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Tag: kids and nature

  • ‘Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness?’ BULL PUCKEY.

    ‘Don’t teach your children to love the wilderness?’ BULL PUCKEY.

    woods

    BULL PUCKEY, I say.

    I ran across this commentary on Jorgen Randers’ ‘2052: a global forecast for the next forty years,’ slated for publication in July, and was so flabbergasted by what I read in there that I’ve had the post open in my browser for days until I had time to write about it:

    There is a section called “What Should You Do?” which is usually the part in such books that picks you up a bit, and makes you believe that you can do something…

    [One] is “don’t teach your children to love the wilderness”. Randers reasons that over the next 50 years we will see the ongoing erosion of biodiversity and wilderness, due to climate change and humanity’s reach into more and more remote areas. A love for “old, undisturbed nature”, he argues, is something it will become increasingly difficult to satisfy. ”By teaching your child to love the loneliness of the untouched wilderness, you are teaching her to love what will be increasingly hard to find”, he argues, which will lead to unhappiness and despondency. ”Much better then”, he concludes, “to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity – and with never-ending music piped into their ears”.

    What fresh hell is this?

    (And no, I don’t mean the decidedly British punctuation issues.)

    I know that it’s reported that the average American kid spends 4-7 minutes daily outdoors in unstructured play (just outdoors, not specifically in a “wild space”) and a hurts-my-heart-to-hear seven HOURS parked in front of a screen. It’s mind-blowing and seemingly insurmountable, but there are tons of initiatives trying to reverse that trend, from the National Wildlife Federation’s Green Hour to KaBOOM’s Playground Challenge to Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to Screen Free Week and so on.

    Sure, we could just teach our kids to learn to just love their bodies, no matter how rotund and unhealthy they become, but we are not resigned. Right? We continue to fight that battle because we f*cking care about our children and their health and even if the tide is incredibly hard to turn, we have to try. If only to keep reminding everyone that we could be healthier, we can eat better and move more and spend more time outdoors, and we bloody well should.

    We continue to teach our kids to value things that have value.

    The idea of not teaching our kids to love and value the wilderness because one day it might not be there is like saying we shouldn’t teach our kids to love us— because one day we will be gone.

    We also teach them how to live without us. We teach them in the hopes that they will carry us in their heart and their minds and in their words and their actions. And in the same way, it’s practical to teach them how to live in cities, how to navigate and find beauty there; but we should strive also to teach them to love wilderness and open space and green life, in the hopes that they will seek it and nurture it and preserve it. Because it has value.

    Children will only try to preserve what they love, that’s human nature. And they will only learn to love wild spaces, solitude, freedom if we give them time to enjoy it; and by showing by example. Which is to say:

    GET OUT THERE.

    National Park attendance by young people is down. The more attendance declines, the more likely it is that these natural spaces will lose their government funding and protection. And once they’re gone… they’re gone.

    But you don’t have to travel to a national park. There are plenty of pockets of untended nature all over the country, and they need protection. These are safe havens for wildlife, travel corridors. They are escapes for the human animal, a place to reconnect  to the wildness and the peace within. A place for you to share with your kids. To create memories. To develop a stronger sense of self. To be healthier. To foster a love of nature.

    For the record, there are some other things increasingly hard to find that I’ve also taught my kids to value:

    • personal responsibility
    • respect for their elders
    • regular household chores that are actually useful (cooking, cleaning, laundry)
    • proper grammar
    • being well-read
    • holding doors open for people behind them; running ahead to open doors for those who might have trouble
    • manners in general

    Because they have value. That’s reason enough.

    What say you?

     

  • Unplugging, Pebble Tossing, Forging Our Own Path

    Unplugging, Pebble Tossing, Forging Our Own Path

    sitting by the creek's edge

    Do not follow where the path may lead.
    Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

    ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Saturday. Time I turned off the computer and called the kids outside.

    My bones are creaky, my assprint indented into the couch cushions, my wrist and elbow stiff from too many hours of tap-tap-tapping on the laptop, the kids restless from a week at school and a morning of video games.

    Time for a nice long walk to stretch our legs and restore our souls.

    White Clay Creek winds across the bottom of our road, and untended parkland connects from the perimeter of our property all the way down to the creek, where we can pick up park trails. Up here, though, there is no path. No one comes through this way.

    We head down the hill, through the forest, trusting our instincts, taking turns leading, never going quite the same way twice.

    I love that adventure lies so close to home, that this little patch of wilderness exists. That we only have to travel ten minutes on foot until we reach a place where we hear no cars, meet no people. Where we find snake skins hanging from trees. Where the ground smells earthy and clean and cool.

    It makes this house- this ancient drafty house, with its stink bugs and carpenter ants and leaking pipes, its never-ending litany of “things to fix”- so totally worth every bit of effort.

    taking a break while hiking

    To sit in the shade on a fine day
    and look upon verdure
    is the most perfect refreshment.

    ~Jane Austen

    Eventually we reach the bottom and meet up with a bike trail, and other people out for a restorative walk. We’re always quick to greet each other– so unlike city streets, where I find people tend to avoid eye contact.

    We go to the creek and then we do something that always, always makes me feel a million times better.

    We skip stones.

    pebbles in white clay creek

    There is something about this that immediately brings me back to childhood. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, and a creek ran by where we waited for the bus to return home. And while we waited, my dad and I would skip stones.

    So I skip stones with my kids, in the hopes that one day this will serve as the same sort of immediate therapy. That when they feel frazzled, stressed, burnt out, they can go find some running water, some smooth stones with sand sticking to them. That the sound of stones hitting water- plink, plink, plunk– will remind them of cool, unhurried hikes with their mother. Of quiet, and of family in the wilderness.

    And something within their souls will slot into place, and they will feel at peace.

    Cass throws a handful of stones into white clay creek

    I know it sounds silly; I know with great certainty that it’s something I need to do.
    What do you do to hit “reset” when your body and soul are out of alignment?