Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations
Kahn, Peter H. Jr. and Kellert, Stephen R. (eds.) (2002).
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 348 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0262611759.
Nature nurtures children who become adults who nurture nature; as nature disappears from children’s lives, what then?
Do experiences of the natural world play a crucial role in children’s development– in who they become and what they care about? In this book, distinguished authors examine this notion through a diverse collection of disciplinary lenses, using perspectives from cognitive science, developmental psychology, ecology, education, environmental studies, evolutionary psychology, political science, primatology, psychiatry, and social psychology. Some of the ideas are familiar but important in this context, and there is much that is new here as well. The result is an intellectual banquet– a succession of varied entrées forming a surprisingly unified whole.
Three themes run through this slim, important volume. The first is that experiences with nature play a unique, irreplaceable role in healthy child development. The second is that early experiences with nature are vital to the forging of later environmental commitments. The third is that children’s contact with nature is increasingly diluted and altered in modern society and that this has far-reaching implications for both children and nature.
Healthy Child Development
The primary theme of the book is that contact with nature is not merely beneficial to children but crucial and even irreplaceable in their healthy development. This is an ambitious thesis; nonetheless, Children and Nature goes a long way in establishing the importance, if not the necessity, of contact with nature.
Some of the arguments are theoretical and explain why we might expect various distinguishing features of the natural world to be uniquely powerful in fostering child development. The arguments are diverse: Verbeek and de Waal, and then Heerwagen and Orians examine myriad ways in which children may be suited for the natural world as a result of evolution, suggesting that child development is, in a sense, designed to unfold in a natural context. Other authors, especially Kellert and Pyle, offer reasons why contact with nature might facilitate development in particular domains, whether physical, cognitive, affective, moral, social, or character development. For example, Kellert points out that the natural world is extraordinarily rich in information and hence may be unmatched as a ground for learning, reasoning, and observing. On another note, Katcher joins Myers and Saunders in exploring how and why children’s social and emotional learning might uniquely benefit from interactions with social, non-human beings.
These and other proposals are given substance in the book through close analysis, illustrative examples and phenomena, and a few dollops of systematic evidence. What evidence is provided is intriguing and suggests that perhaps the relationship between children and nature is special. Heerwagen and Orians provide numerous examples for their thesis that children show instinctive, stage-specific, and adaptive patterns of attraction and fear with respect to the natural world; this is later echoed in Kaplan and Kaplan’s chapter on adolescents and nature. Coley, Solomon, and Shafto note that children show a striking proclivity and talent for inferring larger principles about the biological world, for constructing models of the natural world from limited input. Thus children seem to possess a special competence with respect to the natural world; moreover, they seem to have a special responsiveness or resonance to the world of nature. Kahn studies inner-city San Antonio children and finds a reverence for nature even in children whose experience of nature is severely limited. Kellert reports that most participants find an outdoor challenge experience to be one of the most important in their lives and one that exerted major impacts on their personality and character development. Katcher observes that working with animals can bring striking, often profound, changes in children with developmental disorders including autism, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), and oppositional defiant disorder and cites research demonstrating that children with pets are better at decoding nonverbal human emotional cues (Guttmann, Predovic and Zemanek 1985).
Taken together, these arguments and phenomena demand serious consideration, particularly in light of their diversity and cumulative weight. At the same time, the grain of salt with which findings are usually best taken is sometimes wanting here. Much work remains to be done, primarily by way of making more careful comparisons between what is “natural” and what is not– or perhaps more tenably, between what is more natural and what is less so. While intuitively the reader might resonate to the notions that nature is informationally rich, that wilderness outdoor challenge programs are pivotal experiences, and that children are strikingly absorbed by sticks, stones, and other natural elements, an intuitive case could also be made that the internet is equally rich, urban outdoor challenge programs equally pivotal, and Legos and other artificial elements equally absorbing. Comparisons between carefully matched natural objects and settings and their artificial counterparts are necessary to truly demonstrate the unique contributions of nature to child development. If these authors are right, future research may find that, on any given dimension, ordinary natural stimuli and settings are matched only by a few, selected artificial counterparts, and that only the richest of artificial settings are comparable in benefits to a bit of urban wilderness. Such evidence might constitute the most powerful argument for the preservation of nature yet. I believe that one of the most potent legacies of Children and Nature will be to have framed, motivated, and justified a new generation of research on the irreplaceable role of nature in healthy child development.
