When was the last time you and your family hiked a trail together? Took a nature walk? Devoted a few hours to exploring the flora and fauna native to your backyard?
Those are some questions Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority staff wants families to consider on Thursday Oct. 9, when they host a talk and panel discussion on children and nature at Arlington’s Central Library. The event features participants from all segments of the Arlingtonian community, including school and county board members as well as leaders of local and national ecological organizations. The panelists will discuss the importance of getting kids outside and will provide information about resources available to help families experience nature in Arlington.
Thursday’s event is part of a growing movement to incorporate unstructured outdoors time into the lives of American children. The issue received national attention with the publication of Richard Louv’s book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder" in 2005. Louv’s book documents a growing divide between children and the outdoors and cites research that links this phenomenon to increases in child obesity, attention deficit disorder and depression.
The "no child left inside" movement, as some call it, has prompted educators, child welfare activists and parents to find ways to reconnect kids with the great outdoors. In many respects, Arlington is ahead of the curve.
Martin Ogle is Chief Naturalist with the Northern Virginia Regional Parks Authority. He also serves on the board of the Conservation Fund’s National Forum on Children and Nature, which promotes community ecology programs that effectively engage children. He is participating in Thursday’s discussion. Ogle hopes that the event will "ratchet up attention and action," on the issue.
Ogle has seen the positive effects that programs like Potomac Overlook Regional Park’s "Meet me on a Sunday," which provides ecological education programs for families, can have on a child. For him, getting as many children out as possible is vital to forming a healthy community.
"Ultimately, we want to maximize the amount of time kids spend outside," said Ogle, adding that "In the last 20 years, the roaming area kids occupy has shrunk 89 percent. Kids don’t experience much of their world anymore."
Ogle attributes this decrease to a variety of factors, including the increased popularity of and accessibility to television and video games; urban sprawl, which has replaced green spaces with buildings and roads in many communities; and a rise in real and perceived safety threats. He also asserts that, quite simply, today’s society allows us "less time to enjoy ourselves in any setting, much less outside."
FOR OGLE, the trick is find ways to provide kids unstructured time outside while taking all of these challenges into account – in other words, working around these obstacles. He sees the role that educators play as a key part of the solution.
Tuckahoe Elementary School, on North 26th Street, has had a Discovery Schoolyard Program since the mid-1990s. Mary McLean is Schoolyard Learning Coordinator at the school. She helps coordinate outdoor learning sessions with teachers, incorporating outdoor lessons into every subject. Right now, the schoolyard includes several vegetable and flower gardens which the students maintain with the help of parent volunteers.
"The outdoors provides a context to learning," said McLean, going on to explain that when kids can see what they are learning in an immediate, tangible way, they become more engaged and motivated.
The program also has long-term positive effects on students, maintains McLean, instilling in them a sense of community ownership and value. It also, of course, gives kids a reason to spend a few more hours out of their school week outside.
Several ecology organizations in Arlington provide resources for kids and families outside the classroom. The Green Hour is a web-based program of the National Wildlife Foundation that helps get the whole family involved in outdoor recreation.
"Our goal is to help parents who might not feel comfortable outdoors themselves to get inspired to be outside with their kids," said Anne Keisman, online media coordinator for the project and panel mediator.
The Web site (www.greenhour.org), which is in its second year, allows visitors to use the "Nature Find" application to locate trails, nature centers and resources nearby.
"One of the things we hear online is how little time kids have to just play," said Keisman. "Developmentally, kids need time to themselves to discover and play – to learn to navigate the world."
Keisman insists that parents need to make outdoors time for their kids. For her, small gestures, like walking a child to school instead of driving, are good ways to start to reconnect with nature.
Elenor Hodges, who heads Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment (or ACE), will also join the panel on Thursday. She adds that spending time outdoors is crucial to "fostering a commitment to environmental stewardship" amongst the younger generation.
"If kids don’t have any sense of treasuring their natural resources, having future generations find solutions to our natural problems is going to be impossible," asserts Hodges.
ACE provides Arlington families opportunities to both get outside and learn about conservation through group clean-up projects.
Despite the sizable challenges many face providing children quality outdoors time, one thing these naturalists, educators and activists emphasize is the wealth of resources Arlington provides to help its youngest residents be one with nature. They hope Thursday’s event will offer the necessary tools and inspiration to help attendees plan their family’s next big – or small – outdoor adventure.