6
Mentoring Young Children
There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.
—WALT STREIGHTIFF
MORE THAN A half-century of future has slipped into past since Rachel Carson’s world-changing book, Silent Spring, made its debut. Unfortunately, Carson did not live to see the ensuing revolution, with cascading consequences that included the environmental movement, the Environmental Protection Agency, banning of various pesticides, and Earth Day. No surprise, then, that for most people, the name Rachel Carson brings to mind the ardent activist bravely confronting chemical companies in defense of human and environmental health.
Yet this humble woman also excelled as a nature writer—one of the best in the English language, according to Carson’s biographer, Linda Lear—with a deep passion for fostering wonder in children. If you’re a lover of oceans, and you haven’t read The Sea Around Us or The Edge of the Sea, you’re missing out. But my favorite piece of Carson prose resides in a wonderful little 1956 essay called “Help Your Child to Wonder.” Here she articulates a clear vision for fostering a deep connection with nature in children. Rachel’s recipe is simple: abundant outdoor experiences in wild places in the company of at least one adult mentor.
Public response to this essay was so positive that Carson decided to write a “wonder book.” Yet her dream was to remain unfulfilled. First, the quest to produce Silent Spring got in the way. And shortly thereafter, breast cancer brought a premature end to her life. Nevertheless, Carson’s wonder essay remains a profound, lyrical testament to the raw power of nature connection, highlighted by experiences shared with her young nephew Roger.
Her thesis is embodied in the very first, image-rich paragraph:
One stormy autumn night when my nephew Roger was about twenty months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy—he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me. But I think we felt the same spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.
This paragraph answers one question that may have crossed your mind. At what age should nature connection, and thus nature mentoring, begin? The answer: at birth. Or even before that. As an adult, my mother told me that while I was still in the womb, our family went camping at what would one day become perhaps my favorite place in the world—Long Beach, near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Maybe that pounding Pacific surf made a strong impression on me even then.
Judy Swamp, a Mohawk elder, once shared with Jon Young that mothers in her culture commonly take crying babies outside and whisper to them, pointing at something in the distance. Being outdoors in a natural setting seems to break the spell of upset and calm the infant. Independently, I’ve found that this strategy works well with older children too.
In this chapter, we’ll explore nature connection during the early childhood years, with a focus on ages two to six. Rachel Carson cautions that mentors must fight the urge to teach, striving instead to be co-adventurers. Things work out best if the grown-up adopts the child’s perspective. In this way, the child becomes teacher, enabling the adult to witness a world of wonder through youthful eyes. Carson further underlines the importance of emotions over understanding. In her words, “If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”
The dual emphasis on experience and mentoring captures the E and the M of EMU. A deep and lasting sense of wonder typically emerges through abundant experience, much of it outdoors in the company of a compassionate adult.
Nevertheless, we must not overlook the third EMU element—understanding. Here I’m not speaking of facts, like animal names or flower parts. If the young child seeks such information, as many do, that’s great; feel free to provide some. Or better yet, ask questions and seek out answers together. But don’t let facts hinder the experience, because it’s in the experience that young children are likely to find the greatest understanding, and in ways we are only now beginning to comprehend. Recent discoveries have given us an unprecedented glimpse inside the minds of young children, and some of the results are, to say the least, surprising.
We tend to think of children as miniature, inept, highly dependent versions of ourselves in need of growth and maturing. Until recently, this view was the norm for the general public and professional psychologists alike. Famed developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, for example, considered preschooler thinking to be irrational and illogical, the very opposite of scientific thinking. Not surprisingly, this “adults-in-training” perspective has had large and cascading effects on parenting, education, and policy.
But is it accurate? Research over the past two decades paints a very different picture, suggesting that we’ve grossly underestimated the talents of toddlers.
Psychologist Alison Gopnik is among those at the forefront of this new perspective. Recall from Chapter 2 that kids’ brains are far more interconnected than the brains of adults. All that extra networking enables young children to make novel connections at a blinding pace, an ability heightened by the way they think and experience the world.
