Peg Smith’s Keynote Address at the International Camping Congress in Quebec, October 2008.
Part of my quote in the program book is this: “If we are truly going to achieve a strong, unified voice that articulates the essential value of the camp experience, it will take the entire camp village to raise strong, healthy, global citizens.”
What I’d like to focus on for the moment is the “village”— because the word “village” has a double meaning here. Yes, it takes a village of people to raise one child. But it also takes the village itself.
Think back one hundred years. Our homes were in villages or even mere cabins in the woods. We were surrounded by wide-open spaces — hills, fields, trees — green as far as the eye could see.
Now come back to the present, and we have a challenge. The village has changed.
L.A. Times writer Rosa Brooks said, “American children are in a lose-lose situation. They’re forced prematurely to do all the unfun kinds of things adults do, but they don’t get any of the privileges of adult life: autonomy, the ability to make their own choices, use their own judgment . . . . Somehow, we’ve managed to turn childhood into a long, hard slog. Is it any wonder our kids take their pleasures where they can find them? Not always good. The Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth said, “In countries throughout the developed world, many children and young people are displaying worsening (or unacceptably poor) outcomes in many areas of health and development.”
Well, Rosa Brooks and the Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth have something in common: They both make a great case for children’s need to be in nature.
WHAT HAVE WE FORGOTTEN?
- For generations, children grew up outside. They walked to school. They rode their bikes around the neighborhood. They splashed around in creeks. They ran barefoot in the grass. They climbed trees. They collected bugs. Played in the dirt. Ran outside in the rain. Close your eyes — where does your childhood memory take you? Childhood was characterized by innocence, imagination, energy, wonder, and laughter. And the thought of being cooped up inside all day long was unfathomable and torturous. It was punishment.
- There’s a reason TV is nicknamed the “idiot box.” According to a 2005 study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, American children spend on average 5½ hours a day plugged into some kind of electronic medium (TV, video games, computers, etc.). That’s more time than they spend doing anything else besides sleeping. And there’s mounting evidence that this is affecting our children’s ability to think for themselves and diagnosis of attention deficit disorder in children is running rampant. Two million children in the U.S. are on Ritalin.
- A New Zealand study found that kids who watch the least TV, especially between the ages of five and eleven, have the highest probability of graduating from college by the age of twenty-six, regardless of IQ or socioeconomic status.
- Your child practicing thumb dexterity with their favorite videogame doesn’t qualify as exercise. According to surveys by both the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, an American child is six times more likely to play a videogame on any given day than to ride a bike. At what cost??
- An estimated 22 million of the world’s children under the age of five are already considered obese.
- A new term has been coined for the world’s weight problem: “globesity.”
- There is a sunny side to life. According to Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, society is sending kids a message: “Nature is the past, electronics are the future, and the bogeyman lives in the woods.” Our children get this message at school, from their parents, and most definitely from watching TV. We are teaching fear and confusing that message with responsible safety.
- Kids who watch violent events on television, such as kidnapping or murder, are likely to view the world in general as scary and believe something bad will happen to them.
- TV also consistently reinforces gender-role and racial stereotypes.
- We may be able to take children out of nature, but we can’t change their connection to nature without consequences. Richard Louv explains that when nature is taken away from our children and replaced with a constant barrage of television and computers, they get what he calls “cultural autism”: use of their senses is reduced to the size of the screen they stare at day in and day out. Packaged and limited. He says, “Time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health,” and their mental, physical, and spiritual health depends on it.
- An article in the United Kingdom paper The Independent agreed, saying that “our innate craving for contact with nature is the result of millions of years of evolution in a natural environment . . . . Industrialization and urbanization have tossed those instincts aside. Our detachment from nature lies behind a host of modern psychological, emotional, and physical problems, as well as our blasé attitude toward environmental change. Personal and planetary well-being is connected.
WHAT DO WE KNOW?
Nature and play go hand in hand and, together, they have a profound impact on the health and development of children on the road to adulthood.
- The Canadian Council on Learning called play “nature’s answer to early learning” and described play in natural landscapes as“rich, diverse, multisensory experiences; opportunity for noisy, boisterous, vigorous, physical activity; opportunity for physical challenges and risk-taking that are inherent in the value of play; and opportunity for the development of physical strength, balance, and coordination.”
- The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says,“Play is essential to development as it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. The AAP also reports,“Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child.” Play is not a bad, four-letter word.
- A popular UK laundry detergent company is jumping on the play bandwagon by promoting outdoor playtime for children on its Web site and in commercials with an “Every Child Has the Right” slogan, saying, “We want to get more kids involved in all the outdoorsy, delightfully messy, creative activities that make childhood such fun . . . .”
- There is an actual petition that was sent to the acting Surgeon General of the United States:It is a “Call to Action” to promote the health benefits of daily, unstructured outdoor play for children and families. Regardless of age, being in nature helps us lower our stress levels, get exercise and relax our minds. For children, contact with green space and natural settings improves their ability to learn, hones their agility and balance, and can significantly calm those with anxiety and mood disorders. And, a childhood connection with the outdoors can lead to a lifelong ethic of respect for a clean and healthy environment. Today’s kids and families are missing out on nature. Recent research shows that the amount of time U.S. children spend outside has declined by 50 percent in the last two decades alone! Meanwhile, the rate of childhood obesity has skyrocketed, and children now spend 44.5 hours a week in front of some type of electronic screen. Yet, in my lifetime alone, my children have lost twelve hours a week in free time.
