Spring is beginning to tempt parents outdoors with warmer days, blooming bulbs, sunny bursts and now a fresh push to reconnect their kids with nature.
Jo Schofield and Fiona Danks are the latest educators to tackle the nature deficit—the dwindling amount of time children spend in natural spaces—with a book and a call to action: “Go Wild! 101 Things To Do Outdoors Before You Grow Up.” In 159 glossy pages, the U.K.-based authors lay out their plan to get kids interested in everything from building leaf huts and catapults to assembling wilderness toilets and outdoor kitchens.
The book is about more than a good walk in the woods. They suggest that if children don’t connect with the great outdoors, everyone is in trouble, because efforts to deal with global warming and natural crises likely will fail.
“They won’t value the natural world and then we don’t have a hope,” Danks said from her home just outside Oxford, England.
“There are too many kids who are growing up where the natural world is alien.” What isn’t alien to today’s kids is the virtual wilderness of video games, online social networks and text messages. Danks and Schofield hope to pry them away from these toys with outdoor activities that appeal to teenage sensibilities, such as building fires, stone-age tools and primitive bows.
“You have to make this fun if you are going to tempt them away from their electronic activities,” Schofield said.
You also have to make it safe, and they offer their target audience of tweens, teenagers and parents a lot of safety tips.
Think of the book as a safer, family-friendly version of “Man vs.
Wild”—Discovery Channel’s popular survivalist show. Instead of trying to survive on a Patagonian ice field, Schofield said, “it is stuff you can really do.” Schofield’s argument might work in Seattle because its citizens are more tuned in to the natural world, according to Richard Louv, who introduced the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” four years ago in his book, “Last Child in the Woods.” “Certainly, nature culturally is more important there than it is in other places,” Louv said. “That doesn’t mean nature-deficit disorder doesn’t exist there. It exists everywhere.” Luckily, the Puget Sound region is packed with antidotes—mountains, lakes and rivers—that alleviate the disorder.
To cure it, children should climb a mountain, hike an ocean shore and experience an old-growth forest before they grow up, said Saul Weisberg, executive director of the North Cascades Institute. All three experiences are only a few hours’ drive (or less) from Seattle.
“We want kids to care about a place, and they care by experiencing it and not by being told, ‘This is important,”‘ Weisberg said.
Weisberg is a little less worried about the nature deficit these days because some of the institute’s fastest growing programs are for families. Parents don’t even need to leave the city to go wild.
They can check out beavers in North Seattle at Meadowbrook Pond Reflective Refuge, according to Kris Collingridge, the out and about editor for ParentMap.
Or they can drive over the Interstate 90 bridge this summer to take guided canoe trips in the Mercer Slough.
More ambitious families can drive a little longer, roughly 50 minutes, to the Cedar River Watershed Education Center near North Bend for summertime guided tours of a lakefront beach, an old-growth forest and a waterfall that are closed to the public the rest of the year, Collingridge added.
They also can read “101 Things To Do Outdoors Before You Grow Up” when it hits bookstores in mid-April. In the meantime, they can check out the authors’ Web site, , for tips.
Wild opportunities are too numerous to list, but spring is nearly here, summer is coming and families should get outside.
“A wild place can just be the bottom of a garden,” Schofield said. “You can do it in your backyard.”
