Author Says Today’s Kids Deserve Rural Treatment

At the Adventure Playground in Irvine’s University Park, kids are encouraged to do things they might not be able to do elsewhere in the city: build forts from scrap lumber, scramble over discarded tires or jump into mud puddles.

In other words, they get to do the kinds of things their parents took for granted when they were growing up. It’s a city-funded, master-planned and adult-supervised re-creation of what used to be called a vacant lot.

That’s pretty much how David Suter, the playground’s supervisor, envisions it. Here, kids can “play in the dirt or roll in the mud. . . . They have a chance for experimentation and the opportunity for self-direction.”

Those kinds of opportunities are dwindling, or have to be fostered artificially. Kids today have their Nintendo games and computers and dozens of channels on cable TV; what they don’t have is open space to explore, as more and more of it is paved over or built on or fenced off.

What does it all mean for the way kids grow up, for the way they relate to the natural world? Whatever happened to tree forts, to playing cowboy and finding tadpoles in a local stream? These aren’t just questions of nostalgia for wistful moms and dads; one author believes kids are missing an essential formative experience.

When Richard Louv was growing up in rural Missouri, he used to steal off to the woods and fields whenever he could, and he came to know “every path, every bend in the creek, every kind of animal.” Now grown up and a parent himself, Louv worries that kids today don’t have the chance to explore their natural environment the way he did, and that spells bad news in more ways than one.

Louv’s concerns were borne out when he talked to kids across the country for his book “Childhood’s Future,” published last year by Houghton Mifflin Co. One of the topics he discussed with children and parents was today’s relationship between youngsters and nature.

Kids today, he found, are retreating further and further into the “electronic bubble.” The boundaries of the child’s world are shrinking, not only because open spaces are being developed but because children are not allowed to roam as they once did for fear of their safety in an increasingly dangerous world. So, many stay inside with their electronic toys or stray outside only for organized sport activities.

Dan Leinbach, principal of the Orange County Outdoor Science School, agrees with Louv’s observations. The school, with five sites in the San Bernardino Mountains, is a one-week residential program for fifth- and sixth-graders that last year handled more than 17,000 local children.

For more and more of the children Leinbach sees, this introduction to the outdoors is a “first-time experience,” he says. “There’s so many things today that draw a youngster away from that kind of (outdoor) experience” in their day-to-day lives.

Louv says that schools, for their part, are actually doing a better job than ever in teaching kids about nature and that children today have a much broader awareness of global environmental concepts than he had as a child. Local schools and nature centers also offer children a wide variety of extracurricular nature and outdoor programs.

But while such programs are “very, very important,” Louv says, they are not a substitute for an unstructured, day-to-day exposure to the outdoors, away from the watching eye of parents and teachers.

What is lost is a “personal intimacy” with nature that, studies have shown, is crucial to a child’s creative development. “I think we should be very troubled with that,” Louv says. “To have any kind of transcendent experience with nature, you have to do it alone.”

When you “stand back from America as a nation” and look at the wealth of its creative history, Louv believes, you have to look at our historic “freedom of movement” as much of its source, the freedom that originates from the country’s physical space as well as civil freedoms.

“Cut that away from people’s experience, and you’re cutting the nation’s creativity off at its roots,” Louv believes.

Natural experiences in youth also pave the way for a lifelong love for the outdoors, the author says. Nearly all environmentalists, for instance, can point to a “transcendent” natural experience by the age of 10 when asked about the impetus for their beliefs, Louv says. “It’s at the top of the list.”

So what is a parent to do? Louv has several recommendations, both long- and short-term.

* Be involved in the schools, and encourage hands-on natural science projects in the classroom. Nature videos and classroom lectures, while informative, are not substitutes for direct experience.

* Encourage the preservation of natural open spaces in the neighborhood. Cities and developers have a love for turfed “pocket parks,” but Louv says studies have shown that children don’t use these green spots--kids are much more likely to be found at the untended edges or the bordering ravine.

* Encourage kids to explore the open spaces that are available. This may require parents to come out of their own “electronic bubble” a bit, Louv says. Adults have been convinced by the crime coverage on TV news that their “neighborhood and environment are much worse than they really are,” Louv says. “The more we fear what’s out there, the more we withdraw into the electronic bubble.”

Organizing a Neighborhood Watch program can help lessen the dangers that do exist, Louv says.

* Parents should tell stories about their own childhood experiences with nature. “My kids are just fascinated” with stories of his Missouri youth, says Louv, who now lives in San Diego. He calls it an “oral history of nature” that tells kids “it’s OK to be out there, that there’s something mysterious and wonderful out there.”

* Take trips to natural places. Many families tend to take a once-a-year camping trip, but that’s putting too much pressure on a single event. Regular trips of even a few hours can accomplish more. The kids may gripe a bit, Louv admits, but when they overcome their initial resistance and suddenly connect with their surroundings, it’s like “pouring water on a plant that has not been watered in months.”

Louv recalls a recent trip with his own kids in which they typically complained of tired legs on the walk. But when they came upon a small pond, his 9-year-old son suddenly ran to the water yelling, “Pond slime! Pond slime!” He became fascinated with the life floating in the water.

When that happens, Louv says, he tries to “melt into the trees a little bit to let the kids do that, and stay out of the way.” It’s his way of letting nature take its course.