Richard Louv
Richard Louv
Richard Louvis an American nonfiction author and journalist. He is best known for his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, which investigates the relationship of children and the natural world in current and historical contexts. Louv created the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe possible negative consequences to individual health and the social fabric as children move indoors and away from physical contact with the natural world – particularly unstructured, solitary experience. Louv cites...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
Being close to nature, in general, helps boost a child's attention span.
Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?
If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.
Nature-the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful-offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.
Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.
Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.
Kids are absolutely starved for positive adult contact.
There is another possibility: not the end of nature, but the rebirth of wonder and even joy.
Each of us-adult or child-must earn nature's gift by knowing nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment.
Studies of children in playgrounds with both green areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas.
This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache...Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.
There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.
Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing...
Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.