Children "learn by doing" in the natural environment, says the National Trust
UK
children are losing contact with nature at a "dramatic" rate, and their
health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says. Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says. Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the UK than other
parts of Europe, and may help explain poor UK rankings in childhood
satisfaction surveys. The trust is launching a consultation on tackling "nature deficit disorder".
"This is about changing the way children grow up and see the
world," said Stephen Moss, the author, naturalist and former BBC
Springwatch producer who wrote the Natural Childhood report for the
National Trust. "The natural world doesn't come with an instruction leaflet, so it teaches you to use your creative imagination."When you build a den with your mates when you're nine years
old, you learn teamwork - you disagree with each other, you have
arguments, you resolve them, you work together again - it's like a
team-building course, only you did it when you were nine."
The trust argues, as have other bodies in previous years,
that the growing dissociation of children from the natural world and
internment in the "cotton wool culture" of indoor parental guidance
impairs their capacity to learn through experience.
It cites evidence showing that:
- children learn more and behave better when lessons are conducted outdoors
- symptoms of children diagnosed with ADHD improve when they are exposed to nature
- children say their happiness depends more on having things to do outdoors more than owning technology.
Yet British parents feel more pressure to provide gadgets for their children than in other European countries.
Anger over traffic.
The phrase nature deficit
disorder was coined in 2005 by author Richard Louv, who argued that the
human cost of "alienation from nature" was measured in "diminished use
of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and
emotional illnesses". In the UK as in many other countries, rates of obesity,
self-harm and mental health disorders diagnosed in children have climbed
significantly since the 1970s.
But nature deficit disorder is not generally regarded as a medical condition. "There's undoubtedly a phenomenon that's not good for health,
which is about not giving access to outdoors or green space, safe
risk-taking and so on," said David Pencheon, a medical doctor who now
heads the National Health Service's sustainable development unit. "But I wouldn't say we've identified a medical condition.
"In fact we don't want to 'medicalise' it, we should see it
as part of everyday life - if you medicalise it, people say 'you'd
better go to your doctor and take a pill'." But despite growing recognition of nature deficit disorder, policies aiming to tackle it appear thin on the ground.
Mr Moss cites statistics showing that the area where children
are allowed to range unsupervised around their homes has shrunk by 90%
since the 1970s. Whereas some reasons behind the parental "cotton wool
culture" are not based in logic - most sexual molestation occurs in the
home, for example, not in parks - the one "genuine massive danger" is
traffic. "I think the first step for any child is playing outdoors in
the street; and in the 40 years since I grew up, traffic has increased
hugely, and that's the main reason why none of us let our kids out on
their own," Mr Moss told BBC News.
"The only solution would be to have pedestrian priority on
every residential street in Britain; when you are driving along the
street, if there are children playing, they have priority." The report advocates having teachers take children for lessons outdoors when possible, with urban schools using parks. It also says that authorities who cite "health and safety" as
a reason for stopping children playing conkers or climbing trees should
be aware that successive Health and Safety Executive heads have
advocated a measure of risk-taking in children's lives.
Health warning. The changes in childhood in previous decades are now filtering through into adulthood, where levels of obesity are also rising.
Is nature part of the puzzle of a healthy mind?
Dr Pencheon observed that although doctors are beginning to
prescribe exercise instead of drugs where it is indicated, much more
could be done from a policy perspective. "One of the problems here is that the NHS is not incentivised financially to do public health," he said. "The healthcare system is run on a rescue basis - people come
to us when they're ill, we patch them up and try to get them going
again - that's not the culture of a system designed to keep people
healthy." The National Trust is now beginning a two-month consultation
aimed at gathering views and examples of good and bad practice from the
public and specialists.
These will eventually be turned into a set of policy recommendations. "As a nation, we need to do everything we can to make it easy
and safe for our children to get outdoors," said National Trust
director-general Fiona Reynolds. "We want to move the debate on and encourage people and
organisations to think about how we take practical steps to reconnect
children with the natural world and inspire them to get outdoors."
A survey suggests many parents have lost the art of playing with their children