Gopnik’s work shows that babies and young children tend to display a broad and diffuse kind of attention, resulting in what she refers to as “lantern consciousness.” This kind of unfocused attention makes sense if your greatest need is to explore and absorb as much of your worldly experiences as possible. Think of a crawling infant who flits from a stuffed animal to a piece of fluff on the floor to the leg of a table, seemingly with the attention span of a gnat.
The attention of adults, in contrast, tends to be far more narrowly directed. This “spotlight consciousness” is the mental state you would expect to have when, say, reading a book. Whereas spotlight thinking tends to be purpose driven, with the beam tightly focused on a particular subject, lantern thinking illuminates broadly, shedding light on a wide range of subjects.
In a very real sense, then, kids don’t have short attention spans. They just focus their attention more widely. If you’re still having trouble imagining the lantern consciousness of a young child, Gopnik offers this description: “It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.”
“Children aren’t just defective adults,” she says, “primitive grown-ups gradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens.” She compares humans to butterflies, with very different growth stages, each highly successful in its own right. In our case, however, it’s the youngsters who are the butterflies, flitting about from thing to thing, whereas we grown-ups fill the caterpillar role, steadfastly moving through our focused tasks.
Despite its diffuse nature, much of youngsters’ thinking turns out to be surprisingly scientific. Preschoolers learn from statistics and make accurate inferences about cause and effect. They construct theories of the world around them. And they readily generate hypotheses and test them by conducting experiments. No, really.
Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia conducted an ingenious experiment with an unlikely goal: to determine whether or not eight-month-old babies had a sense of probability statistics. Since their study subjects couldn’t talk, the psychologists measured “looking time,” based on the finding that infants gaze longer at unexpected events. First, the adult experimenter showed infants a box of red and white balls. In one set of trials, the box consisted mostly of red balls and just a few white balls. In another set, the opposite was true—the box was dominated by white balls.
Next, the adult closed her eyes and withdrew a sample of balls from the box. If the sample were random, we’d expect the balls to represent the distribution in the box (for example, more red balls pulled from a red-dominated box). But in some trials the adult performed a sleight of hand, retrieving mostly white balls from the red-dominated box. The infants were able to see that the sample either matched or did not match the expected distribution, and they tended to gaze longer at the nonmatching sample. In other words, they were surprised by the low probability result. Yes, even babies have a sense of probability statistics!
Gopnik’s “baby lab” at the University of California–Berkeley conducts similarly clever studies aimed at revealing the thinking capacities of babies and young children. A key aspect of science is learning from the ideas and findings of other scientists. So the baby lab group decided to test the observational learning abilities of preschoolers. They undertook a study in which four-year-olds watched an experimenter manipulate a blue ball with rubbery protuberances. The grown-up began by telling the child that the toy made music, but that she wasn’t sure how. The experimenter then tried such actions as rolling, shaking, and knocking on the ball. Some of these actions activated music (controlled remotely by the experimenter) and some did not. When the youngsters finally got their hands on the toy, they frequently demonstrated their observational learning skills by mimicking only those actions that activated the toy.
Another experiment features a game called “blickets,” in which young children play with a collection of variously shaped blocks. They’re told that some blocks are blickets, but most are not, and that you can’t tell which ones are blickets simply by looking. Instead, “blicketness” is assessed by placing a block on the “blicket detector.” If the detector plays music, you’ve got a blicket. If not, no blicket. In truth, of course, there’s no such thing as “blicketness.” The adult running the experiment simply flips a switch under the table to turn the machine on.
In one trial, the grown-up put one block, say, a cube, on the machine. No response. The cube was then replaced by a cylinder, which caused the machine to light up and play music. Finally, the cylinder was removed and both the square and cylinder were placed atop the machine. Music and lights once again ensued, and the experimenter invited the child to make the music stop. Children as young as two years old were relatively adept at assessing cause and effect, inferring that the cylinder is the blicket and that removing it turns the machine off.
A pretty neat finding, given the age of the kids, but hardly earthshattering. As adults, we use the same kind of this-or-that reasoning on a daily basis.
