A young boy finds joy in the small wonders of a creek The World Outside Connecting Children with Nature - By Robin Smith, MRCA Interpretive Staff


Catching ladybugs, digging a hole to the center of the earth, running through sprinklers, making forts; like many of you, I spent a lot of time playing outside as a kid. Our neighborhood was a child-sized kingdom full of adventures waiting to be had, discoveries to be made, and mad, crazy, frenetic games fueled by our imaginations. Nature was a wild and limitless source of entertainment; trees to climb, lizards to chase, fuchsia flower ballerinas, picking wild berries alongside shady wooded creeks. Looking around, you can see that urbanization has overtaken nature and this has


4 Symbiosis


changed the way that children play and learn.


It has only been in the last 100 years or so that families migrated to cities in search of work, driven by the industrial revolution, the Depression, and the disappearance of the family farm. Before that, about 90% of families lived in rural or agricultural areas. Children experienced and learned about nature first-hand. Now, three quarters of the population of the United States live in urban areas.i


In a little more than a century,


the daily lives of children have changed dramatically, from toiling in factories in the 19th century, to the parent managed structured play dates of today. Most children live better, healthier lives than of old, with a big exception: children spend less time outdoors than ever before. A lack of time spent outdoors can cause or aggravate childhood behavioral problems. Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods,ii


coined the


phrase “Nature-Deficit Disorder,” to describe this phenomenon. All of this has renewed interest in nature and the environmental movement.


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