Kids and Nature

Are your children suffering from a lack of nature? Oddly enough, this becomes more prevalent when the child becomes older but can, and as I have come to understand, also afflict our pre-school aged children.

Author Richard Louv (Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder) offers a couple of suggestions on how to create a place for your child to experience all of his senses to their fullest. Although Mr. Louv does not necessarily trash technology, a fact of life that even he admits will give the child a degree of learning that can be had nowhere else, he does say that using only television and computers as a source of stimulus does a great injustice to a child’s curiosity.

There is no need for you to pack your bags and head to the closest national park – although the experience is well worth the time and effort you may expend getting your child (and you) to a place where interaction with nature is almost unavoidable (save for hiding in the trailer the entire time). You are in the “big picture” when you are out in nature camping, hiking or fishing. But in many cases, your backyard will do just fine. A walk around the neighborhood or through an open field can be just as rewarding.

But I have found that the simplest exposure to nature is often the most rewarding. Are you stopping to watch a spider spin a web? Do you explain what you know to your child about the nature you grew up with? They revel in your knowledge of subjects that are new to them. Do you take the time to give them a little insight into what they are looking at?

My husband still has a set of nature encyclopedias from almost fifty years ago that do two things for your children when I take them out to show them what they are seeing: they illustrate some of the wonders of nature in vibrant close up color and it also lets them see reference materials in a book. Although I am big believer in reading stories to kids, these little snippets of information fuel their imaginations and give rise to an openness for their natural surroundings.

Can you answer questions like “why bees are attracted to clover”? Books like “The Reason for a Flower by Ruth Heller might help. Or “why birds fly”? Try Up, Down, and Around Big Book by Katherine Ayres and Nadine Bernard Westcot. You can follow along an ant path in Bug Safari by Bob Barner

This is a stop-and-smell-the-roses experience that you get with your child, often only once. Don’t pass up the opportunity to help your child learn from the one person they will rely on for decades to know the answer. I’ll only be an influence for a couple of years but you will always be there with new insights, great antidotes about your experiences with nature and with any luck, knowledge of the world around them.

Just on final word on the subject: Keep it positive. Suggesting that bees sting and spiders bite is good as a warning to keep children out of harms way but do so after you have the opportunity to offer some of the reasons for their being. Then tell them why they will get stung or bit.