Three years ago, when my son was entering kindergarten, I heard about a nature kindergarten pilot project at a school in Colwood. The kids would spend most of the day outside, playing and learning in all weather. The program, modelled on European Waldkindergartens, was inspired by research that shows profound developmental benefits of outdoor learning.
This made instinctive sense to me. Thinking back to my own childhood, I was always outside. My neighbours and I played in the wild space behind our house after school. Summers were spent exploring the islands on my family’s sailboat, roaming beaches and forests, picking blackberries and digging clams. I might not know their scientific names, but I recognize so many of the plants and animals of this region because of the time I spent playing outdoors.
When I compare my experiences to my own son’s childhood, I realize how things have changed. He doesn’t run wild as we used to. His life is planned to the minute as we rush between school, work, after-school care, play dates and extracurricular activities. My son is not building forts and trying to catch garter snakes; he is obsessed with Minecraft and Pokemon.
Clearly, the promise of nature kindergarten made instinctive sense to a lot of parents. On sign-up day, I had planned to get up at 4 a.m. to be first in line. However, when I drove by the school the day before, parents were already camped out. By 9 p.m., 12 hours before the school opened, the 20 spots in the region’s first nature kindergarten were spoken for.
This week, Victoria parents made headlines by camping out for three days to secure spots in South Park school’s nature kindergarten. And I am not surprised.
Richard Louv, who is swiftly becoming a household name, outlines a condition he calls “nature deficit disorder” in his renowned book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Many urban children are spending close to 95 per cent of their lives indoors. Less than five per cent of today’s children can name the five most common birds or plants in the backyard. Obesity, screen addiction, anxiety and depression are on the rise.
Increasing research shows that children need a nature-rich environment for their healthy development. Spending time in nature improves cognitive functioning, boosts confidence, raises fitness levels and gives young people a more positive sense of their own well-being.
Building a connection with nature in childhood inspires a life-long relationship to the natural world. If you have never dug for clams on the beach, or observed the salmon returning to spawn, would you care, or even notice when the clams disappear and the salmon no longer return?
But our children have not yet stopped caring, and nor have parents. That is why we are camping out for spots in nature kindergartens, taking our kids outdoors when we can, trying to scrape corners in our hectic lives to spend outdoors.
But what else are we teaching children by the choices we make? Have you ever tried explaining to a child how burning gasoline is causing climate change, while driving in a car? I have, and I felt pretty uncomfortable.
Children are learning to accept our hypocrisy, our sense of inevitability about the progressive loss of species and natural areas and our complicity in human-induced climate change.
Our enthusiasm for nature kindergarten is salve on the wound. It shows that we are aware and that we recognize the value of connecting children to nature, but as a solution, it is not enough.
As parents and as a society, we need to be advocating for more connection with the natural world for all children, for all of us. We need to make changes and protect what is left of the natural world and the marvellous species still here.
What a difference it would make if we began to make these positive changes. If we start to work in a more committed way to find real solutions to our loss of connection to nature, what could we teach our children? We could show them that everyone deserves to live connected to the natural world, that our earth is worth saving and that we all have the power to make that change.
Anna Kemp of Victoria is a communications associate with the Sierra Club of B.C.
