Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Reviewed by Stacey Hollebeek

For those of you, especially educators, who read and digested last month’s “Lit Crit Lite,” and subsequently have been forwarding Kafkaesque memos to bewildered bureaucratic colleagues, this month’s book – with a longer title, but shorter sentences – is much more straightforward and less confusing, though it still includes its own brand of measured paranoia.

Last Child in the Woods wants you to get outside – get outside with your kids, your students, yourself. And don’t just get out on the soccer field or football field – that’s not what the author, Richard Louv, considers nature. To be in real nature, he argues through somewhat anecdotal research, kids have to be in a place that has grass, dirt (as in our New Mexican case), and trees – and the freedom to explore the area by turning over rocks, sitting in solitude, climbing trees, building forts, and catching animals of all sorts. Not that we all need to head directly to our nearest national park – though that’s not a bad idea, as the number of visitors has been dropping significantly over the past 10 years – but even into the vacant lot next door, the canyon at the end of our cul-de-sacs, the “nearby nature” as Louv calls it.

Published in 2005, Last Child in the Woods laments the loss of natural, unregimented play outdoors in the form of tree houses, forts, gardens, natural parks with trees – the type of play normal 30-40 years ago, before the popularity of neighborhood associations, media-driven kidnapping manias, and the birth of the Internet. To describe this loss of outdoor play and its accompanying disorders, Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder.” For 10 years before the book was published, Louv traveled through America, interviewing a host of school kids and their parents about the shrinking amount of time they spent outdoors, their fearful relationship to the natural outdoors, and the low importance they placed on time spent outdoors. Tying his interviews with the relatively recent “biophilia hypothesis” put forth by Harvard entomologist Edward Wilson, Louv argues along similar lines that humans are by nature hunters and gatherers, and have an innate need to be in nature. Without it children have been experiencing a variety of ailments including increased depression, obesity, and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). By putting kids back into nature, Louv reasons, we could create for them greater mental and physical health, as well as securing a healthier future for our whole planet.

Louv also ties into these interviews a variety of related and eye-opening statistics: By the 1990s, most kids were allowed to roam only a ninth of what their parents had in the 1970s. Most eight-year-olds can identify cartoon characters and media stars, but can’t recognize local bug or tree species. Prescribed antidepressants have doubled for kids in the last 10 years. The average child spends 44 hours per week (?!) using electronic media . . and the list goes on.

Refreshingly, Louv stays away from the easy blame game of faulting electronic media for this phenomenon of increased alienation from nature. Though he nods toward it, he focuses most of his blame on the loss of natural surroundings and increased rules for natural time. More neighborhood association rules – against tree houses and gardens – as well as more rules in natural areas telling kids to “Look, don’t touch” or to “Stay on the trail” might improve someone’s aesthetics and prevent lawsuits, but aren’t doing kids any favors or protecting their natural environment in the long run. In a chapter of its own, Louv also tackles the issue of “stranger danger,” one of the main reasons that parents (myself included) don’t allow their kids to explore their neighborhood nature more, pointing out that stranger abductions have actually gone down in the last few decades. He also faults this generation’s obsessive need for productivity, our habit of putting our kids in every possible organized sport or club, for taking away kids’ time to be creative and inventive in the great outdoors. Going back into the biographies of extremely creative and innovative Americans from previous generations, almost all of who spent significant time outdoors, Louv argues that this generation of Americans may be more productive, but they are less inventive as a whole. In one of the rare studies on this topic that Louv cites, researchers found that kids actually play more creatively and cooperatively in parks with groupings of trees and spots partially hidden from adults.

One more interesting group that Louv blames for this phenomenon of nature alienation is higher education: By switching their science departments’ focus so exclusively away from natural history and environmental education to the molecular level, universities are losing their ground as storehouses of natural and environmental knowledge. No one knows all the names of the local animal or plant species anymore, and no one is teaching this information to college students, much less to grade school kids. And “humans seldom value what they cannot name” (Louv, p. 140). Most of the environmentalists today came into their career because they spent significant time in the wilderness – but if today’s kids aren’t spending that time outside, where will tomorrow’s environmentalists come from?

So, if we’re convinced enough that nature alienation is a problem, what can adults do to get kids back into the great outdoors? Louv spends the last third of the book identifying practical ideas for parents and educators to do just that. Parental enthusiasm and modeling of wonder and awe for nature seems to be his number one suggestion for families – he suggests cutting the over-achievement stress through a walk in the woods, making it not “another ‘Fine Educational Opportunity’ but a chance to turn them on to what a neat world we live in.”

After several statistics and stories showing how many American and international schools have actually improved test scores through sending students outside for longer and more unstructured periods of time, as well as through more monitored hands-on natural activities such as gardening, Louv suggests that schools could be of huge importance in the future of environmental education through alternative educational methods. As experiential education, place-based education, and a variety of other experimental educational ideas are turning kids out of their four-walled classrooms, and showing them the outdoors as their potential classroom, schools are seeing behavioral and ADD problems drop, while grades and attendance rise. An interesting prospect, as we near the 10-year anniversary of the problematic No Child Left Behind law, and measure its ineffectiveness as an educational tool. It might be time to start looking for answers elsewhere, beyond the test scores and into something we’ve had here all along – our own backyard canyons