In a different trial, however, Gopnik and her colleagues changed things up, invoking this-and-that reasoning. A blicket now revealed its blicketness only when placed on the machine with another blicket, and it lit up the box even if a third, non-blicket object was added. Here the four- and five-year-olds consistently outperformed UC Berkeley undergraduate students in their ability to infer causal relationships. And the youngsters had great fun, effortlessly spinning off new hypotheses and testing them by adding and subtracting blocks. Adults, it appears, are biased toward this-or-that reasoning, whereas children, lacking such proclivities, are more flexible and open-minded in their learning capacities.
You’ve seen it dozens of times—a child fiddling endlessly with some object, maybe a ballpoint pen or a rock, manipulating it to test its properties. Experimental observations might include scratching, rubbing, hitting, kicking, throwing, and licking. In the same vein, making a sand castle is a grand experiment in physics. How high can you make a sand tower before it collapses? What happens if you make the walls thicker or thinner, or add more or less water to the sand? Children observe closely, make adjustments, innovate, and learn from others around them. We are natural-born scientists, it seems, generating observations and experimenting with the world to better understand it.
And how do children carry out their investigations into the nature of the world? Through play, of course! Play is the signature of childhood, its raison d’être. Kids are literally driven to play. But why? Why are youngsters compelled to learn about the world through play? Here we move into the realm of speculation, but my bias follows that of a growing cadre of scientists.
As discussed in Chapter 2, we far exceed other animals in our capacity to exhibit flexibility and creativity. This in turn has led to our unparalleled ability to adapt and change. Empowered by our big brains, we seek to understand our environment, imagine alternatives, and transform those imagined worlds into reality. Neuroscientists use the term plasticity to refer to our exceptional ability to change in the light of experience.
And this is where small, playful scientists enter the story. Childhood is the time of life when our brains conform to wherever we happen to find ourselves. It is the time when we explore diverse possibilities with our imaginations, and not just the useful ones. The great bulk of this exploration occurs through play. As the ever-quotable Albert Einstein once said, “Play is the highest form of research.” In short, childhood is about experiencing, learning, and imagining the world through play. Adulthood is the time to put all that experience, knowledge, and imagination to use. Gopnik summarizes this age-based division of labor as follows:
There’s a kind of evolutionary division of labor between children and adults. Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They make the discoveries, we implement them. They think up the million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good ones and make them real.
If this view has merit, the evolution of prolonged childhoods (described in Chapter 2), with their playful, butterfly-like explorations, enabled our human ancestors to adapt to whatever circumstances they found themselves in. And if so, we owe a great debt of thanks to earlier generations of children (as well as adults) for our unrivaled success as a species. In a very real sense, play made us human.
What Is Play, and Is It Really Important?
Most of us have long forgotten what play really feels like. I refer here to free play, the real McCoy, the kind initiated and driven by kids and frequently occurring outdoors. Damming streams, building makeshift forts and dens, holding back the tide with walls made of sand, creating miniature houses or cities, being a fireman one minute and Tarzan the next, quickly followed by Superman—these are the kinds of things that happen during real play. Psychologists tell us that real play is spontaneous, freely chosen by children, and kid-directed. And play activities are intrinsically motivated, with no external goal or reward.
If you’re over thirty-five or forty years of age, chances are your childhood was filled with such unstructured, exuberant play. And not just on weekends. Odds are equally good that you look back fondly on those play-filled years.
Nevertheless, today we tend to regard play as trivial, an outlet for kids to “burn off energy.” From this perspective, schoolyards contain playing fields and climbing equipment for children to rid themselves of excess exuberance so that learning can take place. Learning, according to this view, is the important stuff that happens in classrooms, typically when adults share information with students. No surprise, then, that demands for more rigorous academics have resulted in recess and gym class being cut back or eliminated from many schools.
Yet recent research, including the studies summarized above, confirms that this view is wrong-headed. If you’re a kid, play is serious stuff, and young children actually learn best through play. Some child psychologists go so far as to equate the two: play equals learning.
And the benefits of play, it turns out, extend far beyond learning. Another growing body of research points to the importance of play in children’s emotional, spiritual, and social development. Near the top of the list of benefits are enhanced creativity and imagination, both of which blossom under the influence of unstructured play. Children are experts at exploring imaginative possibilities, conjuring up alternatives and trying to make them reality.
