Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (18 page)

Instilling self-discipline is an essential value in parenting, but so is the nurturing of creativity and wonder. With greater knowledge about the measurable value of exposing children to nature, parents may have an easier time finding that balance. Certainly many parents are concerned about overprogramming their children, and hunger for a different approach. Tina Kafka, the mother of college students, wonders if her children will remember much of what she has scheduled into their lives:

When I think of my own childhood, I particularly remember those special times when I was climbing my tree, or playing pirates in the wash behind my house, or sliding down the wash sides on a piece of cardboard. But I realize now, after talking with my mother—who said she scheduled a lot of my childhood, arranging for friends to come over, all that—that the free time in the wash may not have actually occupied that many hours of my childhood. But those hours are the moments I remember absolutely vividly. Even with my own children, I am often amazed how some activity that I have carefully planned pales in their long-term memories compared to another activity that was completely spontaneous and hardly memorable to me. As adults, we can plan a million things to take up our kids’ time in a meaningful way, but what really clicks into their inner being is beyond our control. Sometimes I wonder why we think we need so much control.

Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew
that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of
respect for humans too
.

—L
UTHER
S
TANDING
B
EAR
(
C
. 1868–1939)

F
EAR IS THE MOST
potent force that prevents parents from allowing their children the freedom they themselves enjoyed when they were young. Fear is the emotion that separates a developing child from the full,
essential
benefits of nature. Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger—and of nature itself.

The boundaries of children’s lives are growing ever tighter. In a 2002 survey, 56 percent of parents in the United States said that by the time they were ten years old they were allowed to walk or bike to school, but only 36 percent of those same parents said their own kids should be allowed to do the same, according to a national survey by TNS Inter-search for
American Demographics
magazine. The trend is documented abroad, as well. For example, in Amsterdam, researcher Lia Karsten compared children’s use of space over several decades. She found that, in the 1950s and 1960s, “playing meant playing outside” and that children had substantial freedom to move around on their own, had a relatively large territory to roam, played with children from diverse backgrounds, and used urban public space for many of their activities. In contrast, Karsten found that children in 2005 did not play outside as much or for as long a period of time, had a more restricted range in which they could move freely, and had fewer playmates, and those were less diverse. And
in Great Britain, researchers have determined that the freedom of mobility experienced by a nine-and-a-half-year-old child in 1990 was comparable to the freedom of a seven-year-old in 1971.

In terms of child development, the shrinking home range is no small issue. An indoor (or backseat) childhood does reduce some dangers to children; but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to the child’s concept and perception of community, risk to self-confidence and the ability to discern true danger—and beauty. The child psychologist Erik Erikson described the child’s need, particularly in middle childhood, to establish a self beyond adult control, and the important role of forts, hideouts, and other special places near the home. Stephen Kellert, professor of social ecology at Yale, and a leading thinker on biophilia, describes how experience in the surrounding home territory, especially in nearby nature, helps shape children’s cognitive maturation, including the developed abilities of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. “A major challenge of childhood is developing the ability to translate and interpret experience by systematically assessing objective, empirical evidence,” he writes. “Indeed, no other aspect of a child’s life offers this degree of consistent but varied chances for critical thinking and problem solving—a steady diet for the mind as well as the body.”

When the educator and landscape architect Robin Moore studied the San Francisco Bay region in 1980, he combined his findings with a review of international research and came to “one inescapable conclusion”: Increasing residential and arterial traffic “was the one universal factor above all others that restricted the development of children’s spatial range, thereby limiting children’s knowledge of the community environment—including its natural characteristics and components.” Other researchers have pointed to deteriorating parks and the trend toward larger houses filled with electronic toys and gadgets.

My unscientific hunch, however, is that since 1980, fear of strangers—and beyond that a generalized, unfocused fear—has come to outrank
the fear of traffic. For all of these reasons, many children never get to know their neighborhoods or parks or the surviving natural areas at their fringes.

Long before the terror of 9/11 magnified our generalized fear, I spent a day with the Fitzsimmons family in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They lived in a Victorian house; the porch swing in front creaked slightly in the wind. Swarthmore is an idyllic town filled with old trees and young children and wide sidewalks, where, as Beth Fitzsimmons told me later, there is one rule: Nobody can hurt trees or children. This is, in short, the last place where one would expect parents to express fear. Yet, Beth said:

When I was a little kid, there were woods at the foot of my street, and I would get up at six o’clock in the morning and go down there for two or three hours and pick blueberries by myself, and nobody ever had to worry about it. . . . Guns and drugs are the reasons that we say no to things that our kids would probably like to do. There are a lot of lunatics out there. It’s so different. Even if [my daughter] Elizabeth goes down to Crum Creek behind the college, I want her to take the dog and make sure she’s with at least one friend.

I was surprised to find the fear as intense in Kansas as it was in Pennsylvania. One father said:

I have a rule. I want to know where my kid is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I want to know where that kid is. Which house. Which square foot. Which telephone number. That’s just my way of dealing with it. Both of my kids have heard my preaching that the world is full of crazy people. And it is. There’re nuts running loose. People that need to go through years of therapy and need to be incarcerated. They’re out there driving around in cars and they’ve got guns on their seats. They’re out there. And you have to deal with that situation. I’d be hesitant to let my kids go over to the park alone. Everyone tells you to never leave your kids alone.

Also in Kansas, a pleasant middle-aged teacher spoke with sorrow about how daily life is colored by fear.

