Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
This is typical sentence from Last Child in the Woods: "he offered no academic studies to support his theory; nonetheless his statement rang true." That about sums up this book: it's not empirical, but, nonetheless, it rings true'"more or less. Louv draws his conclusions far too widely and gives too much credit to what nature will do for kids, but the general idea rings true. Kids should play in nature '" not because (as Louv questionably implies) it will cure ADHD, make them better athletes, increase their math and language test scores, prevent depression, or guarantee great creativity '" but because it's fun, it's freeing, it's healthy, and they're kids, and that's what kids have done for centuries.The author takes an unfocused and largely anecdotal approach to supporting his argument that playing in nature makes kids better off in a myriad ways. He dubs the results of modern lack of contact with nature "nature deficit disorder." He cites some studies but often ignores the maxim that "correlation does not necessarily imply causation." A typical support goes something like this: look at all these creative people. They used to play in nature as kids. Playing in nature must make people creative. It's rather like picking the most creative people of the current youngest generation and saying '" look at all these creative people. They used to surf the internet as kids! Surfing the internet must have made them creative!It makes sense, however, that nature would have a calming effect on kids; that balancing on fallen trees as you cross the creek would build coordination, that spending time imbibing the wonders of the great Creator would inspire human creativity. And I join in a feeling of sadness for a world that is largely gone; I want my children to have the childhood I had, spending hours after school exploring the creek with friends, building forts from scratch in the woods, catching waterbus and tadpoles and butterflies, digging pits in the earth, and engaging in neighborhood-wide, week-long war strategy games from patch of woods to patch of woods. I don't necessarily agree with all of his solutions, and I don't think he realizes how large a share of the problem is owing to private familial choice and not external circumstances, but I dearly want my kids to play in nature.Louv has ideas for improving the problem, but, as is true of most people making public policy proposals, he doesn't really consider the cost or practicality of implementing them. And ultimately it isn't schools or poor city planners that keep kids from nature, it's family culture. And he does mention this: the overscheduling, the fear of allowing children to wander off on their own to explore, and the permissive use of electronic entertainment. But roaming freely in packs from school until dinner time is the way children have always explored nature, so until you change that private family culture of fear, structure, scheduling, and plugging-in, no amount of city planning or tinkering with the public school curriculum is going to address the problem of "nature deficit disorder." This is why I think this is much more a private family issue than a public policy issue, and while I think this book is a good kick in the pants to parents (including me), it's not necessarily a good springboard for policy making, being based almost entirely on emotion rather than reason and lacking sufficient empirical verification of the claimed benefits of free play in nature or evidence that the particular policies he supports really would sufficiently increase free play in nature.The truth is '" nature is still there. Development has made the areas smaller, but they're there. The very same creek I explored as a child is right where I left it. The question is '" are we individual parents going to allow our kids to explore it on their own and encourage them to? Or are we going to say, I want you home after school, in your room, studying until basketball/football/piano/band practice? Even the author of this book doesn't let his kids explore the canyon behind his own backyard without taking their cell phones, and he has taught them to be appalled by hunting.Some questions I wished he'd addressed better (or at all):(1) How much of our perception of the problem might be connected to mere romantic nostalgic longing for our own pasts? I was not born into a world of personal computers (though I got my first in 4th grade) or of the Internet (which I didn't use until college); the world has changed irrevocably, and there is more difference between the childhood lifestyle of my children's generation and my own generation than there was between the childhood of me and my parents, or even me and my grandparents. The talents the future world will demand will be different; we have to acknowledge this and prepare our kids for it.(2) How much of it is that nature has a calming effect on children, and how much is it that in open spaces, adults are more tolerant of children acting like children? (3) I want my kids to explore nature on their own, but I did this with friends as a kid because this is what kids did. Now, how will my children make and maintain friends spending most of their time doing things most other kids simply aren't doing?
Do not let the title of this book deceive you. Your children do not suffer from "Nature-Deficit Disorder." In fact, Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, admits his unease with the appropriation of medical science jargon, but says that “parents and educators†understand the term very clearly. Unfortunately, that alone does not justify such disingenuous, hyperbolized nomenclature. It does, however, set the tone nicely for his argument that the senses of young Americans are being unnaturally dulled by a lack of exposure to the wilds.Frankly, the arguments put forth to make such a case were very weak and disorganized. Louv is a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune and this book had all the factual basis that one would expect in a standard sized op-ed piece. The book is full of pull out quotes from seven year olds and grandmother naturalists alike and light on cultural analysis. And where he does pull together more credible academic research, he consistently fails to provide any sort of critical analysis beyond the same headline producing conclusions that we could expect to read about in a daily newspaper. While he frequently caveats his citations with notes that the research is not definitive or ongoing, he rarely talks about the shortcomings of the works he is relying upon.He utterly neglects the possibility that his views as a cultural commentator are just that, the product of a very specific American, middle-class culture. He frequently discusses the restorative power that nature experiences have on inner-city youth, never realizing the patronizing tone of such value projection. Meanwhile he bemoans the loss of the privileged places that natural historians and scout masters once occupied in the hierarchy of the American psyche. His ongoing nostalgia with the tree-houses of his own childhood came across as very generationally specific and I briefly wondered how many grandparents purchased this book impulsively for their own grown children.And finally, at its heart, this book was profoundly anti-urban. Louv's recipe for an ideal childhood is wholly exurban; the bigger the lot, the better. He claims the environmental high ground without acknowledging the positive effects of density.The real problem for kids today is not a nature-deficit, but a generation of adults that buys into the simplistic argument that doing things differently than they were done 'back when' is inherently inferior. (C)Jeffrey L. Otto, October 23, 2007
What do You think about Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (2006)?