Then there are all the bodily benefits linked to growing bones, muscles, senses, and brains. Movement and balance are enhanced through walking on logs and climbing trees. Sensory skills are developed, particularly outdoors, by the kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes. Motor skills are fine-tuned through manipulating toys, constructing makeshift forts, and skipping stones on the water. Brains enlarge and form complex neural pathways in response to playful experiences. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends sixty minutes of unstructured free play per day to support children’s physical, mental, and emotional health.
Finally, we mustn’t forget the all-important social benefits of play. Next time you’re at a playground, keep an eye out for young kids meeting each other for the first time. You’ll quickly see that names don’t matter (though, interestingly, ages do. “I’m four. How old are you?”). Youngsters who’ve known each other for mere minutes will naturally start to play, often in imaginative games with flexible rules. Through play children learn how to socialize—make friends, collaborate, resolve conflicts, and bounce back from failure.
We now know that childhood experiences have a direct and lasting influence on brain chemistry and brain growth. So it is not hyperbole to say that adults literally guide the growth of children’s brains by exposing them to different experiences. All the more reason, then, to choose those experiences carefully—to know which are likely to be harmful and which beneficial.
One of the most profound and disturbing discoveries in neuroscience has been the direct link between infant brain chemistry and adult psychology. It turns out that adult success is not genetically determined. Rather, it depends largely on those first few years of life, when the brain is rapidly growing and transforming. Toxic stress—for example, physical or emotional abuse—turns out to be a far better predictor of success (or the lack thereof) later in life than IQ.
Okay, we know what children don’t need. So what do they need to grow up to be healthy adults? Of course, they need adults to feed them, clothe them, and protect them. They need an abundance of love and nurturing that forges a strong bond with at least one parent. They need plenty of time around one or more grown-ups speaking and reading to them. But equally so, kids in early childhood need daily doses of unstructured playtime where they can use their imaginations and explore the world around them. Especially during early childhood, then, understanding—the U in EMU—will follow naturally if children get appropriate experience and mentoring (the E and the M).
A few years ago Wired magazine published an article called “The 5 Best Toys of All Time.” Particularly given the source, readers were surprised to learn that rather than high-tech games, the list consisted of (1) stick, (2) box, (3) string, (4) cardboard tube, and (5) dirt. What do all of these toys have in common? All of them qualify as “loose parts,” things with no designated role. In other words, such toys can be adapted to an almost infinite range of purposes, limited only by children’s imaginations.
Take the top toy on this list—the stick, inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2008. Sticks come in an amazing array of sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and heft. Indeed, no two are exactly alike. You can use a stick to make interesting patterns in sand, snow, or dirt. You can balance a stick on your hand, or lean on it as you walk. Sticks can easily be transformed into wands, scepters, telescopes, fishing rods, shovels, and, yes, swords (or the higher-tech version, light sabers). A bunch of sticks—or better yet, logs—make terrific building materials, with construction possibilities spanning towers, chairs, houses, and hideouts. Big sticks offer kids opportunities to test their strength. I fondly remember dragging mega-sized branches along trails as a kid. (Mom: “Scott, put that thing down!” Dad: “Oh June, let the boy have some fun.”)
If the thought of your young child playing with sticks triggers blaring internal alarms, a few simple rules may suffice, such as no touching of people with sticks and no hitting of anything.
Now, compare the multipurpose stick with the standard array of stuffed animals, dolls, action figures, and toy cars. When kids are playing, a stuffed dog, lion, or sea otter will typically exhibit behaviors appropriate to its species. Likewise, dolls and action figures tend to act like humans (albeit with the occasional supernatural abilities), whereas cars and trains perform as the vehicles. I don’t mean to imply that such traditional toy favorites are bad, only that they can and should be augmented by more open-ended loose parts.
Loose parts are far more abundant and varied outdoors than in. String, boxes, and cardboard tubes typify the smattering of human-made loose parts commonly available indoors. Sticks and dirt, in contrast, are accompanied outside by a rich spectrum of open-ended, readily available objects. Rocks range from boulders to stones to pebbles, with limitless roles in play. Plant parts are also varied. Alongside sticks may be leaves, bark, pinecones, flowers, fruits, seeds, and acorns. Then there’s the highly varied outdoor terrain, typically with natural elements such as trees, grass, and water, together with uneven topography interrupted by roots, rocks, hills, and bushes. Add to this the presence of birds, insects, earthworms, and other critters, together with their byproducts—shells, nests, tracks, and the like—and you have a truly engaging playspace that’s tough to beat.
