>Chil­dren and na­ture…and Gray­don

>Chil­dren and na­ture…and Gray­don

Our strug­gle to pre­serve Gray­don has in­spired a pa­per pre­sent­ed at a con­fer­ence and sum­marized on a Psy­chol­o­gy To­day blog by Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton psy­chol­o­gist Peter H. Kahn, Jr., PhD. His book The Hu­man relation­ship with Na­ture ex­plores the deep sig­ni­f­i­cance of chil­dren’s in­ter­ac­tions with na­ture and the un­for­tu­nate long-term conse­quences for both them and the en­vi­ron­ment when th­ese are lost. Read his blog en­try here or from a link on our home page. Click on Read­er Com­ments (be­low the text of the blog en­try) to check out Mar­cia’s exchanges with Dr. Kahn and the coau­thor of his pa­per.

In the past few years an en­tire move­ment has grown around the pre­cepts of sim­i­lar­ly mind­ed ex­perts, such as Richard Louv, au­thor of Last Child in the Woods: Sav­ing Our Chil­dren from Na­ture-De­fic­it Di­s­or­der and six other books. Louv is chair­man of the Chil­dren & Na­ture Net­work. The im­por­tance to chil­dren’s de­vel­op­ment of na­ture and un­struc­tured play has been stressed by the Amer­i­can Acade­my of Pe­di­atrics, the Amer­i­can Public Health As­so­ci­a­tion, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC), and many other or­gani­za­tions of high re­pute.

Louv writes in the book, for ex­am­ple: “A wi­den­ing cir­cle of re­search­ers be­lieves that the loss of na­t­u­ral habi­tat, or the dis­con­nec­tion from na­ture even when it is avai­l­able, has enor­mous im­pli­ca­tions for hu­man health and child de­vel­op­ment. They say the qual­i­ty of ex­po­sure to na­ture af­fects our health at an al­most cel­lu­lar lev­el.”

Among many fas­ci­nat­ing studies on the Net­work’s web­site is a sum­mary of a re­cent re­port from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois. The re­search­er cites doc­u­men­ta­tion, for ex­am­ple, that chil­dren with AD­HD have few­er symp­toms af­ter out­door ac­tiv­i­ties in na­ture-filled en­vi­ron­ments and that col­lege stu­dents achieve bet­ter re­sults on cog­ni­tive tests when their dor­mi­to­ry win­dows view na­t­u­ral set­tings. This is clear­ly an al­ready-rich area that is ripe for greater study.

Coali­tion sup­port­er Diane Pala­cios, who spott­ed a link to Kahn’s ar­ti­cle on the Ridge­wood Blog, in­s­tant­ly rec­og­nized its im­por­tance and de­liv­ered or sent copies to all mem­bers of the Vil­lage Coun­cil and its Gray­don Pool Com­mit­tee. Aware­ness, ini­tia­tive, com­mu­ni­ca­tion—a fine way to get the mes­sage out.

We’ll be back soon with more au­tumn pic­tures of Gray­don. If you’d like to share your best Gray­don pho­tos, tak­en in any sea­son, send them to us in dig­i­tal for­mat. The park is so pic­turesque that we’re con­sid­er­ing pro­duc­ing a 2011 Gray­don cal­en­dar. It’s love­ly through­out the year at the beach in our back yard.

Swimmingly,

Suzanne Kelly and Marcia Ringel, Co-Chairs
The Preserve Graydon Coalition, Inc., a nonprofit corporation
“It’s clear—we love Graydon!”
info@PreserveGraydon.org www.PreserveGraydon.org