GROWING IN NATURE

Childhood depression, teen depression, ADHD, teen crime and drug abuse;  I’ve been reading up on how several situations involving children and adolescents have been addressed through some type of nature therapy.  A casual term of “nature-deficit disorder” describes the negatives effects that a life cut off from free play in green spaces can lead to.  Essential for healthy development of a child, outdoor free play describes openly exploring and playing with an outdoor environment through all senses in their own space and time.  With urban areas seeming to take over much of our lands green space and legal and regulatory restrictions on natural play, we have a generation of kids that have a high incidence of nature-deficit disorder.  First hand experience of nature is being replaced by the second hand, often distorted, dual sensory (sight and hearing only) one way experience of television and other electronic media. 

There are so many benefits of nature, which feed the growing mind and body:

• Nature is a place to use all your senses and to learn by doing; multi-sensory experiences in nature help to build the cognitive constructs necessary for sustained intellectual development and stimulate imagination by supplying the child with free space and materials for creativity and problem solving. 
• It doesn’t make you feel like you have to conform to any image as the misleading landscape of our man made world tends to do with advertisements, billboards, and other media; it’s just there and excepts everyone just as they are.  
• A calming, tranquil and active environment, nature involves the senses to help with stress reduction, improving attention span and rejuvenating your spirit by being a short escape from challenges of life. 
• nature presents the young (and everyone) with something greater than they are -  it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.  Without that experience, we forget our place, we forget that larger fabric on which our lives depend.

My inspiration for this topic comes from a book I’m reading called “The Last Child in the Woods”  by Richard Louv.  The following statements, from Louv’s book, are from or about children/ young adults spending time in nature, usually their first encounter:   

• Describing his time spent on an Nature Reserve, a late teen/early twenty year old says “When I come here, I can exhale.  Here, you hear things; in the city, you can’t hear anything because you can hear everything.  In the city, everything is obvious.  Here, you get closer and you see more.”   
• In relation to a story of overcoming some hardship as a child,  a woman says “There is something about nature that when you are in it you can feel that there are far greater things at work in the world that oneself.  It puts one’s problems in perspective and makes challenges seem less significant.  It can be an escape without actually leaving the world.          
• After a court appointed 2 week excursion to a remote Alaskan Tribal Village, some troubled city teens had this to say of their experience:  “I never seen a place so dark at night.  I seen seals, bears, whales, salmon jumpin’- and I caught crabs and oysters, and as soon as we caught ‘em, we ate ‘em.  I felt like I was in a past life.”   "I never saw a bear before.  I’m scared of bears, but when I saw them, I had no stress.  I was calm, free.  You know what was great?   Picking berries.  It was addictive. Like cigarettes.  Just the picking, just being out in the bushes.”
• A parent said she had recently begun taking her son to the local park for 30 minutes each morning before school because the weather was nice, and they “had some time to kill”.  She then said, “Come to think of it, I have noticed his attitude toward going to school has been better, and his schoolwork has been better this past week.  I think it’s because spending time at the park is pleasurable, peaceful, quiet, calming.”

Growing in nature is being part of the bigger picture.  Rediscovering the link between human creativity and experiences in nature could offer a new branch of therapy for such syndromes as attention deficit disorder.  Children naturally crave the outdoors as it’s an integral part of developing our senses.  We can comfirm this fact by watching what happens to the senses of the young when they lose that connection with nature and by seeing the sensory magic occur when children, and even those beyond childhood, are exposed to even the smallest interaction in a natural environment.  

Nature is perfectly imperfect, just like humans.  We were made to be involved with nature.