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| Fewer and fewer children have the time, or desire, to simply go outside and play. (File photo) |
The Inside Story: Remember When Kids Went Out to Play?
BY PEGGY O'CROWLEY
Posted on 4/1/2006, 6:47:10 PM by Incorrigible
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The Inside Story: Remember When Kids Went Out to Play?BY PEGGY O'CROWLEY |
Ah, spring.
The crocuses are blooming, the mittens are put away, the children are riding bikes, jumping rope, climbing trees ... uh, scratch that about the children.
The children are inside, playing video games, watching television or on the computer. If they're outside, they're playing organized sports, supervised by coaches and attended by doting parents. Or they're in the car dashing between clarinet lessons, tutoring sessions and play dates arranged by adults.
Today's children are out of the woods, literally. With fewer open spaces, paranoid parents and enough electronic gadgets to keep them cloistered for months, kids are less and less likely to have unsupervised, outside fun. These days it's hard to find children riding bikes, climbing trees or paying pick-up ball games with nary an adult in sight.
The disconnect is so deep that parenting magazines include tips on how to play backyard games like "red light, green light." A new publication, Wondertime, actually ran a feature on how to teach a child to climb a tree.
While some shrug and argue that it's a sign of our times, many others feel this new lifestyle is making children fatter, more isolated, less creative and less attached to the environment, raising concerns about the future.
"When you think about it, human children for eons of history went outside and played and worked in nature for much of their childhood. In the space of two or three decades in Western society, that's in danger of disappearing," said Richard Louv, author of "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin, $13.95).
Louv, a California newspaper columnist, coined the phrase "nature-deficit disorder" to raise the alarm about children losing touch with the real world in favor of the virtual world.
So what's wrong with kids whose encounters with nature are more likely to be on the Discover Channel than in their backyards?
Plenty, according to Louv and other childhood experts.
Take health, for example. An alarming new study by the International Association for the Study of Obesity projected that nearly half of all the children in North and South America will be overweight by 2010.
There are many reasons for the epidemic of childhood obesity, including overeating and calorie-filled junk food. But much of it is due to a decline in activity, a decline that cannot be made up by organized games and practices, said Sue Shapses, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University and co-director of the New Jersey Obesity Group.
"Someone might read this and say, `Oh, my kid plays soccer,"' she said. "If you have an hour (of activity) scheduled every other week, or half an hour a day, it's not going to be as much as kids playing outdoors," she said.
Declines in physical education classes and daily recess are also to blame, she said.
Some experts believe children who spend hours alone, watching television or playing computer games, are also at risk of becoming socially isolated. An analysis of children's artwork, a joint project of Oregon State University and the Kaye Academic College of Education in Israel, confirmed that trend.
The project recruited 500 schoolchildren in grades 1 through 5 in Corvallis, Ore., and Beer-Shiva, Israel, and asked them to illustrate their favorite activities.
While playing sports was number one, of the remaining 60 percent of kids, one in four drew pictures of themselves playing alone or watching TV by themselves.
"They spend less time developing social skills and getting along -- things that we all need later in life, in the workplace or elsewhere," said Nell O'Malley of the College of Education at Oregon State University, a co-author of the project.
"Left unattended, we're looking at a future of people who don't have the social skills and some of the moral development that comes with social interaction," she said. "You develop empathy by interacting with people. Children at a certain point need to be learning about themselves in relationship to others."
The inactivity of today's kids might even influence public policy: The staff at the National Wildlife Foundation thinks that today's children might not be as effective advocates for the environment because the outdoors has no value for them.
"What the research says is that people get attached to nature by spending time in nature. Even if you grew up in a city, there were trees and parks. For us the issue is, if we don't get kids out more, how are they going to connect to nature?" asked Kevin Coyne, vice president of education for the federation. "Our conclusion is that, in the larger area of wildlife conservation and the protection of the environment, this is really a threat."
For Louv, however, all those practical reasons give way to something more profound: the sense of wonder that nature instills in human beings.
"To me, the most important word is wonder, a sense of where you are in the universe and the awe that should inspire," he said. "You're not going to get that playing `Grand Theft Auto."'
To Louv, nature is not strictly the majesty of the wilderness, something out of an Ansel Adams photograph.
"Nature can be a ravine behind the house or a little woods at the end of a cul-de-sac. That's maybe even more important than Yosemite," he said. "That wonder can begin when a 4-year-old goes out in his backyard and listens to the leaves and turns over a rock and sees a universe of bugs."
Fear of adult predators is one reason why kids don't have unstructured time outside. While such fears are understandable, fed by media reports of stalkers and child molesters, many experts feel the concern is far more inflated than it should be. Actual incidents of strangers snatching children off the streets are rare -- most incidents occur with an adult who knows the child.
Kids today have a higher chance of encountering a predator online than in their communities, Coyne said.
The loss of the backyard culture, in which there were supportive adults around so families felt safe letting their children roam the neighborhood, also feeds fears of stranger danger.
"Crime may not be greater today, but that culture of fear certainly is. We've replaced children's freedom with a great deal of isolation that ultimately might not be that healthy," O'Malley said.
Supportive neighborhoods have a positive effect on children's freedom to be outside -- and their physical health, research indicates.
A study by the RAND Corp. of 3,000 households in Los Angeles found that, in neighborhoods identified as supportive, children were half as likely to be overweight as children in other neighborhoods. Supportive neighborhoods were defined as close-knit, with adults who watched out for children's safety, spoke up when they saw bad behavior and were willing to help a neighbor.
