Out-of-Doors
Reprint from Life Unplugged Column, Tucson Green Magazine. Februaryby Susan L. Feathers
Generations ago mothers told their children to go play "out-of-doors."
Think of it. A kid could run out into the neighborhood street and summon up a gang of friends to find adventure in places where there was still a semblance of natural landscape.
What do we find today? Kids on cell phones, walking down a sidewalk oblivious to the surrounding environment; kids in front of computers with virtual landscapes entering into a Second Life where they can create themselves into someone else. And the "woods" are no longer wild places. Groomed parks replaced them. But much more has changed. By age twelve today's American child has been exposed to more violence, more advertising, more influences other than a family's values than many of us experienced by age thirty.
It isn't all bad, of course. The learning opportunities are awesome. Children can find innumerable outlets for their creative side, form relationships with children and youth around the world, and learn about people and places with the ease of a seasoned world traveler- right from their bedroom.
I, for one, would never want to give up my computer and all it has made possible for me in my communications with family and friends and in my work as a freelance writer.
Yet these new communication technologies come on the crest of a wave leaving in its wake an important kind of learning experience with a real live world.
In 2006 Richard Louv published research on a phenomenon he termed "nature-deficit disorder" (Last Child in the Woods). He documented the negative impacts on learning from lack of exposure to natural landscapes. What began as a series of articles developed into a movement and now, a Congressional bill- No Child Left Inside (NCLI)- a bill that would bring an infusion of funding for environmental education in public schools once again. Louv's observations parallel a growing body of information about how exposure to nature positively contributes to healthy child development.
Yet, parents today are much less willing to allow their kids to play outside unsupervised. Louv sites "stranger danger" as a prime reason. He explains how the media helped perpetuate fear that is unfounded in the real statistics that show neighborhoods are safer today than at anytime.
However, neighborhoods where people know each other and care for each other are fading from experience. The culture promotes anonymity through its quest for individual freedom in technology and transportation and a myriad of other aspects of daily life. Rather than roaming kidnappers, we may have created our own social wasteland with technologies that separate us from each other.
Adults and children are equally equipped with cell phones, IPODs or MP3 players with a menu of several hundred songs cued-up for the day, perhaps a Blackberry for unbroken email and web access. With all the accoutrement, it's a wonder we ever look into another human face, let alone the trees or sky.
Americans are continually distracted. We do not pay attention to each other, to our own bodies and what they are telling us, nor to the natural world around us. For all we've created to open such amazing possibilities online, we have lost our footing on Earth.
So what's the big deal? Doesn't all this STUFF connect us more? Well, it does connect us but in a way that might actually be changing us.
Think of an email as a note pinned to a wall somewhere in your circle of daily existence. What makes it meaningful? The real experience of the person, the flesh and blood, the guy that makes you laugh, the friend that drives you crazy, the memory of a nuanced gesture- these make the message contextually meaningful. A note from a stranger holds little power to make us act, to help us cope.
Take the email from someone you do not know, for example. Who is he really? We can make ourselves out to be just about anyone we want when there is a screen. Little can be discerned. Often there are misunderstandings because of lack of context; we have all experienced the email gone awry!
My son is an executive in human resource management. He talks a lot about human relationships as akin to banking. You have to deposit value to withdraw value, Tom reflects to me. Extrapolating to a virtual world, are we overdrawing our relationship accounts because we are failing to make deposits in the flesh?
The antidote is to show up in person more often, I believe. Our virtual communications will only be as meaningful as our face to face encounters. The same is true with this beautiful desert. We can look at a photo of a desert night, but how can it ever convey the deep stillness broken only by the low hoot of a barn owl and the sound of evening breezes playing through needles on a saguaro spine?
How can children know what it means to be truly alive on this great good Earth without the touch of sun and the wonders of discovery in a little wild place near their home or school? How can they ever conceptualize their place in a world so grand and finely wrought from an image on a flat screen in a silent room?
For more information on the No Child Left InsideSM Coalition visit www.eeNCLB.org.