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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Early Years (2-6)
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Nature is still there in the vacant lot, the back yard, the thoughtful neighborhood park. I was a city kid. The vacant lot on the corner was all the wilderness I knew until the Girl Scouts put me in a bus and drove me up into the local mountains, those ranges I saw dusted with snow on winter mornings, a view often disappearing by midday in that L.A. basin haze we sometimes more honestly call smog. I loved those empty lots. My friends and I built elaborate forts created out of scrap lumber and scavenged construction cast-asides. We imagined intricate dramas and played out old stories. We found treasures: lizards, frogs, birds, spiders that spun webs as big as windows. We met these creatures on our own, down on our hands and knees, without an adult interpreter. We lost ourselves, sometimes for hours, until we heard the voices of our parents calling us home as the streetlights began to wink on. I loved the scouting trips too: not just for the sisterhood, but for the stars, the trees, the cool clean sharpness of the air, and the wildness I found there and, simultaneously, in myself. Those local mountains were the first place where I felt myself singular, a human stretched out on the earth, looking up at the constellations, the vastness of the night sky. I was, I understand now, a typical child. I yearned for what all children need: a sense of their place in the natural world. And in that “losing” of ourselves, we learn what Henry David Thoreau discovered long ago: “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” I found I understood something about myself, my place in the world, in those vacant lots and in those scouting trips. My mother wasn’t a whiz about parenting theories. Someone probably gave her Dr. Spock but I am confident it went unread. I know she never read Thoreau’s “Walden.” She was busy. As a working single parent, she let me do what I wished for the most part – hence, the vacant lots, the scouting, the occasional treehouse, the adventures on my bike as far as my legs could carry me. I am sure she was relieved that I was self-directed and responsible enough to thrive on what I now see as unsupervised, unplanned activity, dependent on discovery and improvisation – exactly, it turns out, the kind of play that some experts suggest is essential. But the world that most of today’s children have inherited is different from my own childhood, even those who grew up where I did in the suburbs in and around Los Angeles. And many children don’t have parents who would allow them, as my mother did me, in the very best sense of that old saying, to “run wild.” In his most recent book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin Books, 2005), Richard Louv, a newspaper columnist and former staff writer for Parents magazine, coins a phrase – “nature-deficit disorder” – that he readily admits “is by no means a medical diagnosis.” But, he suggests, “it does offer a way to think about the problem and the possibilities – for children and for the rest of us as well.” True, there is less nature, even fewer vacant lots – or so it seems. Most of us live in urban and suburban areas, work more, play less. The natural world, when we can glimpse it, seems far away, too far, the destination for a vacation or a weekend jaunt, not a part of our daily lives. But children recognize what we adults may not: Nature is closer than we think. It doesn’t always require a car trip and reservations made months in advance at a showy national park. Nature is still there in the vacant lot, the back yard, the thoughtful neighborhood park, the regional preserve. Children don’t require the grand vistas adults seem to need. Their world is closer, smaller, a world in a grain of sand in a sandbox or on the beach, heaven in a wild flower. By all means, show your children the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Big Sur. Go camping. Join the scouts. But take a look closer to home, too. The natural world is still with us. It needs us, more than ever. And consider this: If it’s good for our children, it’s also good for us. Lisa Alvarez, an English teacher at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
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