Life Skills Education

One noise that children are guaranteed to hear this half term is not the cuckoo, or the sound of wind rustling through the trees, but that of parents moaning, “Get off that computer, and play outside.” Forceful mums and dads will try loading their “screenagers” in the car to take them for a walk. More certainly would, if they had been reading the new edition of Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods.

Five years ago, when the book was first published, Louv’s was the first voice heard in what is becoming a dawn chorus of concern about the way children are deprived of nature. He went so far as to call this disconnect an illness – Nature Deficit Disorder – the symptoms of which include depression, hyperactivity, boredom and loneliness. All of these problems have been increasing, along with obesity rates, as children spend more time either indoors, or in cars, glued to screens and divorced from nature. According to a survey by Natural England, less than a quarter of children (24 per cent) visit a local patch of green weekly, whereas 53 per cent of their parents did.

Louv’s concerns were echoed last week by Sir David Attenborough. Speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the presenter of numerous wildlife series lamented the various obstacles – parental fear, health and safety rules, and laws against collecting fossils or wild flowers – that prevent children from “roaming the countryside” in the way that he did eighty years ago, as a child in Leicestershire.

One of those obstacles, it must be said, is the hours that children spend watching his television programmes about nature, which make them feel that they have seen, and know, it all. “I daresay they know more about East African lions and game than they do about foxes,” he acknowledges. Entrancing though it is to watch the wildebeest migration or wheeling shoals of sardines, lack of direct experience of nature is impoverishing children – and adults – in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.

We are profoundly ignorant of our own surroundings. In a recent poll conducted by the Natural History Museum, less than a quarter of Britons could identify a sycamore, two thirds failed to recognise a peacock butterfly, and less than a fifth correctly labelled a frog: they either thought it was its warty relative, the toad, or had no idea at all.

Such findings are shaming, but they are also worrying. Louv has drawn together all the various strands of research that add up to a mental and physical health disaster not just in the US, where Louv lives, or western Europe. “Worldwide, in 2008, for the first time more people were living in cities than in rural areas,” says Louv, who is currently touring Britain. “People are worried about NDD in Nairobi as well as London and Los Angeles.”

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