly and forever declining, yet, somehow, society just keeps wobbling along, for good or ill.

Fortunately, kids in the San Juans have a natural paradise lapping at their doorstep. If your kids can't find something interesting to do outdoors in such a magical environment, they aren't looking for it. Some kids grow up to be wilderness guides and marine biologists. Other kids grow up to be software engineers. If your nature child is drawn to the out of doors, she or he will, no doubt, figure out how to open the door without the benefit of a $20 million fund to shift culture.

*References come from the article "Are Children Losing Touch with Nature?" written by Donna St. George for The Washington Post, June 24, 2007.

Notes-to-Self #2: April 15th is the deadline for your submission to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (also known as "The Dark and Stormy Night Contest"). If you have anything like the talent of Stan Higley - "When she sashayed across the room, her breasts swayed like two house trailers passing on a windy bridge." - and can write comparable or even worse prose, you could be a contender.

See www.bulwer-lytton.com for rules. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page anyway, so take a moment to stop at the 2007 Bad Sex in Fiction Awards for inspiration.

Notes-to-Self #3: If you ever feel like your romantic life is in a sorry state, you may find some comfort in the story of Petra, the love-addled German swan. Petra had developed a, shall we say "attachment" to a paddle-boat shaped like a swan. When a real male swan was introduced into the love triangle, it appeared that Petra had found a more satisfying relationship.

But it was not to be. The male swan left her for bluer ponds (the swan equivalent of "greener pastures") and Petra went back to her paddle-boat lover. See Petra the swan and her plastic pedalo lover at www.telegraph.co.uk

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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