"Kids are less likely to be playing outside if people are not watching out for them," said Deborah Cohen, the senior natural scientist for RAND who conducted the study. "In another study, we found that having parks around is another very good predictor of how much people exercise.
"I think this has a lot of messages about the way we deal with overweight and the lack of physical activity. We tell each individual they have to do something different, as if they themselves are responsible," said Cohen, a physician. "Here we clearly see that environment makes a difference. Beyond healthy families, we need healthy communities."
(Peggy O'Crowley covers family issues for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She can be contacted at pocrowley@starledger.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Supportive neighborhoods were defined as close-knit, with adults who watched out for children's safety, spoke up when they saw bad behavior and were willing to help a neighbor.
It takes a village!! ;-)
Actually, it sounds like a neighborhood with married, stay-at-home parents and multiple children per couple in various age groups. Hmmmm, I wonder if such a neighborhood is likely to have a lot of Conservatives in it???
I'd hate to pay for a game of pick-up football... speaking of living behind a computer, spell check is not always one's best friend.
Too many lawyers......send them to the fields to pick lettuce replacing Mexicans.
Great article...
Two weeks ago I took in a couple of neglected boys. I just told them to go out to play (11 and 12 yo), and they looked at me dumbstruck. They have no idea what to do, so they are sitting on the porch clueless as I write this. Article is right on.
When I was a kid before we got a phone, and computers and Playstations, I stayed in my room reading books. Now, I at least get a little exercise moving my fingers on the keyboard and interupt the kids' video game play with discussions of FR topics. Throw in inviting their friends along for full days of caching with the aid of a gps and what's so wrong with today's way of life with gizmos and gadgets?
I live on a cul-de-sac and the only girl closest in age to my third grade daughter is 3 grades higher. The boys on the street aren't much for playing with a girl so my daughter is hoping someone will move out!
She has a play date over as I type but it's raining out.
In the winter if it's really cold and there's no snow, my daughter and I play Pokemon combat on the Game Cube. She's going to be a geek just like her dad!
:-)
Gee, when my boys were young, I used to throw them out in the back yard (fenced) and tell them to play instead of letting them watch TV. I was pretty young myself, but I knew kids needed to be outside moving around, not sitting around in the house (and bugging me!) Or, I would take them to the park to play. I cannot imagine that starting to watch hours and hours of tv at a young age is good for them.
susie
Look up the Megan's law list -- how many of those who were even caught are listed, and they are nearby, and they haven't reported to their probation officers or are missing/unaccounted for. Even with a fenced yard, I think kids are at risk.
That's why parents don't let their kids play unsupervised, if you ask me.
This is a crock. I live in a residential neighborhood in a major US city. The first day of Spring here, with snow still on the ground, the kids came boiling out of their houses, the basketball hoops were rolled out of the garage, the bicycles had their tires pumped up and the parade of kids outside began.
It will continue until the snow falls again next Winter.
My neighborhood is very mixed ethnically, and all the kids play together in the street, in everyone's yards, and very enthusiastically.
Most of the neigbors around me keep their curtains and draperies open, and all the neighborhood adults keep an eye on the kids, whether they have any themselves or not.
I'm grandpa age, so there are no kids in my house. Still, the word is out: I have tools, and I'm home during the day. I fix the kids' bikes when they break, and anything esle they need fixed.
I never advertised that, but the kids started coming to my door, saying, "Hey, mister, can you fix my bike" within a week of my moving into the neighborhood.
Feels like old times here, and this is a big city.
Actually, it is mentioned in the article. I would have to agree that this fear is overblown and sensationalized by the media.
Ha!! I was just in the garage this morning raising my daughter's bicycle seat to as high as it can go (argh, she's getting so big I need to teach her how to use the hand brakes on my wife's bike). I repaired a tube on my son's bike too.
The old fisher price basketball hoop just isn't cutting it for them anymore. I'll have to get one of the bigger ones.
Amazing how we survived as kids huh.
If no one could play there was always the imaginary freind.
I can even remember as a young teen going on adventures all over the Bay Area on Bart and never worried about predators.
As I remember it everyone was coming or going to a job and during working hours if I played hookey to go ride the BART from Concord to San Fran the trains empty during work hours.
Boy I had fun.
What happened?
You are part of the problem with your hysteria. There are no more predators now than there was "back then," you just hear about more of them because you live in a wired world where you can tune into Court TV 24 hours a day. Back in the day your local newspaper didn't report of missing teens in Aruba, nor was stories like that on the 30-minutes-a-day TV news.
My son and daughter grew up in a rural area. We had horses and ponies. My daughter would meet up with her girlfriends and their horses, pack a lunch, and we wouldn't see them all day. They were out riding the hills. A dinner bell would bring them in if they were in earshot. My son and neighbor boy would play in each others yards all day. Again the dinner bell...like a ranch bell...would bring them home. Did the neighborhood worry about those kids...only if they were late to dinner. I wouldn't even conceive of this now, even in our old neighborhood. The world has changed. The trail rides we had where flora and fauna were pointed out and explained. [Good times, good times]. I feel so sorry for kids now who don't have that sense of freedom and wonder for the great outdoors that my kids had. Do parents still lie out at night a point out the night sky to their kids. Teach them the constellations and stars? Now I am bring back wonderful memories I had with my kids. [A mom's big sigh]
I remember thinking my mom was over protective. More so, since she would announce it to everyone. Now, I am more over protective than she was. The difference is everyone I know is the same way.
My 10-year-old daughter has been in "the creek" all morning. She's very dirty......and happy.
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