Back to the Future

By Joel Vance

Recently a friend visited with her six-year-old daughter who is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  Our grandkids, six, eight and 10, also were visiting.  The kids all went fishing in our pond.

  

It was as if the fish were cooperating in a memorable day for the little ones.  I was busy impaling bits of nightcrawlers and trying to avoid getting hooked by the wildly-swinging fishing lines.  Everyone was shrieking…except the mother who was unusually quiet.

Her daughter was too busy to be AD and all the kids were pretty much HD…or maybe they were just being kids.

We kept a half-dozen of the bigger bluegills and my friend asked, “How do you clean them.”  Never one to mince words, I said, “I bop ‘em in the head and filet them.”  She was even quieter and later, on reflection, I realized that she probably was appalled at my insensitivity and her daughter’s pre-adolescent bloodlust.  I just hope that she realized her daughter was s a kid being a kid, connecting, possibly for the first time with the elements of life which include death.

For a kid with ADHD, the outdoors quite possibly is far more agreeable than Ritalin or some other chemical mood magic.  “Attention deficit” means the kid has trouble staying focused.  The outdoors is a vast world of sensory delights and if ants don’t claim the kid for a long time, maybe butterflies will or squirrels…or fishing. 

The second part is “hyperactivity disorder,” meaning the kid is overly-full of energy that often is misdirected (many ADHD kids have problems with anger management).  I suspect the joy of discovery and the sensory overload of the outdoors bleeds off ADHD aggression. 

In Last Child in the Woods, writer Richard Louv explores the calming effects of outdoors activities on children with ADHD, an area scientists have only recently begun to research. He says that "nature therapy," as opposed to the many pharmaceutical fixes for hyperactivity, is "widely accessible, free of side effects, non-stigmatizing, and inexpensive."

Today’s child is electronically leashed to a television set or MP3 player or some other disconnect from the natural world.  Louv tells of a family ski trip where the kids wore headphones as they skied (as if downhill skiing were not already a disconnect from nature). 

Farm kids once belonged to nearly half the families in the country.  Now farm families are no more than two percent of the population.  Virtually everyone lives in cities or suburbs. 

I was born in Chicago.  But I explored vacant lots as if they were wilderness areas, played cowboys and Indians and watched the adults return to their rural roots with World War Two Victory gardens.  It’s possible to experience the outdoors even in the biggest cities—New York has Central Park and some cities, like Minneapolis or Seattle, are cheek by jowl with lakes or the ocean. 

The fact that parks and wildlife areas exist in most major cities is evidence that we realized historically that green is good for the soul.

On the other hand, millions of Americans live in developments that actively prohibit the kind of creative outdoor play that we enjoyed as kids—Louv talks about prohibitions against building treehouses or even climbing trees.

My friend Henry Domke. a retired doctor, is building an elaborate tree house in the woods at the edge of a native prairie restoration on his property.  “It’s something we’ve talked about since we were in college,” Henry says. 

For me as a Chicago kid summers brought a real trip to the outdoors, either to my father’s Missouri hard rock farm or to my mother’s small resort home town in Wisconsin.  Either way I was outdoors from dawn to dark and often later.   I saw farm animals mate, and I saw them butchered.

It was not a big deal for those who lived there and consequently it was not a big deal for me.  Today’s insulated city kid has no idea about blood and circling flies.  And neither do his parents.

In Chicago we didn’t have Little League or any of the other organized baseball programs.  We had a scuffed baseball and a couple of gloves and we tried to sting the other guy’s palm by throwing as hard as we could—called it “burnout.”

When it got too dark to see we chased fireflies.  In my mother’s Wisconsin resort town, we could hear a tiny Johnson outboard far out on the lake, far removed from today’s mega-horsepower bass boat engines.  Summer smelled like road tar.  On my father’s Missouri farm the stridulation of cicadas and the first tentative calls of a whippoorwill were the sounds of night. 

There are alternatives for the most city-bound.  The famed naturalist Jean Henry Fabre spent his entire professional life, more than half a century of his 87 years, studying insects in his back yard. 

And my friend Gale Lawrence, a Vermont naturalist, has a wonderful book called “The Indoor Naturalist” about the fascinating natural history of your house, from the origins of dust balls to everything you didn’t know about cobwebs.  Gale also has a book “A Field Guide to the Familiar” which teaches you (and your kids) to see, really see, what’s around us.

This is not a plea for a return to the 1940s but it is a plea for releasing our kids from the prison of modern homes into the outdoors where the real world exists.

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Joel Vance is the author of Grandma and the Buck Deer (softcover $15); Bobs, Brush and Brittanies (hardcover $25); Down Home Missouri (hardcover $25); and Autumn Shadows limited edition, signed $45).  Available from Cedar Glade Press, Box 1664, Jefferson City MO 65102.  Add $2/book for S/H.