No Child Left Inside

When I was a child and teen, my family lived variously in a semi-rural part of the San Francisco Bay Area, near Saint John, New Brunswick, in a suburb of Salt Lake City right up against the Wasatch Mountains and in Holmdel, N.J. which was still a mix of farm country and 'burb in those days. Depending on the time of year and where we lived, I could be found playing baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, running track, riding horses, chasing chickens, having dirt clod fights, sailing, swimming, throwing apples at cars, hiking, skiing (a blue collar sport back then), skating on a frozen river or pond and basically running around and carrying on as kids have since eons ago. I took music lessons, too (I gave up the trumpet at 10-years-old but played hockey into college). Most of my schoolmates were similarly active. It was a time when kids were not diagnosed with depression, ADD or bipolar disorder. I don't think I ever heard of anyone taking a psych med until I was well into college in the 1980s and that was Lithium.

My unbringing was not privileged. The back side of our house in the Bay Area always needed a coat of paint and we had an uninsulated bathroom in Canada, for example. Nowadays, though, I guess I would count as privileged due to all the activities that were either right outside my door or, like school sports and Little League, were available at low-cost. Apparently, most kids just don't have similar access anymore.

I point this out because, last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had an article about nature deficit disorder and a youth program designed to address it (yeah, I am just getting around to it). I cannot even guess at the reasons, beyond our rampant urbanization in America (even in the 'burbs), that keep kids inside and in front of the TV or computer monitor when they should be skinning-up their knees or painting Becky Thatcher's fence. I have heard that parents won't let their kids run in the woods due to fears of criminals and that most sports are incredibly sanitized due to legal concerns. And so on.

So why would anyone let their kids romp in a field?

"Scientists are finding that contact with nature can benefit kids in numerous ways, reducing symptoms of hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorders and leading to inner-city girls acting with better self-discipline. Kids in California performed better on science tests after a week in the woods. A survey found that conservation-minded adults traced those concerns to time spent in the wilderness."

Somehow I think it's far better to take a risk on having a kid encounter a bear in the woods than it is to let them sit in front of an electronic device of some kind for six hours a day--the national average--and wind up all zonked out on atypical antipsychotics and anti-depressants. But that's just me.

What amuses me about the article is that a psychologist who's studied nature deficit disorder says that although she agrees that nature and play have benefits for human psychology and development, she is incapable of saying so definitively because not all the scientific evidence is in. More study is needed. Why have we become a culture where everything must be studied to death and expert panels called upon to offer their sober consensus opinion before anyone can do anything different anymore? Are academics incapable of common sense? Was it the judgment of an expert panel that got us this crazy cultural shift to kids and adults sitting in front of CRTs and flat screens for much of their waking lives? Um, no.

Of course, the State of Washington, being the useless tools that they are, is asking the legislature for $2.5 million in the forthcoming state budget to study outdoor education. The only thing that needs studying is the cultural imperialism of science which, in essence, argues that common sense must be studied to death and proven out before it is allowed to be common knowledge. OK, that's a rant, but if there's one thing I have learned from being a reporter, it is that you should never trust the government. I don't mean that in an ideological manner, but from the sheer deficit of results and benefits that we we get from our tax dollars. Besides, keep in mind that it is the federal government, plus state and local governments and the public health policy wonks who feed them all, that has played lapdog to Big Pharma on each and every step of America's transition into becoming the medicated nation that we have become.

A couple of years ago, when Richard Louv advanced the nature deficit disorder thesis, I giggled at his idea. Then, I took a look around. Millions of kids on psych meds, including the truly nasty atypicals which are barely fit for adult consumption. Millions of kids being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, where the diagnosis is as much fiction as fact (because we all know what a good idea the big wave of ADD diagnosis in the 1990s was!). And so on. Hopefully, I don't sound like Tom Cruise there, but when a nation goes within 20 years from almost no kids being on medication to millions of kids on medication (with doctors clamoring to diagnose more kids), then you know something is up. If you don't think that there is, then you are delusional yourself.

I know there is something to Louv's thesis, and I would hope that when the DSM masters get around to writing the new manual in 2011 that they include Little League deficit disorder. Or perhaps Golden Gloves deficit disorder. Or equestrian deficit disorder. I am only half kidding. Nature is good for kids (and adults). So are sports. And for boys in particular, as I pointed out to a friend yesterday, these have got to be contact sports not just soccer. There is something in the male psyche that benefits from beating the hell out of one's fellow males in a competitive setting, shaking hands afterwards and walking away. I cannot explain the dynamic, except to say that it is true. Should I ever have kids, I hope I have the ability to follow through on everything I just wrote.