Save children from nature deficit disorder

Kids' access to nature has diminished with urbanisation and they have retreated indoors
Nur Dianah Suhaimi Sunday Times 21 Aug 11;

As a kampung child in the 1960s, my mother spent much of her time climbing trees in the neighbour's compound to pluck forbidden fruits and playing hide and seek with other children amid lalang (tall grass). When it rained, she rushed outdoors to slide down muddy slopes.

It was a childhood spent outdoors because, as she said, 'only the weird kids stayed indoors'.

Thirty years later, but only a kilometre away from my mother's old kampung in Sembawang, I spent my childhood in a vastly different manner.

I spent most of my days indoors, reading story books. I didn't climb any trees despite living in a semi-detached home with a huge mango tree in the garden. But I did play outside occasionally - to ride on my bicycle or to play a few rounds of badminton with my cousins.

Sometimes, when it was cool just after the rain, I would sneak off with a friend to take a walk in the little forest near my home where trees and bushes grew wild and uninterrupted for several kilometres.

Twenty years since then, I now have a daughter of my own and it scares me to think how, like most children of her generation, her exposure to nature will be extremely minimal, if at all.

Singapore is developing so fast that there is barely an empty plot of land that has not been sacrificed to build a new condominium or a new cluster of Housing Board flats.

Much of the ground has been cemented over as more roads and pavements are built. Even playgrounds have lost the traditional natural elements such as sandpits to make way for synthetic rubber flooring.

Like other children, my daughter, Nuha, will most likely spend most of her time indoors, in front of the television or a computer. Time spent outside the home will be confined mostly to the air-conditioned comfort of shopping malls.

These children may not know the pleasure of feeling sand underneath their bare feet, and the joy of rolling around in the dirt. They may not know the difference between a mango and the poisonous pong pong fruit.

These are the same children who, while at the beach, prefer to huddle in the stroller with the iPhone instead of playing in the sand.

Their idea of fun is playing computer games for hours and their idea of exercise is playing tennis on Nintendo Wii.

Some experts believe this severe lack of exposure and connection to nature is an illness, and have coined a term for it - nature deficit disorder.

They argue that for thousands of years, human beings have lived in intimate contact with nature. During that time, children played freely in the forests and fields.

However, with increasing urbanisation, children's access to nature began diminishing and it wasn't long before they all but retreated indoors.

The obvious results: a steep rise in obesity and depression levels as well as a decline in creativity and cognitive maturity.

The medication for this disorder sounds simple and straightforward: huge doses of exposure and connection to the great big outdoors.

Unfortunately, not only have children's playing environments shrunk considerably in the last few decades, but also the time that they have to play has greatly decreased.

In this paper-chase society, children spend so much of their time slogging through piles of homework and attending 'enrichment' classes that they barely have time to do much else.

Parents are also reluctant to allow their children to play outside the home, for fear of danger from strangers.

This is especially so in Singapore, where children are stuck in pigeonhole apartments with barely any space to run about. It is no wonder that they turn to the television and computer for recreation.

However, by keeping kids indoors, we may be harming their health. Evidence suggests that children need nature for their emotional and physical development, just as they need food and water.

The lack of exposure to nature has been frighteningly linked to diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, hyperactivity and depression. Being sedentary also puts our young ones at risk of childhood obesity.

On the contrary, unstructured and imaginative play in the outdoors has been proven to develop problem-solving skills, concentration and self-discipline in children.

For example, climbing a tree might sound like a primitive, ape-like activity, but the child will learn to exercise judgment and self-restraint by choosing which route to take and how high to go.

Indeed, exposure to nature has, of late, been tried as a remedy for various maladies in children, such as stress, antisocial behaviour and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Physical and mental illnesses form just the tip of the iceberg of the dangers of nature disconnect. There are deeper repercussions.

In 2005, author Richard Louv wrote a best-selling book titled Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder.

In it, he argues that children have become so disconnected from the real world that they will be ill-prepared decades down the road when it is their turn to be future stewards of the planet.

They will feel nothing but apathy towards environmental concerns because, to them, nature is just something lurking in the background - a tree which sheds too many leaves or pesky bugs that should be rid of.

Yale University professor Stephen Kellert said it best when he described society today as being 'so estranged from its natural origins, it has failed to recognise our species' basic dependence on nature as a condition of growth and development'.

Paradoxically, children are increasingly forming a 'connection' with nature through watching television programmes such as those on National Geographic and Animal Planet.

But some experts argued that this phenomenon may not be entirely positive because when children's experience with nature is limited to the virtual world, they may be conditioned to think that nature is exotic and exists only in faraway places that do not concern them.

They will have no idea that nature exists everywhere, including in their own neighbourhood and backyard.

Research findings have also shown that young children who grow up with little or no regular contact with the natural world will eventually come to see themselves as separate and not a part of the natural world. This sense of disconnect is likely to last a lifetime.

By virtue of the fact that she was born into a tech-driven society, my now nine-month-old daughter automatically becomes a likely candidate for nature deficit disorder.

Worried for her well-being, I take her outside as much as possible, even if it is to just sit on the grass in the garden and feel between her fingers the leaves from the plants.

Sometimes, I run some dirt through her tiny hands. At other times, we look out for birds that perch in our compound.

I realise that there is a noticeable change in her mood whenever we're out in nature. She's happier and not as restless as when we are indoors. She is in her element.

Apart from braving the humidity of the local weather, it actually does not take much effort to get children to 'return' to nature.

It does not have to be part of a special government programme or a school-initiated project. Neither does it have to be intensive immersions in the wild. The simple acts of checking out some angsana pods on the ground and lying down on the grass can be instantly beneficial.

The connection they will feel to the world around them can never be simulated, not even by the best computer game.