Why is nature play with loose parts important? Because it provides fuel for growing brains and bodies. Rates of childhood obesity in the United States have almost tripled since 1980, now hovering around 17 percent. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) regards outdoor play as an essential strategy to combat this disturbing trend. Gross motor skills benefit from manipulating big objects such as rocks, whereas play involving irregular small objects enhances fine motor skills. Nature play strengthens muscles and bones. Being outdoors offers kids regular doses of vitamin D, which many urban children today are deficient in. Recent studies demonstrate that because outdoor play demands shifting one’s gaze between near and far, it greatly decreases the odds that children will develop nearsightedness later in life. It encourages liberal use of creativity and imagination. It fosters both sensory awareness and collaboration. Those loose parts generate unlimited opportunities for children to name, sort, and arrange things. Not surprisingly, play in natural settings also ups the odds of children growing into adults who are passionate about environmental conservation.
Learning, too, is enhanced through such open-ended nature play. Without even knowing it, kids are working on their math and science skills as they construct things. Those loose parts are often counted, or even used as currency. Playful scientists glean important lessons in physics by tossing stones in the water or rolling rocks down a plank (for example, understanding that the speed of a rolling rock increases with the angle of the plank). Kids also tune their aesthetic sensibilities by decorating and arranging with natural objects. So what may at first glance appear to be frivolous play is often engagement in a hyper-rich learning environment.
Here’s a simple experiment. Try giving kids a bucket of rocks of varying sizes, shapes, and colors. Chances are you’ll quickly find that the possible activities are endless. Children will roll, stack, arrange, bury, wash, hide, and sort rocks. They’ll drop them into water and mud. They’ll transform them into trucks or castles or dinosaurs. If encouraged, they will happily paint rocks or use them to make pieces of art. Far more than Barbie dolls or Tonka trucks, those rocks are likely to inspire a wondrous variety of imaginative play. This kind of hands-on experience—the E in EMU—is essential to nature connection.
At this point, you may be thinking, “Yeah, all that sounds great. But my kids would rather hang out indoors and play video games.” Perhaps you’ve even had the frustrating experience of taking your children outside, excited to get them “into nature,” only to find that they claim to be bored and ask to head back in the house where the TVs and iPads are. While I’ve found that this response is rare among preschoolers, it’s much more common for kids of middle childhood age, particularly those who’ve had plenty of screen time and minimal experience playing outside. In such instances, you may have to get creative and Coyote-like to begin with, coming up with activities to get things kicked off. These activities might be quiet, such as drawing, or more active—for example, games like hide-and-seek. With some engaging nature time under their belts, most children will choose to be running around outside immersed in imaginative play. Without a doubt I preferred to be outdoors as a kid, and my guess is that you did too.
Dirt Is Good
“But wait,” I can already hear the next objection. “If we let our toddlers play outside, they’re gonna get dirty all over and probably taste some of those loose parts along the way.” Fearing filth, falling, choking, “germs,” or some other hazardous outcome, our natural tendency is to intervene immediately. But learn to hold yourself back. Unless there’s true risk to life and limb, let children explore. Let them explore on some occasion even when there is some risk. And be careful of your expressions and body language. Kids tend to mirror your internal state, whether it’s fearful or calm. So if you’re worried or afraid, they will be too.
As for the dirt and germs, it appears that kids are merely following a natural and healthy inclination. You’ve likely heard of the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that children raised in super-sanitized settings tend to have more allergy and asthma problems than kids who grow up with regular exposure to soil microbes and other invisible critters. This idea has received big-time support in recent years, much of it summed up in Mary Ruebush’s book, Why Dirt Is Good: 5 Ways to Make Germs Your Friends. According to Ruebush, the child who eats the most dirt wins because his immune system becomes so robust. Our immune systems are set up during the first year of life. So early exposure to a bevy of potential allergens is one of the surest pathways to a healthier life thereafter. Ruebush also cites evidence that playing in dirt lowers stress levels, together with the odds of getting irritable bowel and gut-based disease, while upping focus and attention spans.
