Do today's kids have "nature-deficit disorder"?

Certainly the explosion of technology over the last 25 years -- from cable TV, to video games, home computers and the Internet -- has curtailed the amount of time kids spend playing outside each day. But during that same time, hasn't society as a whole become much more aware of environmental issues?

I say early in the book that it's more like the polarity has reversed. When I was a kid I had an intimate knowledge of woods and fields, to the extent that I pulled up hundreds of survey stakes to protect them from bulldozers. I really had a sense of ownership -- I had no clue that my woods were connected to other woods ecologically. It's the reverse now. Kids today can tell you lots of things about the Amazon rain forest; they can't usually tell you the last time they lay out in the woods and watched the leaves move. It's not that learning about the Amazon is bad -- it's great, and I'm glad it's happening -- the problem is, it becomes an intellectualized relationship with nature. And I don't think there's much that can replace wet feet and dirty hands. It's one thing to read about a frog, it's another to hold it in your hand and feel its life.

By now, we've all heard the reports that two out of 10 American children are clinically obese -- four times the number reported in the late 1960s. And you note that this obesity epidemic has coincided with the greatest increase in organized sports for children in history. So, what can unstructured outdoor play offer kids that soccer and little league can't?

First, I'm not against soccer, and it's not a 1-to-1 ratio in terms of cause and effect. In the book, I'm cautious when talking about obesity -- it's complex. But I think it is a striking fact that the two [statistics] have grown alongside one another. One factor is just frequency of movement -- it's one thing to go to soccer practice once a week, or even three times a week -- compared to the way kids used to come home from school and just head out. Sometimes I played free-form pick-up baseball, but most of the time, I was just gone, in the woods, and I was moving, I was racing my collie. That was constant. And I was so skinny I had to run around in the shower to get wet.

But there's something going on here that's more mysterious, and frankly the lack of study on it means any answer to your question will be incomplete. There is the "biophilia" hypothesis, which in some quarters is controversial, but that suggests we are still hunters and gatherers and biologically we have not changed. That hypothesis says there is something in us that needs natural forms, that needs association with nature in ways that we don't fully understand. I think we instinctively understand that there is something about being in nature that you cannot get on a soccer field.

At one point you quote research that says children playing in parks are naturally drawn, not to the landscaped fields, but to the rocky borders where there are natural plants and ravines. But parents seem to spend a lot more time these days looking for spaces that are "child-friendly." By building super-structured suburban communities dominated by gates and playing fields, are we actually making kids' imaginative worlds smaller?

What we usually design is really more "lawyer-friendly" than "child-friendly." This is a litigious society, and a lot of the places you are talking about have been designed by attorneys, not park designers. But there is interplay between the fear of lawsuits and [parents'] fear of a "bogeyman" that is going to hurt their children -- indeed, they almost have become one and the same.

In the book I write about natural tort reform, and the idea that we will have to confront this problem sooner or later. For instance, I bring up the idea of the "criminalization" of natural play, where if you take all the state regulations, the well-intended and often needed environmental restrictions, and add those to the covenants and restrictions that now cover almost any new development that has been built in the last 20 years -- things that control everything to whether you can plant rosebushes in the front to what color your curtains -- well, the idea of a freewheeling, tree-house-building, nature-loving kid doesn't fit that. So if all of [these restrictions] were to be enforced, playing outdoors by kids would be essentially illegal. It's not all enforced, but the message still gets through -- kids get a sense that there's something unsavory about playing outdoors. And it's too easy to blame this on lazy parents who let the TV do the baby sitting, when the truth is there is a matrix of forces that have come together to create this problem, and those forces are hard to stand up against as an individual and as a people.

You say that parents' anxious attitude about the world -- what you call "stranger danger" -- a nebulous paranoia about violent criminals and sexual predators, kidnappers, traffic accidents, lawsuits and freak disease  is one of many factors, including increased technology, that has alienated kids from nature.

It's not good for human beings to live with fear all the time. In this society we are increasingly living in fear, whether it's of terrorism or "stranger danger" -- and statistically, most of that fear is not warranted. Child abductions by strangers are, in fact, rare, and criminologists and others report that the number of them may have decreased in recent years. A 1988 report by the National Incidence Study on Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children in America, stated that there were between 200 and 300 children abducted by strangers in 1988. The most recent such National Incidence Study, found 115 children kidnapped by strangers in 1999. A relatively few child abductions are amplified into the appearance of an epidemic through nonstop coverage by the media. All of this is not to say that child abductions are a small matter, but fear of them must be weighed against the effects of that fear on our daily lives -- including children's ability to find joy in nature. However, if you live next door to somebody whose child was kidnapped, it doesn't matter what the statistics are, and I understand that fear and I've felt it myself as a parent.

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