MB Civic

Take a few seconds to remember your favorite place as a child. Where was it? What did it look like? How did it smell? Don’t carry on reading till you have this place in your minds eye. Ready to read on? Good. Here are some predictions.

 Your favorite childhood place to play was outdoors. It was away from adults. And it was a ‘wild’ place- not truely wild perhaps, but unkempt, dirty, and quite possibly a little bit dangerous. How can I be so sure? Because over the years I’ve asked a lot of grown-ups this question and they all say the same thing. If you doubt me, just raise the subject at your next coffee break or party and see what comes up.

Children are disappearing from the out-doors at a rate that would make them top of any conservationist’s list of endangered species if they were any other member of the animal kingdom.

Research by Mayer Hillman and collegues at the policy studies institute suggests that, in a single generation, the ‘home habitat’ of a typical eight year old- the area in which children are able to travel on their own- has shrunk to one-ninth of its former size. Official government figures say that over 30 percent of children aged eight to ten never play outside with an adult watching over them.

This dramatic loss of children’s freedom has its roots in fundamental changes to the fabric of their lives. Over the last 30 years, an exponential growth in road traffic, poor town planning and shifts in the daily rhythms of families and communities, have left children with fewer outdoor places to go and fewer friendly faces to look out for them. These changes have coincided with a modern ‘culture of fear’ and irrational anxieties about ‘stranger danger’. Yet ten times as many children are killed by cars and five times as many are killed by their own parents or relatives than by strangers.

Parental anxiety combined with media scaremongering means we now face the prospect of a generation of children growing up at best indifferent to or, at worst terrified of, the world outside their homes and who will, as adults, pass on their fear of the outdoors to their own children.

Consider this quote: ‘An essential part of the process of a child becoming an adult is the need, and desire, to explore limits and to try new experiences.’ Suprisingly, it’s from CEN, Europes leading saftey standards agency.

It may be unrealistic to think we can restore to children the free-range childhoods enjoyed by previous generations. However, parents have the power to bring freedom, adventure and nature back into the daily rhythms of children’s lives.

Excerpt from The Ecologist pages within the independent