The dirtier the better, suggests another recent study. Ilkka Hanski and colleagues at the University of Helsinki conducted an intriguing investigation of allergies, comparing adolescents living in neighborhoods surrounded by natural areas with those in neighborhoods landscaped in concrete and neatly trimmed lawns. They found that people immersed in more natural settings, places home to greater varieties of native plants, were themselves covered with a wider range of microbes and were far less likely to exhibit allergies than folks in the more sanitized settings. So let ’em get out there and get dirty!
Remember, too, that nature connection is a contact sport. Sitting on the manicured sidelines looking out at the field of green pales in comparison with actually getting out there and getting muddy. Whenever possible, give kids the full experience. And let them entice you to get into the game yourself!
Adam Bienenstock is a passionate nature play advocate with a big personality. Leading with his bald head and ever-present smile, he exudes a unique blend of intensity and joviality—a Buddha with a cause.
Through his company, Bienenstock Playgrounds, in Dundas, Ontario, Bienenstock is on a mission. His bold aim is to replace traditional play areas of monkey bars, swings, and slides with playspaces of logs, boulders, trees, paths, and rolling hills, all rooted in local nature. Sourcing the bulk of his materials from within 100 miles, he sees playgrounds as one of the best ways to connect communities with nearby nature. I agree.
As a test, Bienenstock once asked the mayor of Toronto to give him the worst park in the city, the one everyone had given up on, and let it be transformed into a natural playground. The mayor complied, offering up a corner parkette frequented more by IV drug users than surrounding neighbors. Bienenstock’s group removed the tired play apparatus and pretty much took the space back to bare ground. They then installed a variety of natural elements, including groves of trees, logs to walk on, musical instruments made of wood, pathways punctuated by comfortable benches, and boulders of various sizes. The response was immediate. With the park revitalized, the neighbors returned, and the negative elements effectively disappeared. Within a year, housing prices in the immediate vicinity spiked 20 percent. The day we visited, mothers were chatting comfortably on one of the benches while their children ran around happily exploring and playing games.
The beauty of natural playgrounds is that they tap directly into children’s passions. In traditional playspaces constructed of metal and plastic, decisions about what to play are made by the designers. First you swing. Then you go down the slide. Too often, the result is competition, with kids arguing over who gets to do what, followed by frustration and tears. Conversely, in natural play areas, the child is boss. Imaginations are fired up as kids invent games with the available loose parts. Studies show that interactions tend to be more cooperative as well. Bullying is greatly decreased, and both vandalism and aggressive behavior also go down if there is a tree canopy. And with greater engagement comes longer play intervals, about three times longer compared with old-style play equipment.
Returning to our goal of deepening nature connection, playspaces designed by Bienenstock’s group and others are designed to engage not only the five standard senses, but also to help engender a sense of wonder and a sense of place. There are quiet places for contemplation. When on the move, kids improve their balance, agility, and gross and fine motor skills, and they tend to be more engaged mentally. Think about the differing attention levels demanded of evenly spaced monkey bars versus branches within a tree.
Natural playgrounds, which cost about the same as their traditional counterparts, also foster healthy risk-taking, the kind experts say kids need but parents often prevent for fear of injury. Picture a young child climbing on a standard set of monkey bars, the nervous mother standing below with her arms outstretched. Now replace that image with a set of boulders varying in size. Youngers kids can manage to climb onto only the small boulders. But with their enhanced size and strength, bigger kids summit the larger boulders, and safely navigate the leap back to earth. This approach, which Bienenstock calls “graduated challenge,” allows children to take only those risks appropriate to their abilities. Proof of this claim comes in the form of statistics showing that the incidence of “catastrophic injuries” such as broken bones is a fraction of that on traditional playgrounds. In short, these natural play areas provide a safe place for all kids to master physical challenges.
The movement to build natural playspaces is gaining steam. Bienenstock Playgrounds and like-minded efforts are getting calls from a wide range of interested parties. Recently, the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Learning Initiative at North Carolina State University collaborated on the Natural Play & Learning Area Guidelines Project, which sets guidelines for designing, building, and managing natural play environments.