Environmental Stewardship
A second theme of Children and Nature is the potentially pivotal role of childhood contact with nature in environmental stewardship. Might children’s experiences of nature play a unique and irreplaceable role in the development of environmental commitments, understandings, and sensibilities? Many of the authors argue, “Yes!” Myers and Saunders show how coming to care for individual animals might form a necessary stepping stone to caring for other species in general. Chawla suggests that children’s experiences of oneness and magical connection with nature might be a crucial ingredient in the formation of environmental commitment, by helping children see nature as a larger living whole of which people are a part. Thomashow echoes Chawla, suggesting that properly constructed nature experiences can play a critical role in helping adolescents assume their rightful, ecological identities. And Kaplan and Kaplan provide an analysis of how the very characteristics emphasized in Thomashow’s programs help satisfy evolutionarily and culturally-shaped adolescent drives for self-determination, peer involvement, and competence. Additional arguments for the role of nature in the development of stewardship are presented in the context of analyses of on-going changes in children’s experience of nature.
Children’s Diminishing Experience of Nature
A great strength of the book is that it persistently brings its central theoretical claims into current societal contexts. It does not merely ponder whether children’s experience matters in the abstract, but points out ways in which children’s experience of nature is currently being transformed or disappearing altogether, and explores the likely consequences of these changes. What are the consequences for healthy child development and the long-term health of the environment when children’s experience of nature is ever more infrequent, mediated rather than direct, programmed rather than spontaneous, simulated rather than real, and increasingly replaced by television and video games? Pyle, Kellert, Orr, Heerwagen and Orians, and Kahn draw on both theory and recent evidence to provide some answers, and the prospects they foresee are not rosy.
A particularly troubling notion here is Kahn’s “environmental intergenerational amnesia” – the notion that each generation takes as normative or “natural,” the state of the environment it grows up in and is only disturbed by degradation relative to increasingly impoverished norms. Another striking claim is Pyle’s proposal that leftover, local natural spaces such as ditches and vacant lots are not “waste ground” but rather uniquely important resources. In Pyle’s view, these spaces afford a truly intimate, comprehensive connection to nature and thus may have a central role in fostering child development and the development of stewardship.
These and related ideas in the book make the changing relationship between children and nature more than academic, transforming interesting theoretical questions into matters of urgent and widespread relevance to our society. Orr, in particular, conveys a deep urgency in his analysis of the current state of both children and the natural world, offering a passionate indictment of core practices, beliefs, and values of modern society.
Children and Nature tells us much about how children’s relations with nature evolve over time and with experience, and across different cultures and environmental contexts. We learn about children’s changing conceptions of nature, and how children’s needs and responses with respect to nature change from infancy through toddlerhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. This book will be of interest to many readers– parents, developmental researchers, educators, and policy makers interested in understanding and promoting healthy child development; ecologists, environmentalists, and others interested in raising the next generation of environmental stewards; and of course, anyone interested in the relationship between children and nature. Researchers will be particularly well served by the array of conceptual frameworks and approaches for the next generation of studies in this domain.
While the mark of a successful banquet is that its guests leave satisfied, a successful intellectual banquet must awaken the appetite. Children and Nature is a feast for the mind, stimulating the palate and providing rich food for thought, research, and action.
Reference
Guttmann, G., M. Predovic, and M. Zemanek (1985). 'The Influence of Pet Ownership on Non-Verbal Communications Competence in Children.' In The Human-Pet Relationship. Vienna: Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on the Human-Pet Relationship, 58-63.
Reviewer Information
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Frances Kuo received her Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. She is currently co-Director of the Human-Environment Research Laboratory with faculty appointments in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and Psychology at the University of Illinois, where she teaches and conducts research on the role of nature in a healthy human habitat.