Nature Playscapes: Bringing the "wild" back to the child
By Julie Dieguez
As children, my sister and
I would spend happy hours hiding out in our
“cave” in the heart of a massive forsythia
bush and conduct death-defying crossings on
rickety logs over streams full of “ravenous
crocodiles.” When my third grade teacher
instructed the class to describe our pets, I
turned in a page filled with drawings of
squirrels, rabbits, birds, and other critters
that were as much a part of my daily life as my
dog.
When asked about childhood memories of time spent outdoors, most of us wax nostalgic about splashing wildly in streams, climbing to dizzying heights in trees, and defending shaky stick forts from the onslaught of villains – not about climbing monkey bars and plastic slides.
Sadly, the once-common practice of mothers waving children out the door into the sunlight, telling them simply to “come back when the streetlights come on,” is virtually unheard of these days. It is an anomaly to see a child perched in the branches of a tall tree or playing anywhere outdoors other than on a ball field or designated playground equipment. In fact, many kids have been led away from outdoor experiences completely by the lure of online entertainment.
A Changing Landscape
In
“The Landscapes of Childhood,” published in
the journal Environment and Behavior,
psychologist Rachel Sebba poetically suggests
that the natural landscapes of childhood become
the inner landscapes of adulthood. As the world
undergoes the largest wave of urban growth in
history, the landscapes of neighborhoods are
changing drastically, dominated by cement,
mowed lawns, and manufactured playground
equipment. Any natural areas are often governed
by covenants and homeowner agreements limiting
activities like fort building and unstructured
play. The creativity and imagination sparked
and nurtured through free play and exploration
has been replaced by “packaged imagination”
handed to kids in the form of mass-produced
plastic play sets and entertainment flickering
through computer and television screens.
Today’s children engage in exponentially more screen time than green time. According to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation report, children and teens spend more than seven hours a day in front of “entertainment media” – television, computers, video games, cell phones, and iPads. That’s more than 50 hours each week that youth are “plugged in” – an increase of more than one hour per day since a similar survey in 2004.
Author Richard Louv spoke of the impact of all this screen time in his groundbreaking book, Last Child in the Woods: “Society is telling kids unconsciously that nature’s in the past, it really doesn’t count anymore, that the future is in electronics and, besides, the bogeyman is in the woods.”
Yet the true value of
learning about one’s world through hands-on
discovery cannot be duplicated by sitting
indoors in front of a screen or by engaging in
unimaginative, repetitive play on manufactured
equipment. A 2011 article in The Atlantic
entitled “The Creativity Crisis” notes that
organizations such as NASA and Boeing already
sense a growing deficiency in creativity among
the incoming workforce. Recent graduates are
incapable of thinking in three dimensions, and
companies now consider ideal candidates those
who can “think with their hands” instead of
simply creating things on a screen. Stanford
University recently refocused on hands-on
learning partly due to the frustration of
engineering, architecture, and design
professors who realized their best students had
never taken apart a bicycle or built a model
airplane. There is simply no substitute for
hands-on exploration, and the multifaceted
setting of nature is the perfect vehicle to
encourage the development of critical creative
skills and reconnect youth to the “real
world.”
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