Now, imagine if natural playspaces adorned every school, park, zoo, botanic garden, and museum, not to mention backyards. The result would be safe places for children to play in nature within easy walking distance of virtually every home. We’ll return to this dream in the final chapter.
Mentoring Goals
When Jade was between about four and seven years of age, I sometimes walked with her the mile or so to our mailbox along Pacific Coast Highway 1. Typically I picked a time close to dusk and followed a route that avoided the highway, detouring instead across Muir Beach. We inevitably dawdled, picking up bits of driftwood as the glowing western sky deepened from burnt orange to deep rust. She would climb and jump off rocks, choosing bigger ones over time. By the time we headed home with a handful of letters and maybe a small package or two, faint stars pierced the heavens.
For me, the mail was merely a ruse, a Trickster’s way for Jade and me to connect in a wondrous outdoor setting. Usually we didn’t say much, preferring instead to feel the twilight seep into our bodies. Other than feeling her little hand in mine, my favorite part of these mini adventures was sighting animals whose days were just beginning—swooping bats gorging on an insect smorgasbord; a barn owl heading out for a night of rodent hunting; a gray fox trotting by on the way to who-knows-where. For Jade and me, it felt like we were participating in a grand change of shift: the day creatures like us were heading to bed while the night creatures clocked in and set off to work. A changing of the guard. Tag, you’re it.
Heading out at dusk, I found, had other, unanticipated benefits. Small children are often afraid to venture out into the evening blackness. But if they first experience the daylight-to-dusk transition, the fear lessens. In addition, as Rachel and Roger discovered, nighttime has an intangible power, a primal feeling ingrained in us by millennia of intimate contact with the denizens of darkness. With me by her side, these mail trips helped Jade learn to feel comfortable being outdoors at night. Perhaps most important of all, by walking instead of driving, I was modeling my value of, and gratitude for, nature. Without my saying a word, Jade got the message that the natural world matters—that it is a part of us, and we a part of it.
Young children are like wolf pups. They long to venture outside, but not too far from Mom and Dad. They’re all about exploring and pushing edges close to home, yet run back regularly for a dose of security. As a nature mentor, the key is to give young kids plenty of time in natural places—backyards, beaches, forests, deserts, creeks, parks—where they can play with all those loose parts until exhaustion sets in. Show interest when they bring you some random object for inspection, but otherwise feel free to let kids hang out and explore with all their senses. The end result for the child will be an amazing experience in which she deepens her bond with you and with nature.
At this stage, one of the major goals is empathy. Talk about the trees and the animals as the amazing life forms they are—each one built to fulfill a role in that place; each with its own unique way of experiencing the world. Fulfill kids’ longings for both language and nature by reading animal stories. Encourage youngsters to imagine what it feels like to be a bird or a tree, and to act it out. If you feel so inclined, get in there and stand tall like a tree or fly like a hawk. Remember that this sort of mimicking is a powerful way to foster nature connection and build that sense of empathy.
Rachel Carson underlined the role of adult mentors as co-conspirators, expressing the value of nature as much through actions as words, and unabashedly reveling in the experience of being outdoors with children. She best expressed the spirit of mentoring young children in another of her famous quotes:
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder . . . he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Become one of those adults. Make a huge difference in a young child’s life simply by sharing his nature experiences, and enjoying yourself along the way. The path to becoming a wild child starts with being a wonder kid. Wonder deepens connection. With deeper connection comes empathy, and then caring. And, with time, caring leads to love.
Secret #6 for Raising a Wild Child
Perhaps the greatest secret of being a nature mentor during the early childhood years is at once the easiest and most difficult thing to do. It is, simply, to get kids outside, get out of the way, and let ’em play!
Nature Mentoring Tips
FREE PLAY RULES!
