Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (15 page)

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. A child can, on a rare clear night, see the stars and perceive the infinite from a rooftop in Brooklyn. Immersion in the natural environment cuts to the chase, exposes the young directly and immediately to the very elements from which humans evolved: earth, water, air, and other living kin, large and small. Without that experience, as Chawla says, “we forget our place; we forget that larger fabric on which our lives depend.”

W
ITH IDEALISM AND TREPIDATION
, a graduating college student anticipates becoming a teacher; but she is puzzled and upset by the school environment she experienced during her training. “With all of the testing in schools there is no time for physical education, let alone exploring the outdoors,” she says. “In one of my kindergarten classes, the kids get to run to a fence and then run back. That’s their P.E. They have to stay on the blacktop, or they can use one of the two swings available.” She doesn’t understand why P.E. is so limited, or why the playground can’t be more conducive to natural play. Many educators share her sentiment.

At least her school has recess. In the United States, as the federal and state governments and local school boards have pushed for higher test scores in the first decade of the twenty-first century, nearly 40 percent of American elementary schools either eliminated or were considering eliminating recess. In the era of test-centric education reform and growing fear of liability, many districts considered recess a waste of potential academic time or too risky. “Lifers at Leavenworth get more time in the exercise yard,” commented
Sports Illustrated
columnist Steve Rushin. School-based physical education was already on the wane. Between 1991 and 2003, the percentage of students who attended physical education class dropped from 42 percent to only 28 percent. Some
states now allow students to earn P.E. credits
online
. Field trips were also cut. Even as school districts decreased students’ experiences beyond the classroom walls, they increased the number of school hours. Ironically, the detachment of education from the physical world not only coincided with the dramatic rise in life-threatening childhood obesity but also with a growing body of evidence that links physical exercise and experience in nature to mental acuity and concentration.

Now, for some good news. Studies suggest that nature may be useful as a therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), used with or, when appropriate, even replacing medications or behavioral therapies. Some researchers now recommend that parents and educators make available more nature experiences—especially green places—to children with ADHD, and thereby support their attentional functioning and minimize their symptoms. Indeed, this research inspires use of the broader term “nature-deficit disorder” as a way to help us better understand what many children experience, whether or not they have been diagnosed with ADHD. Again, I am not using the term nature-deficit disorder in a scientific or clinical sense. Certainly no academic researchers use the term, yet; nor do they attribute ADHD entirely to a nature deficit. But based on accumulating scientific evidence, I believe the concept—or hypothesis—of nature-deficit disorder is appropriate and useful as a layperson’s description of one factor that may aggravate attentional difficulties for many children.

First, consider the diagnosis and current treatments of choice.

Nearly 8 million children in the U.S. suffer from mental disorders, and ADHD is one of the more prevalent ones. The disorder often develops before age seven, and is usually diagnosed between the ages of eight and ten. (Some people use the acronym ADD, for attention deficit disorder, to mean ADHD without the hyperactive component. But ADHD is the more accepted medical diagnosis.) Children with the syndrome are restless and have trouble paying attention, listening, following directions, and focusing on tasks. They may also be aggressive, even
antisocial, and may suffer from academic failure. Or, in the language of the American Psychiatric Association: “The essential feature of ADHD is a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity, impulsivity . . . more frequently displayed and more severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development.” Some of the uninformed public tends to believe that poor parenting and other social factors produce the immature behavior associated with ADHD, but ADHD is now considered by many researchers to be an organic disorder associated with differences in the brain morphology of children.

Critics charge that often-prescribed stimulant medications such as methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamines (Dexedrine), though necessary in many cases, are overprescribed, perhaps as much as 10 to 40 percent of the time. Methylphenidate is a central nervous system stimulant and shares many of the pharmacological effects of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and cocaine. Contrasting sharply with medical practices elsewhere in the world, use of such stimulants in the United States increased 600 percent between 1990 and 1995, and continues to rise in numbers, especially for younger children. Between 2000 and 2003, spending on ADHD for preschoolers increased 369 percent. Both boys and girls are diagnosed with ADHD, but approximately 90 percent of the young people placed on medication—often at the suggestion of school officials—are boys.

One child psychiatrist explains: “My prejudice is that girls with ADHD whose symptoms are similar to boys with typical symptoms of ADHD are not common.” Notice that he said “prejudice.” Much about ADHD remains a medical and political mystery.

The massive increase in ADHD diagnoses and treatment may, in fact, be a matter of recognition: ADHD has been there all the time, called by other names or missed entirely, causing suffering for children and their families. Another explanation boils down to availability: three decades ago, the currently used medications were not widely known or as intensely marketed by pharmaceutical companies, and not yet fully
trusted by physicians—and we’re lucky to have them now. Nonetheless, the use of such medications and the causes of ADHD are still in dispute. As of this writing, the latest culprit is television. The first study to link television-watching to this disorder was published in April 2004. Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle maintains that each hour of TV watched per day by preschoolers increases by 10 percent the likelihood that they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by age seven.

