Nature deficit disorder is the human cost of alienation from nature, among them, diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. Direct exposure to nature is essential for physical and emotional health. As the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience and causes the senses to atrophy. Nature education stimulates cognitive learning and creativity and reduces attention deficit. If children do not attach to the land they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature. Nature as antidote: stress reduction, greater physical health, a deeper sense of spirit, more creativity, a sense of play, even a safer life—these are the rewards that await a family when it invites more nature into their children’s lives. A growing body of research links our mental acuity and concentration, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature—in positive ways. Natural play strengthens children’s self-confidence and arouses their senses—their awareness of the world and all that moves in it seen and unseen.

These studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can lead to healthy child development and can be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. There are two kinds of attention: directed attention and fascination (i.e. involuntary attention). Too much directed attention leads to directed attention fatigue marked by impulsive behavior, agitation, irritation and inability to concentrate. With this type of attention, neural inhibitory mechanisms become fatigued by blocking competing stimuli. If you can find an environment where the attention is automatic, you allow directed attention to rest. And that means an environment that is strong in fascination. The fascination factor associated with nature is restorative.

Indoor sedentary lives are linked to mental health problems while outdoor lives promote more physical activity. Evidence is growing of a generational break from nature in the US. Modern children do not play outside as much or for as long a period of time and have a more restricted range in which they could move freely. In terms of child development, the shrinking home range is no small issue. An indoor childhood does reduce some dangers to children, but other risks are heightened, including risks to physical and psychological health, risk to child’s concept and perception of community, risk to self confidence and the ability to discern true danger—and beauty. As more parents keep their children inside the house or under rigid control, youngsters will be deprived of chances to become self-confident and discerning, to interact with neighbors or to learn how to build real community.

There is an almost religious zeal for the technological approach to every facet of life. Primary experience of nature is being replaced by the secondary, vicarious, often distorted, dual sensory (vision and sound only), one-way experience of television and other electronic media. In 2003, the average American devoted 327 more hours to electronic pursuits than he or she did in 1987. TV stifles creativity—there is a connection between boredom and creativity. Much of our learning comes from what we do with our hands, not from computer-based experience. Nature is a place to use all the senses and to learn by doing. Natural settings are essential for healthy child development because they stimulate all the senses and integrate informal play with formal learning. Our brains are set up for an agrarian, nature-oriented existence that came into focus five thousand years ago. Neurologically, human beings haven’t caught up with today’s over-stimulating environment. The brain is strong and flexible, so 70% to 80% of kids adapt fairly well. But the rest don’t.

In any environment both the degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of discovery are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it. Ecstatic memories give us an internalized core of calm, a sense of integration with nature and for some a creative disposition. Creative thinkers return in memory to renew the power and impulse to create at its very source, a source which they describe as the experience of emerging not only into the light of consciousness, but into a living sense of kinship with the outer world.

As a Parent you should be aware of the fact that:

1. Increasing residential and arterial traffic was the one universal factor above all others that restricted the development of children’s spatial range, thereby limiting children’s knowledge of the community environment—including its natural characteristics and components (Robin Moore, educator and landscape architect, 1980).

2. There is a growing public awareness that conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, resource-intensive environments, which is leading some cities to pass regulations emphasizing native species to reduce resource dependence and create habitat for wildlife.

The natural environment is the primary source of sensory stimulation. Children have greater ability to concentrate in more natural settings. Time in nature is not leisure time. It’s an essential investment in our children’s health. Instilling self discipline is an essential value in parenting, but so is the nurturing of creativity and wonder.

Many parents are concerned about over-programming their children. Free play in nature is far more effective than mandatory, adult organized activities in nature. The childhood obesity epidemic has coincided with a dramatic increase in children’s organized sports. This does not mean that organized sports contribute to obesity, but that an over-scheduled over-organized childhood may. Families become over-stressed when they fall into the high-achievement trap., encourage more time outdoors, in nature to increase your child’s health and safety.

Adults should model appreciative attention to plants and animals in nature. They should not demonstrate fear or heedless destruction. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Children need adults who understand the relationship between boredom and creativity, adults willing to set the stage so that kids can create their own play and enter nature through their own imagination.

The anchoring of environmental ethics in responsibility to descendants gives environmental values a concrete and emotional grounding. The consideration of the right of future generations to nature’s creation – with its formative and restorative qualities – is a spiritual act because it looks far beyond our own generation’s needs.