One of the essential rules of nature mentoring is to enable children to fulfill their innate longings. Young kids long to play; it’s what they’re designed to do. So carve out some regular time for the children in your life to engage in unstructured play, with a portion of it outdoors. Unstructured here means free play without adult guidance or supervision. Encourage kids to create their own imaginative games and activities, preferably using readily available natural elements—loose parts like water, sticks, dirt, and rocks. Feel free to gather up some of these loose parts or, better yet, have the kids do it. Bigger elements, such as large sticks, can be used for creating makeshift structures, like forts or bridges. Smaller items can be used in an almost infinite array of activities. Aim for an hour a day of free play outdoors and watch the effect it has on the kids. A rapidly growing mountain of evidence indicates that this kind of nature play is critical for their physical, mental, emotional, and social development, as well as their everyday health. Besides, they’ll love you for it!
NATURE CONNECTION IS A CONTACT SPORT
Too often these days, children’s encounters with nature are dominated by a look-but-don’t-touch directive. Fearing that we must protect nature and our kids at all costs, we often do far more harm than good. Nature connection depends on firsthand, multisensory encounters. It’s a messy, dirty business—picking leaves and flowers, turning over rocks, holding wriggling worms, splashing in ponds. Lacking such experiences, children’s growth is impoverished and they’re unlikely to care for, let alone protect, natural places. So loosen up and find some hands-on nature experiences for the kids in your life. Rather than telling kids “no” all the time when they want to climb a tree, throw a rock, or step into a muddy pond, take a deep breath and offer words of encouragement. Don’t worry so much about the dirt and scrapes. Clothes and bodies can be washed, cuts heal.
Most of the time, kids don’t need to be shown how to connect with nature. It’s engrained in their DNA. Rather than seeing nature connection as something you need to teach young children, the real key is simply to take them outside and let them do what comes naturally! At least on occasion, seek out some wilder places where kids can go off-trail and bushwhack a little. As much as possible, and more so as children grow up, give them space to explore on their own. Nature connection is a contact sport, and nature can take it!
FREE THE BUGS
With the help of children, make a habit of using a cup and a card to catch insects and spiders that find their way into your home or classroom. A clear plastic cup is best so that you can observe the little critters before releasing them outside. Jade and I have done this in our home for years, prompting her to observe the various “bugs” more closely. The unspoken (or spoken, if you prefer) message of this activity is that each of these many-legged animals is an individual with its own life to live, a life worthy of our assistance. If kids show a strong interest, you might work with them to figure out what kind of insect you have, but identifications aren’t essential. Alternatively, you might decide to sacrifice a few individuals, pinning them to a card and storing them in a nature collection for future observation. Yes, I understand the intense contradictions of saving versus killing, but the latter can be done in such a way as to demonstrate to children the value and importance of all life. If killing even insects is outside your comfort zone, another option is to collect and pin dead bugs to add to a child’s nature table.
As Rachel Carson discovered with her nephew, there’s something powerful about being outdoors at night immersed in a natural setting, no matter what your age. Beaches, deserts, forests, even neighborhoods take on an entirely different feel in the dark. And, of course, different creatures come out after the sun goes down. So, assuming you can find a safe place, seek out opportunities to take children on nighttime adventures, even if it’s just a walk around the block or some quiet time in the backyard. Watch them closely and see where their interests (and fears) are directed. Be authentic and open yourself up to rekindling that childlike sense of wonder, chasing their passions as well as your own. If you model this kind of engaged playfulness, the child will feel more secure and do the same. The end result will be a growing sense of wonder in both of you.
If you’re a city dweller, escape the urban environment once in a while to experience truly dark skies. A good litmus test is whether or not you can see the Milky Way, that starry band of light crossing the sky. There are few experiences more powerful than lying beneath a star-filled night sky, particularly during one of the annual meteor showers.
Whether you’re a teacher, parent, grandparent, or some other kind of caregiver, add some loose parts to children’s playspaces. Whether it’s the schoolyard, backyard, or courtyard, the addition of natural elements such as rocks, logs, water, and sticks will likely transform the play experience outdoors. I’ve seen amazing places where kids were provided with long, pole-like sticks that could be used to make teepee-like structures. Of course, if you go to the local park, chances are good that plenty of loose parts will be waiting for you. The goal here is to allow children’s imaginations, as well as their bodies, to run free and be creative. Feel free to sit back and let the kids run the show. If you do engage, be sure to follow rather than lead. Remember that for free play to be truly free, children must be the bosses.