Susan Brenna: Take a Hike

Take a Hike: As gaming devices supplant games of catch, schools counter
nature-deficit disorder with outdoor experiences.
by Susan Brenna
Edutopia

Though his parents once lived in the countryside in Mexico, Juan Martinez grew up in crowded Los Angeles, barely noticing the earth and sky that was masked by the concrete and smog. Six years ago, when Martinez was fifteen, his science teacher proposed he earn extra credit and raise his failing grade by joining the school's ecology club. He found he liked working in the school garden, which led to a trip to the Teton Science Schools, in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. It changed his life.

"Just to be able to see a fresh stream -- not the LA Aqueduct, but to see an actual stream with fish in it -- to actually see the stars was magic, "Martinez says. "This happened at a moment in my life when I needed something to motivate me." Today, he leads overnight camping trips for nature-deprived LA teens and helps them restore their neighborhood parks, even as he studies to become an environmental lawyer. "I can't live without nature," he says. "I've got to have it in my life."

But nature is exactly what's missing from the lives of many urban and suburban and even rural American children and teens, according to San Diego journalist Richard Louv. In his book /Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder/, Louv presents evidence that American children are losing a vital aspect of healthy development as they spend increasingly less time riding bikes, climbing
trees, fishing, or doing much of anything outdoors.

Louv notes a number of trends that have converged over decades to create the modern indoor-centric family: Residential development patterns have consumed the bits of forest and empty lots where young baby boomers used to meet and play. Ubiquitous airconditioning has made homes into comfort cocoons. As more parents have gone to work, they have enrolled their children in supervised after-school programs, many of them conducted indoors.

"The average child thirty years ago was spending four to five hours a day outdoors, while the child today is spending almost all that time inside -- including nearly six and a half hours a day with electronics," says Kevin Coyle, vice president for education at the National Wildlife Federation. Recently, Mike Lee, director of community programs for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, based in San Francisco, discovered that children of agricultural workers in nearby Monterey
County had never seen the ocean, located a mile from their homes.

"It's not just that the outdoors is uncool" to kids who prize gaming devices over games of catch, says Martin LeBlanc, national youth director of the Sierra Club. "It's that it doesn't exist for them." And the unknown is scary. When teens from many of Chicago's thirtyone Boys and Girls Clubs took an overnight trip to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore last fall, many feared going on a night hike and encountering critters in the dark. But fear turned to thrills as the teens used touch, smell, and hearing to poke their way along a trail lit only by moonlight, trip leader Angela Zirles recalls.

As families have increasingly stayed inside in recent decades, behavioral scientists have shown that children and teens are less stressed, and physically and emotionally healthier, when they are regularly exposed to nature. Scientists at Cornell University found that children who have more contact with nature -- even a view of something green from their bedrooms -- experience less stress than those with less
contact. At the University of Illinois, scientists found that children as young as five who engaged with plants and nature showed reduced signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

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