The suppositions of this book most of us already acknowledge, a priori, to be true. We need only to be a little observant. Yet I was particularly startled to learn that "Nature Deficit Disorder" or the disconnect between Nature and our children is not solely confined to the continental United States but is a world wide pandemic with global repercussions. And frankly, this disconnect is quite scary!Through a host of causes carefully constructed we discover that children are quickly losing their opportunities for direct primary experience of Nature and the out of doors. Instead, with almost religious fervor and intensity indirect secondary experiences of technology via the computer and other electronic devices are now the alpha and omega of their view of the world. In addition, institutional and legal fear has infected the culture to the point where in 2005 in Brownard County, Florida "no running signs" were posted at 137 elementary schools; merry-go-rounds and swings had already been eliminated along with cement crawl tubes. Culture autism was the authors description of this downward spiral.Paul, a fourth-grader in San Diego: "I like to play indoors better, cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."And from Robert Michael Pyle: "What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren"
—John
Now, any book that insists kids should be spending more time playing outside than in front of a screen is, in my case, preaching to the choir. I don't need to be convinced. I need data and ideas and backup.Louv makes many interesting observations and provides some references to research that supports his claims, but not much in the way of in depth examinations of those studies. (I am a skeptic even when presented with data that backs up my beliefs.) I would have liked to see more of that, but appreciate that the conversational tone was probably better suited for intended audience- ie, those who are trying to figure out how to get their kids outdoors and connected to the real world around them. He does provide a number of interesting ideas and examples, including ways to involve schools and communities.I found the chapters on HOA restrictions and legal complications of outside play especially informative. Louv addresses the pervasive but illogical "stranger-danger" paranoia that keeps many kids from exploring their own backyards, let alone the neighborhood, and suggests that more community involvement is the best way to combat these particular issues.
—S. R.
Pre-reviewJust want to jot down my thoughts about this book BEFORE actually reading it. This book is constantly cited in discussions about connecting people to nature (which is kind of my thing) , but I've avoided reading it b/c I've also gotten the impression that it's not based on any kind of reasonable evidence, and by reasonable I mean quantitative, peer-reviewed research, and that's a problem for me. But, as Constance pointed out to me, the fact that it has traction in my circles is reason enough to read it, I guess, if only to knowledgeably refute it or repackage its message when it comes up in discussion....and the reviewI think if you read this as an editorial and not as an attempt to present evidence supporting the thesis, the book is actually quite good, and relevant. If you are a parent and you haven't thought about the value of unstructured play in the outdoors, or you simply live in a largely man-made landscape, I suspect there's a lot to be gained by reading Louv's occasionally eloquent, always impassioned plea that kids need the freedom to explore and experience the non-human world on their own terms, as almost all children have until our current urban era, even if that world is a weedy abandoned lot. His collected anecdotes from kids and parents are beautiful, and resonant for those of us who grew up, as Louv and I did, with easy access to forests and streams and abundant time to explore them.What I wanted, though (what I always want, really), was evidence, which was generally lacking or unconvincing. Sometimes this was Louv's fault, e.g. single-observer descriptions of events (doesn't that break a fundamental rule of journalism?) [1], un-cited facts and figures [2], over-reliance on the work of a handful of academics [3], or worse, reports that did not undergo any form of peer review [4]. That being said, I'm pretty sure the underlying problem is that the concepts here are complicated and hard to reduce into forms of evidence I find persuasive, even when Louv did cite research (which he often did). What is nature, anyway? What is a "connection" to nature, and how does one operationalize it in such a way that one can study it? These are the kinds of issues that make social science hard and its findings maddeningly impossible to generalize, so it's difficult to fault a journalist like Louv for not providing evidence that is not only not there, but practically impossible to collect in the first place (not that it stops people from trying, though). Calling this "scholarly" or "well-researched" as the back cover blurbs do seems a bit extreme, though.So while I can't exactly thump my forefinger against this book and cry out, "The proof is here, people!", I think I can recommend it in the way I can recommend Pollan's books, as a thought-provoker and a conversation-starter. For me, the ideas presented aren't novel, so I found the lack of supporting evidence frustrating, but for those who've never considered this stuff, like I hadn't considered the source of my food before reading Omnivore's Dilemma, I think this one's worth reading.[1] Louv has this great anecdote on p. 27 about a neighborhood association in San Diego chasing away kids who were fishing in a pond and making bike trails in the woods b/c it violated housing association rules, but it's all based on one friend's testimony. Isn't this too good to go unverified?[2] E.g. "Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by American families, more time in front of the TV and computer, and growing obesity among adults and children because of diet and sedentary lifestyles" (p. 32). Totally without citation. "new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" (p. 34), also without citation.[3] He cites a lot of different researchers, but relies heavily on Chawla and Sobel, both of whom seem like cool nature-loving people in their own right, but neither of whom seem to publish much in the scientific literature.[4] E.g. "CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning" (executive summary, full text), p. 204TOREADhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
—Ken-ichi
