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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Despite having the physical appearance of young adults, teenagers have brains more similar to those of younger children, meaning they are more disorganised and susceptible to distraction than older people, experts said.

The brain does not become fully developed until the late twenties or early thirties according to the research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Dr Iroise Dumontheil, one of the joint authors of the research, from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “It is not always easy for adolescents to pay attention in class without letting their minds wander, or to ignore distractions from their younger sibling when trying to solve a maths problem. “But it’s not the fault of the teenagers that they can’t concentrate and are easily distracted. It’s to do with the structure of their brains. Adolescents simply don’t have the same mental capacities as an adult.”

MRI scans were used to measure the mental activity of a group of teenagers as they were asked to solve a problem while trying to ignore a number of distractions. Scientists found a surprisingly high amount of activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain which is used for making decisions and multitasking, showing that the brain was operating less efficiently than an adult’s.

Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who led the study, told The Guardian: “We knew that the prefrontal cortex of young children functioned in this chaotic way but we didn’t realise it continued until the late 20s or early 30s. “The part of the brain needed to complete this sort of process is still very much developing throughout adolescence. This means it continues to do a lot of needless work when making these sorts of decisions.”

She said teenagers’ brains contain too much grey matter, the parts of the brain that carry messages, meaning their thought process is more chaotic than that of an adult.

The amount of grey matter in the brain decreases with age, meaning the thought patterns of adults are more efficient and ordered, making the brain work more effectively.

Dr Blakemore said: “What our research has shown is that there is simply too much going on in the brains of adolescents. The result is that their brain energy and resources are wasted and their decision-making process negatively affected.”

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