Nature Deficit Disorder?????

These pictures were taken at one of my favorite camping places on the Mohican River. That was a camping trip we took about 2 1/2 years ago. I will always remember that spot on the river. There were some people a few sites down that kept playing that banjo song from the movie "Deliverance" as people were riding by in their canoes.
Anyway.....been thinking alot about how I feel when I connect with nature. Being outside has always been a powerful way for me to connect with spirit. I grew up on a lake in my backyard and I spent so much time swimming, boating, fishing, skating........lots of connection with nature. I probably spent more time outside than inside when I played as a child. Even today, I love to walk outside every day with Dusty. We go to the park for a walk almost everyday....I need it to connect. I can tell when I haven't been out in nature.
I really hope our kids continue to enjoy being out in nature and continue to love camping.
There are so many distractions for them (and me) like cell phones, video games, computers, Ipods....etc...sometimes it is hard to get them away from technology.
Read this article below......It is about the importance of connecting with nature. He came up with a term called Nature Deficit Disorder. I think it is a pretty real disorder .
I would say that it is probably more important to get out and connect with the earth instead of driving our kids all over for organized sports or activities or even pushing them to complete their homework.....and kids (mine included) get less and less outside, unstructured play-time in nature.


Seriously, go take a hike

Nature is being left out in the cold by indoor distractions
By Gary Fallesen
Published in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle


(December 31, 2006)
Christmas break from school meant one thing to us when we were growing up: Playtime.

And playtime was synonymous with the outdoors.

We rarely came inside, other than to change out of frozen clothes after breaking through pond ice while skating or for a quick snack of hot cocoa and cookies. Then back out we went with dry gloves or mittens.

How many homes experienced that scene this past week?

Never mind the non-wintry weather. Global warming isn't the only change we've seen in recent years.

"The days of free-range childhood seem to be over," Bradford McKee wrote last year under the headline "Growing Up Denatured" in The New York Times.

The reasons are many: video and computer games, television, organized sports, and fear. Fear that children will be abducted. For many, fear has stolen our kids' childhood. Call it Amber Alert syndrome.

But there is also a lack of appreciation for the outdoors.

Richard Louv, a columnist, author and child advocate, dubbed this "nature-deficit disorder" in his book Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005). He blames a fixation on artificial entertainment for this failing interest in the natural wonders.

Louv quotes a fourth-grader who says, "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

The growing number of youths who prefer staying inside rather than going outdoors is producing a greater risk of obesity because of poor diet and sedentary lifestyles.

Ann Mangan, an active mother of two cross country running and skiing children from Honeoye Falls, says outside recreation has kept her children's "appetites high and their weight normal."

"We haven't ever owned a computer game or watched much TV except the Olympics and sports," says Mangan, 43, who played on the first post-Title IX girls soccer team in high school in Connecticut, "so we're pretty outside kind of people."

Families like the Mangans are fewer and farther in between.

Neighborhood sandlots once were meeting places for would-be baseball or football stars. Now those stars of tomorrow are being groomed on travel teams.

"Kids are so busy," says Julie Doyle, another outdoorsy mother of four from Pittsford. "Sports are so organized and take up so much time."

She says her sons are barely home from school before they have to be packed off to hockey practice. "Kids are in year-round sports when they're 6," she says.

Doyle, 41, was a four-sport athlete in school in Colorado, but she still had time to play.

"We were always outside," she remembers. "We came home from school, threw the backpack down, and went out until dinner. We never watched TV."

But, she adds, both parents weren't working in a majority of households and other kids were available.

Because of the demands on time, Doyle has made a point of introducing her boys to life sports — from skiing and snowshoeing to whitewater kayaking and mountain biking.

"People aren't thinking outside the box," she says. "People need to do things for the pure enjoyment of the sport, not the competition. They need to be out there having fun."

It's getting them outside the proverbial box and out the door that's the hard part.

There is such a growing concern that the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park has proposed that communities serving as gateways into parks need to start a "no child left inside" program to promote outdoor usage.

"Visitation is going down nationwide in the National Park Service," Suzanne Lewis was quoted saying two months ago by The Associated Press.

"When I grew up in suburban Ohio, we played in the woods all day long. But today, a lot of kids aren't comfortable in the outdoors. When you add computers, video games, TV and all those things, we're absolutely producing a culture of children that don't identify with the outdoors."

Lewis sounded the warning bell, saying that today's nature illiterate is tomorrow's park visitor — or not.

She wondered who would be going to parks in 20 years and those who do go, "what will be their comfort level in the parks. What will they want in these wild places?"

Man is, by nature, wild at heart.

John Eldridge, whose book Wild at Heart (Nelson Books, 2001) is a guide for adult males, wrote: "Simply look at the dreams and desires written in the heart of every boy: to be a hero, to be a warrior, to live a life of adventure and risk. Sadly, most men abandon those dreams and desires ..."

To recapture what we were made to be and do, we must first be exposed to what is out there: wilderness and adventure. That is something our children cannot learn by playing Xbox or PlayStation 3 or even by watching TV programs on the Discovery Channel. There is a need for stimulation found only in the outdoors.

"Using your body is the most ultimate thing," Doyle says. "Challenging yourself teaches leadership and self-confidence. When do you get that playing a video game?"

Doyle's oldest son, Mac, an 18-year-old high school senior, went to Outward Bound in Alaska last summer. He is a smart, athletic kid, but the wilderness experience did more for him than anything else he has done.

"When your kids run inside and say, 'Look at the sky, Mom; it's so beautiful,' you know you're doing something right," Doyle says from experience.

When my 12-year-old daughter, Hayley, woke up Wednesday morning, she shrieked with joy. "It's snowing," she shouted so everyone in the house could hear.

Before long she was outside catching snowflakes on her tongue and playing in the snow with her 17-year-old brother, Jesse.

Having an appreciation for a sunrise or sunset, a blanket of stars overhead, the shape of clouds, the color of leaves changing, the budding of flowers, the spinning of a spider's web, the buzzing of a bee, the chirping of birds, the pouncing of a hawk, the footprints of a rabbit in snow, and the grazing of a family of deer — these are only a few of the beautiful things being lost by too many children.

A person who does not know what's out there is not going to miss it when it's gone.

Wilderness is at risk if the next generations turn their backs and close their doors on the great outdoors.

Some parents are going to great extremes: forcing their children to go out and play, blocking the use of video and computer games. But punishment doesn't seem like a very good way to encourage a love or appreciation for nature.

That is something that needs to be taught. A parent-child walk in the woods or a skate on a pond, a trip to the sledding hill or ski slopes. A vacation to the real outdoors, not some Disney fabrication.

As with most things, it starts at home. Mom and dad need to go outside and play, too. They need to lead by example. Walk the walk. Or run the run. It just might be the most fun they've had since those after-school snowball wars at the bus stop.