A popular children’s television cartoon features a boy-cow named Otis, with udders. About a year ago, there was a movie about bees, and the boy bees left the hive in search of pollen for honey.
In rural Adams County, I’m guessing most kids pretty much know how to tell a bull from a cow, and probably understand that the only way boy bees leave the hive is dead; their job is indoors.
Unfortunately, more than half our nation’s population, and a growing portion of Adams County’s population, live in urban and suburban settings, and all they see of the natural world are the movies.
Too many of them glide in an SUV past farmland and fields of living story-book animals, but miss seeing while they watch geese learn to “Fly Away Home” on the in-car DVD player.
They really need to get out more.
And I mean Out. They are suffering from what Richard Louv, in “Last Child in the Woods,” calls “nature-deficit disorder.” And the cure is not to be found in Ritalin, counseling, or the courts, all of which deal with pent-up energy that could otherwise be released in outdoor play.
In his book, Louv quotes a San Diego, Calif., fourth-grader saying, “I like to play indoors better, ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
I was lucky. I was raised on 50 acres of woodland, on the shore of a fairly large lake in the middle of thousands more acres of woodlands. I spent my formative years where the last human sound I heard, as I headed into the forest primeval, was Mom saying, “you kids go out and play.” I’d wager most people of my generation still hear echoes of that refrain.
But times have changed.
We have become over protective of our offspring, and the future of my childhood books and science fiction movies — populated by body-less beings with large hairless heads plugged into atomic power sources — seems too true. Well, almost. Our kids have bodies, but there is a whole industry springing up around their obesity.
The police showed up at the door one day when my family and I lived in Hampton, Va. A neighbor had called because the youngsters, both second-graders, one boy, one girl, had been seen climbing a tree. The neighbor, said Officer Friendly, was concerned they might fall and be hurt.
True. And they might fall and be hurt if they drive a car or fall in love. They need guidance, not prohibitions, to learn how to recognize too-thin branches, too-slippery curves, and too-slick lovers. Even then, there is risk.
After traveling a goodly portion of the world, I returned to the woods of my youth, only to find what of it remained was fenced off. Cables and large rocks blocked entrances to old logging roads. A state law allowed police to prosecute anyone they found on posted land without written permission to be there; there was no need to contact the often-out-of-state landowner.
We Adams Countians have preserved thousands of acres of fields and woodlands, and we should be proud of the water and air we have protected. We missed a chance last month to buy a 200-acre parcel that would, had the plan worked out, have become a public park where children of all ages could walk among 300-year-old trees, fish in a creek, and watch hawks hunt their dinner.
But I have to wonder how much good the park would have been to those young immigrants from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., now living in Littlestown and New Oxford, who would have depended on their harried parents to drive them to the park on the other side of the county. I suspect it would have been, as a playground, of little more value than other preserved land — private property fenced in with wire and yellow signs telling passersby to stay out.
There is a growing body of evidence indicating the value of time spend playing in whatever world is outside the fortress our children and grandchildren call home. We need to stop and let them see real cows, but we also need to allow them outside to simply play.
In 1971, Simon Nicholson offered a “theory of loose parts,” in which he said, more or less, the number of possibilities a child’s imagination may create is directly related to the number of playthings that have no assigned purpose.
We need, when we design housing developments, to design into them places where children may simply play, and then let them play in it, unhindered by geometric pipe structures, PlayStation game sets, and team-colored uniforms. Instead, give them a few trees, large rocks, and maybe a mud puddle or two.
I know from experience that I gain girth when I sit all day in front of a computer, and I lose it when I get up off my derriere and move my limbs. I also know from experience there is no real fun to be found on a machine at the gym, my ears plugged into an mp3 player.
We say we want only to keep our kids safe. There are, after all, so many dangers lurking outside the fortress we call home.
The best way to keep them, our communities, and our planet safe is to tell our kids what our parents told us:
“Go outside and play.”
Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.
Notes from Out Back 