Are your kids really spending enough time outdoors?

Originally titled "Nature's Magic Touch," from the June 2007 issue of Canadian Living Magazine. Click here to purchase the back issue.

The dragonfly resting on the palm of my hand was large and brilliantly blue. Our children momentarily stopped their chatter as they gathered around to have a closer look at the insect we had found in the dirt while out for a stroll.

“It's dead!” three-year-old Joshua announced. Samuel, 7, nodded in agreement, peering solemnly at the motionless bug.

“Look,” I said, pointing to its long pulsating abdomen. It wasn't dead. But something was wrong.

“Why doesn't it fly away?” asked Emily, 5.

As we talked about what might have happened to the dragonfly, the children came up with a plan to help it.

“What should we do with it?” I asked.

“Pray for it,” suggested Joshua.

“Put it in the shade,” said Emily, stooping to arrange a safe place for the dragonfly in the grassy ditch.

Close to nature
As I later reflected on the compassionate response of these youngsters for an apparently insignificant hapless creature, I thought about the importance of nature to our children's overall development. Early in our relationship, my husband, Randolph, and I agreed that nature would play a significant role in the lives of our children.

Our own early connections to nature helped to make us physically, emotionally and spiritually strong, and strengthened our commitment to raise our kids close to nature. The purchase of our rocky, densely treed parcel of “marginal” farmland outside of Cold Lake, Alta., helped to incorporate nature into our daily routine. As a family, we walk almost daily, frequently paddle our canoe on nearby waterways, ski, cycle and just tromp around the outdoors.

The urban challenge
The nature-child connection is eloquently described in Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 2006). Using personal stories and research, he paints a vivid picture of the rich contribution nature makes to children's overall healthy development. He also describes the unfortunate and widening gulf between nature and childhood –- and draws a bleak picture of the face of childhood without nature, a childhood lacking compassion, curiosity and wonder.

Canadians are increasingly urban. According to Statistics Canada, 80 per cent of Canadians in 2001 lived in urban centres. That's a complete reversal of the statistics of a century-and-a-half ago, when almost all Canadians lived in the country. As a result, children's access to wilderness is decreasing. “The days of all of us having cousins or an aunt and uncle on the farm are diminishing,” says Cam Collyer, program manager for Learning Grounds, a program of Evergreen, the Canadian charitable nonprofit organization that is committed to bringing nature to Canadian schools.

With a little imagination
There are simply fewer urban wild places to go to these days, and when they do exist, children are discouraged from using them, says Nathan Perkins, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph, Ont., who has conducted research in this field. “We came to the conclusion after a year of work that wild places, which kids find incredibly appealing and meaningful and are good for them, are disappearing because of adults' good intentions to tidy up the world.” For example, he says, adults look at places such as hedgerows on the perimeter of playing fields and see only sticks and windblown garbage and imagine pedophiles lurking within. But these messy places afford children a sense of wilderness to be explored.

And studies suggest that parents' fears about unseen dangers are unfounded; wilderness areas today pose no greater danger than in the past.

Is your family suffering from nature deficit disorder? Click here to find out.

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