conundrum

[phinnia]

we talk about environmental awareness but most of our kids' interaction with nature is through man-made manicured spaces. we're expecting our children to eventually inherit and care for national parks and wildlife reserves, but the unspoken message is that nature is Not Safe and that manmade areas are superior. how will kids really have an idea

Comments

[winterknight]

I think it's a matter of uneducated parents, and a social attitude that discourages 'risk taking' of any sort. We got around that because both sets of grandparents have Property, and because we have a lot of 'lung space' in town, often with nature trails with parkour stations (obstacles to jump and scale), and the Arboretum is free to run around in, in addition to all the conservation areas. From the time Mys was four, she was off and running about in the woods on her own, except for a dog or two or three. One of the reasons we had dogs was to send one with her when she went out, and my mother's dogs would go with her as well. At one house, she even had chickens and ducks to play with. At my mother's she had a play house on the side of the escarpment where the drop was only about 30 feet and it was sloped gently in that area so really she'd just roll down after the first drop (my mother tried it out herself; you have to admire her dedication, falling out of a playhouse at 50-something), and you had to jump from rock to rock to get to the house.

I trained her on the playgrounds to be a good climber. I think it's easy enough as a parent to do some basic work and then trust your kid from there. I wish there were more parent education on USING A PLAYGROUND. A playground is NOT a babysitter! It's a tool for developing skills. That this is a mystery to parents infuriates me. That's why children get hurt so often, in my experience as a pre-K teacher/nanny/mom -- they're not TAUGHT to use the playground. Parents are not taught to use the playground, either. There should be signage that discusses the educational and developmental benefits of each structure, cautions to take, and how to teach your child the skills to use it.

We had walkie-talkies when Mys was small (again, kindergarten age), and she would take one and go rambling off into the Great Beyond with all the dogs. She was out there with a (vicious, for real) border collie, a Briard, a shepherd/collie, and a poodle (the advance scout); no one was about to interfere with her. My dad had put up signs that she knew not to go past. My parents always had us out in the conservation area as kids, when we were poor, because it was free; the same conservation area their house backs on now. Mys is also an excellent tree-climber. My dad would put a ladder up in the tree-climbing tree and go with her when she was little, until she mastered it. Again, it's attitude and education.

I'm sure people wonder how she lived through it all, but I think it did her a world of good. The schools here are likewise inclined to get kids in touch with nature. When they cut down the big tree at Mys' school when she was little, the kids all got to watch and they were told why (old tree) and then the work men used huge chunks of the trunk and large branches to make a play area for the kids, grinding them flat and smooth. The kids had tables and chairs and posts to balance on and when they began to rot, the idea was that the maintenance staff would haul them away as needed. Most schools here have gardens where they grow native species and others where they experiment with growing all kinds of plants to see how our weather affects their survival.

It's hard not to be in touch with nature here. We even have what's called natural fencing around subdivisions and between areas, which is restored habitat. It works to keep noise and foot traffic out of areas where otherwise they'd build a fence or wall. Workers come out and attend to it as needed. We have bunnies and voles living in ours out back. I think we really do a lousy job of educating parents these days. If there was a show that showed you how to develop your child, what was developing when and why and how to foster it, it would do people a lot of good.