I was standing in line the other day at the airport and a little kid was going around to look behind the counter, and his mother said to him, “Do you want somebody to snatch you? Don’t walk away from me like that.” And here I’m standing behind them in line, and I’m saying to myself, well, I really didn’t
look
like a child snatcher. But we teach our kids so young to be aware of everything. They lose their time to be innocent. My seventh-graders have had to deal with situations that we didn’t know about until we were adults. Teaching kids intelligent caution around strangers is certainly important; how to say “no” to potential child abusers is essential. But we need to create a balanced view of danger. The damage that has been caused when you have families teaching their kids never to talk to another adult in a society where you desperately need more communication—what does that do to the kid?

In the oddest ways, many Americans’ view of the woods has reverted to ancient irrationality, conjuring dread behind the branches.

In the early 1990s, Joel Best, then a professor and chairman of the Sociology Department at California State University, Fresno, had conducted a study of stranger-danger—Halloween terrorism, in particular; all those reports of candy laced with drugs or pins, razor blades or poison. He reviewed seventy-six specific stories and rumors reported from 1958 to 1984 in the
New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Fresno Bee
. “We couldn’t find a single case of any child killed or seriously injured by candy contamination,” he said. “The Halloween sadist is an urban myth.” In 2001, Best—now a professor at the University of Delaware—updated his findings in his book
Damn Lies and Statistics
. “Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.” So goes a widely quoted statement,
which originated in a Children’s Defense Fund report in the mid-1990s. Best calls it the most inaccurate social statistic ever circulated. “If the number doubled each year, there must have been two children gunned down in 1951, four in 1952, eight in 1953, and so on,” he writes. In 1983, the number of American children gunned down would have been 8.6 billion (about twice the Earth’s population at the time). By this doubling process, the number of American kids shot in 1987 alone would have been greater than the estimated total of the world’s population—from the time of the first humans. “Monster hype,” Best calls this.

At the time, I dubbed the phenomenon the “Bogeyman syndrome.”

At the height of the first missing-children panic, a decade ago, some missing-children organizations were claiming that four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction. Wrong, said David Finklehor, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, who conducted the National Incidents Study of Missing Children with the Justice Department in 1990, considered the most comprehensive and accurate report on this subject. By a wide margin, most of the abductors weren’t strangers, but family members or someone the family knew. Second, the actual annual figure of stranger abductions was two hundred to three hundred, and it still is.

By 2005, the rates of violent crimes against young people had fallen to well below 1975 levels, according to the 2007 Duke University Child and Well-Being Index. In 2006, New York state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services report on missing children described a microcosm of the issue: “Abduction cases accounted for approximately one percent of the total reports, and abductions committed by family members comprised the most frequent form of abduction.” One stranger abduction is too many, but in New York state, only three children were abducted by strangers in 2006. The authors of the New York report cautioned that this may be an undercount, because of how cases are reported. Even so, the recorded number is far lower than most people believe. An argument
can be made that this is because children
have
spent more of their lives indoors. There may be some truth to that. But many other variables are at work, among them the demographic reduction in the proportion of young males, the rise of community policing, and so forth. The greatest risk to children is elsewhere. The authors of the Duke Well-Being Index state, “The most disturbing finding” of their report is not violence or abductions, but “that children’s health has sunk to its lowest point in the 30-year history of the Index, driven largely by an alarming rise in the number of children who are obese and a smaller decline in child mortality rates than achieved in recent years.”

Today, Finklehor calls the stranger-snatcher epidemic “an optical illusion” caused by the generalized social anxiety, new coordination between law enforcement and the missing-children groups, and media excitability. Make that media market-driven excitability. In a five-year study of local newscasts aired in Los Angeles in the 1990s, Frank Gilliam, a professor of political science at UCLA and associate director of the Center for the Study of American Politics and Public Policy, found that local TV news is creating a powerful “crime script” in the public’s mind—a distorted shorthand that we carry around in our heads. “The nightly news, much more visceral and powerful than print media, actually promotes racism and violence,” he says. “Viewers now automatically link race with crime.”

Isn’t TV simply telling us unpleasant, though accurate, news? “No,” says Gilliam. “Violent crime coverage, connected to race, has disproportionately come to dominate local news.” In Los Angeles, coverage of violence overwhelmingly outstrips the incidents of violent crime—by a factor of as much as 30 to 1 in the case of murder. Some TV newsrooms work hard to provide balance and context to crime coverage. But Gilliam insists that “body-bag” news coverage, by conditioning us to “crude stereotypes of members of racial minority groups,” is shaping public policy and spreading inaccurate fear.

Such fear may actually make our children less safe. In 1995, a “shyness
inventory” revealed that 48 percent of people surveyed described themselves as shy, up from 40 percent in the mid-1970s. “People see social interactions as more dangerous than they are,” says Lynn Henderson, a clinical psychologist and visiting scholar at Stanford. She worries that, as more parents keep their children inside the house or under rigid control, youngsters will be deprived of chances to become self-confident and discerning, to interact with neighbors, or to learn how to build real community—which is one defense against sociopaths.

Excessive fear can transform a person and modify behavior permanently; it can change the very structure of the brain. The same can happen to a whole culture. What will it be like for children to grow up in socially and environmentally controlled environments—condominiums and planned developments and covenant-controlled housing developments surrounded with walls, gates, and surveillance systems, where covenants prevent families from planting gardens? One wonders how the children growing up in this culture of control will define freedom when they are adults.