- Green is the new Valium. A recent study at the University of Essex in England concluded that evidence suggests that nature can help us recover from pre-existing stresses or problems, has an immunizing effect that can protect us from future stresses, and helps us to concentrate and think more clearly. Another study, this one by the National Science Foundation in the U.S. measured individuals’ heart recovery rates from minor stress when they were exposed to a natural scene. Subjects were measured viewing nature through a window, shown on a high-definition plasma screen, or staring at a blank wall. Not surprisingly, the heart rate of those looking out the window dropped more quickly than those eyeballing the wall. Somewhat surprising, however, the study found that the scene on the high-definition plasma screen had no more effect than the wall. Exposing children to nature via a video is no antidote.
- “Let’s not be fooled into thinking we can live without nature … Children grow up watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. That’s probably better than nothing. But as a species we need interaction with actual nature for our physical and psychological well-being.
- Too much input. Cannot compute. We are all overwhelmed. With TV, computers, cell phones, and iPods®, our kids are exposed every day to more images, ads, slogans, and buzz words than they can possibly process. It’s no wonder kids today are stressed out. The Essex Study says that, “Just as our bodies are unable to adapt to a permanent surplus of calories and the invention of the automobile, so our minds are unable to acclimatize to the peculiar stresses of high-density urban living.” Nature is the antidote to “system overload.”
- According to a study by two Cornell University environmental psychologists, “Life’s stressful events appear not to cause as much psychological distress in children who live in high-nature conditions compared with children who live in low-nature conditions.”
- The study found that being close to nature also helps boost a child’s attention span.
- Our world is safer than we think. If you watch as much TV as our nation’s children, you may be under the impression that the world is nothing if not full of crack addicts, muggers, and pedophiles. Writer Rosa Brooks’ thoughts on the subject? “Forget the television fear-mongering: Your child stands about the same chance of being struck by lightning as of being the victim of what the U.S. Department of Justice calls a ‘stereotypical kidnapping.’ And unless you live in Baghdad, your child stands a much, much greater chance of being killed in a car accident than of being seriously harmed while wandering unsupervised around your neighborhood.”
- If that doesn’t belay fears of our children’s safety, then sending our children to camp, where they can take calculated risks in nature under the supervision of trained camp counselors, looks even better than it did five minutes ago. (Yes, I know that’s preaching to the choir.) But the choir must start preaching.
WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
If, as the song says, children are our future, what will going green mean if our kids are never in the green to begin with?
- According to the American Public Health Association, “The retreat indoors for many American children has environmental advocates worried that children who grow up without memories of fishing in a local stream or hiking through idyllic woods might become adults for whom conserving the environment isn’t a priority. We need to understand that the most important computer a child owns is his or her brain. Memory is their storage bin. It needs to be filled with memories of play and natural experiences.
- Exposing kids to nature means getting them reconnected with the natural order of things. It means allowing them to experience the richness of the air in a grove of trees, a stream of clean water teeming with life, the healthfulness of a population that respects the Earth’s open spaces and their place in them. If you have never seen the stars in the dark of night, how can you imagine the wonder of life?
FIELD GUIDE TO PRESERVING CHILDHOOD
So what must we do? How can we as individuals reverse these nasty trends in our children’s health and well-being?
We must be the village and get involved and be aware that a child’s life without the benefit of nature is lacking an essential component to becoming a well-adjusted adult. As we have recognized “failure to thrive” in infants, I believe we may risk seeing a “failure to thrive” in adolescents if deprived of critical developmental opportunities.
And we must seek out the village, protect the village, promote the village, and leave the city behind now and then and get our children back to the natural world. There’s nothing more precious than childhood; it is a right, it is an important developmental process, it is a time of wonder, discovery, and exploration . . . . And camp fits exquisitely into that equation.
So what would a field guide to preserving childhood look like?
Probably much like the handbook for a smoothly run camp. Every camp brochure is a field guide.
- It would start by making the reader aware of the importance of preserving childhood and the benefits of doing so.
- It would point out the keys to being childlike: playing games, using the imagination, having time to think, time to practice, and fail. Failure is the fertilizer of success. That is childhood.
- It would explain that it takes courage to hold on tightly to childhood when everyday influences urge them to grow up too quickly.
- It would give children permission just to be kids, perhaps in the form of a pledge:“I, [state your name], pledge to have fun playing with my friends, and get outside for at least an hour every day, etc.”
- It would include a call to action for parents to switch off the TV and seek out nature with their kids and to send them to camp for the kind of nature experience that will stay with them long after they’re back to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The guide would help them develop a memory.
- And every good field guide should contain recipes for survival based on ingredients found in the environment. So here’s a recipe for a memorable day in the life of a child: Everyone has a recipe to share.
1 camp in a natural setting
1 watering hole (lake, river, or pool acceptable)
1 good climbing tree (preferably more)
1 to 3 hours of fun, supervised risk-taking activities
1 healthy dose of wonder
a cabin of friends to share the experience
3 to 5 creative camp songs
laughter to taste
Then fold your arms in an embrace and keep warm for a lifetime.
