It takes a forest, a field and a stream to raise a child | The Japan Times Online

In 1996, back when the present U.S. Secretary of State was the first lady, Hillary Rodham-Clinton published a book titled “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us,” which popularized an old African proverb — “It takes a village to raise a child.”…… But beyond politics, social scientists know, and most parents admit, that child-rearing is a mysterious combination of nature and nurture. Both influence a child’s development to varying degrees, with the interplay of genes and environment determining who we become. Clearly the village plays a role.

Today, however, with over half of the world’s population living in cities, more and more young people are missing out on a crucial dimension of childhood development. Not the village or the genes, but the forests: a combination of nature and nurture, call it self-nurturing in the natural environment.

The lack of forests, fields and streams for urban kids is one part of the problem, and the spread of seductive technologies is another. According to a recent survey in the United States by California-based nonprofit the Kaiser Family Foundation (which focuses on national healthcare issues and the U.S. role in global health policymaking), in a typical day “8- to 18-year-olds devote an average of 7 hours 38 minutes to using entertainment media (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking,’ they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours 45 minutes’ worth of media content into those 7½ hours.” (For full survey results, visitwww.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm.)

……Whether we like it or not, such technologies and their offspring are here to stay. The problem is that each hour a child spends absorbed in entertainment media is one hour not spent in nature.

……Like various other similar outdoors programs for children — including ones my Nature page colleague C.W. Nicol organizes with his Afan Woodland Trust in Nagano Prefecture — these camps give children an opportunity for self-nurturing in a supportive environment set in natural surroundings. Unlike Nic’s projects for mainly disadvantaged Japanese children and young Tohoku survivors, though, these are conducted in English.

…….”Modern kids don’t get enough time outdoors in contact with nature, and far less than previous generations, and this affects everything from intellectual and emotional development to obesity and physical fitness,” Paddock continues. “As a kid, I only went to one overnight camp, but I was out in the woods around our neighborhood in the daytime, catching fireflies at night, sledding and making snow forts in winter. We weren’t closely supervised, so we got to learn our own limits and invent our own play.

…..”Another thread is that we are providing camps for a growing number of children from orphanages,” he explains, including a special camp in Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture, for Tohoku Prefecture orphans. “For these kids, all of the other camp benefits are true — along with what we believe to be great therapeutic potential to be found in nature.”

Paddock cares deeply about kids and nature, and he hopes that nurturing campers who love nature will encourage those children to conserve Japan’s environment when they get older. “We have to know something before we can love it, and we have to love it before we want to protect it,” he says.

…..”Our job at EA is first of all to help kids really know nature and the outdoors. Then, and only then, can they begin to love it. Once they’ve begun to experience the beauty, the fun and the mysteries for themselves, then love of the natural world has a hope of arising from within. And once that love, that personal relationship, arises, then the instinct to protect what they love will follow,” he explains.

“If even a fraction of the kids we meet at camp develop a personal relationship with the outdoor world and have a respect for nature that comes from knowing it directly, maybe we’ll have made a difference,” Paddock says. “Turning kids on to how cool nature is, and how much enjoyment there is to be found in nature, we’re laying the foundation for them to understand, care about — and act upon— the environmental issues they’ll learn about as other educators contribute to their development.”