This information is disturbing. But television is only part of the larger environmental/cultural change in our lifetime: namely, that rapid move from a rural to a highly urbanized culture. In an agricultural society, or during a time of exploration and settlement, or hunting and gathering—which is to say, most of mankind’s history—energetic boys were particularly prized for their strength, speed, and agility. As mentioned earlier, as recently as the 1950s, most families still had some kind of agricultural connection. Many of these children, girls as well as boys, would have been directing their energy and physicality in constructive ways: doing farm chores, baling hay, splashing in the swimming hole, climbing trees, racing to the sandlot for a game of baseball. Their un-regimented play would have been steeped in nature.

Even without corroborating evidence or institutional help, many parents notice significant changes in their children’s stress levels and hyperactivity when they spend time outside. “My son is still on Ritalin, but he’s so much calmer in the outdoors that we’re seriously considering moving to the mountains,” one mother tells me. Could it simply be that he needs more physical activity? “No, he gets that, in sports,” she says. Similarly, the back page of an October issue of
San Francisco
magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains
that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him—but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.

The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams. “Our brains are set up for an agrarian, nature-oriented existence that came into focus five thousand years ago,” says Michael Gurian, a family therapist and best-selling author of
The Good Son
and
The Wonder of Boys
. “Neurologically, human beings haven’t caught up with today’s over-stimulating environment. The brain is strong and flexible, so 70 to 80 percent of kids adapt fairly well. But the rest don’t. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference. We know this anecdotally, though we can’t prove it yet.”

New studies may offer that proof.

This research builds on the well-established attention-restoration theory, developed by a husband-and-wife research team, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan. Environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan, the Kaplans were inspired by philosopher and psychologist William James. In 1890, James described two kinds of attention: directed attention and fascination (i.e., involuntary attention). In the early 1970s, the Kaplans began a nine-year study for the U.S. Forest Service. They followed participants in an Outward Bound–like wilderness program, which took people into the wilds for up to two weeks. During these treks or afterward, subjects reported experiencing a sense of peace and an ability to think more clearly; they also reported that just being in nature was more restorative than the physically challenging activities, such as rock climbing, for which such programs are mainly known.

The positive effect of what the Kaplans came to call “the restorative environment” was vastly greater than the Kaplans expected it to be. According to the Kaplans’ research, too much directed attention leads to what they call “directed-attention fatigue,” marked by impulsive
behavior, agitation, irritation, and inability to concentrate. Directed-attention fatigue occurs because neural inhibitory mechanisms become fatigued by blocking competing stimuli. As Stephen Kaplan explained in the journal
Monitor on Psychology
, “If you can find an environment where the attention is automatic, you allow directed attention to rest. And that means an environment that’s strong on fascination.” The fascination factor associated with nature is restorative, and it helps relieve people from directed-attention fatigue. Indeed, according to the Kaplans, nature can be the most effective source of such restorative relief.

In a paper presented to the American Psychological Society in 1993, the Kaplans surveyed more than twelve hundred corporate and state office workers. Those with a window view of trees, bushes, or large lawns experienced significantly less frustration and more work enthusiasm than those employees without such views. Like similar studies on stress reduction, this study demonstrated that a person does not have to live in the wilderness to reap nature’s psychological benefits—including the ability to work better and think more clearly.

Subsequent research has supported the Kaplans’ attention-restoration theory. For example, Terry A. Hartig, an associate professor of applied psychology at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Gävle, Sweden, along with other researchers, compared three groups of backpacking enthusiasts; a group who went on a wilderness backpacking trip showed improved proofreading performance, while those who went on an urban vacation or took no vacation showed no improvement. In 2001, Hartig demonstrated that nature can help people recover from “normal psychological wear and tear”—but nature also improves the capacity to pay attention. Hartig emphasizes that he does not test the extremes—say, the Sierras versus East Los Angeles. Rather, his studies have focused on what he describes as “typical local conditions.” As described in
Monitor on Psychology
, Hartig asked participants to complete a forty-minute sequence of tasks designed to exhaust their directed-attention capacity. After the attention-fatiguing
tasks, Hartig then randomly assigned participants to spend forty minutes “walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music,” the journal reported. “After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proofreading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger.”

Attention-restoration theory applies to everyone, regardless of age. But what about children, especially those with ADHD?

“By bolstering children’s attention resources, green spaces may enable children to think more clearly and cope more effectively with life stress,” writes Nancy Wells, assistant professor at the New York State College of Human Ecology. In 2000, Wells conducted a study that found that being close to nature, in general, helps boost a child’s attention span. When children’s cognitive functioning was compared before and after they moved from poor- to better-quality housing adjacent to natural, green spaces, “profound differences emerged in their attention capacities even when the effects of the improved housing were taken into account,” according to Wells.

Swedish researchers compared children within two day-care settings: at one, the quiet play area was surrounded by tall buildings, with low plants and a brick path; at the other, the play area, based on an “outdoors in all weather” theme, was set in an orchard surrounded by pasture and woods and was adjacent to an overgrown garden with tall trees and rocks. The study revealed that children in the “green” day care, who played outside every day, regardless of weather, had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.