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    Free-Range Kids

    Nature Is Not a Snooty Museum! Let Kids Tear Off Some Leaves, For Gosh’ Sake

    March 17, 2025
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    African american kid pointing with his hand.
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    It is right to respect nature. But is it right to insist on a “hands off” policy, as if each leaf is a Vermeer? A mom dropped us a note to say:

    At my son’s pre-k, he and another boy were picking leaves off of an overgrown bush while adults were talking. The boys were quiet, engaged, and the bush seemed pretty hardy.

    When the teacher and the other boy’s dad realized what was going on, there was lots of Very Concerned Talk about respecting the bush, and keeping it nice for the other kids, and sort of a glance towards me like: Really? You watched this?

    Whatever. It’s not like it was an orchid, or poison oak. And they weren’t decimating it.

    Then again, here in LA, there are some lovely canyon hikes that are frequently spoiled by taggers spray painting rocks and trees. No respect. And it’s really a bummer to try to get into nature and all you see is the selfishness of others.

    Or is that the price of allowing exploration — like supporting free speech and hearing some undesirable things?

    Signed, A Nature-Loving Mom

    Turning kids off nature

    For perspective, we revisit a yellowing article in Orion Magazine that was particularly wise about kids and nature. It quoted naturalist David Sobel, who said that…

    Much of environmental education today has taken on a museum mentality, where nature is a composed exhibit on the other side of the glass. Children can look at it and study it, but they can’t do anything with it. The message is: Nature is fragile. Look, but don’t touch.

    The great indoors?

    It’s an approach that may actually cut kids off from nature, Sobel argues — one that could create fearful and, well, boring associations with the outdoors.

    No one wants to sound like — or raise — a nature-trampling jerk. But I think it’s okay for kids to pick, pluck, move, squish, haul, and use the physical equivalent of their “outdoor voices” outdoors. Some of the fiercest stewards of our lands, from Teddy Roosevelt on down (and up), have actually been hunters, attuned to ways of the wild. The more time you spend outside, the more it makes you marvel.

    If we want kids to have any true, deep feelings for nature, they can’t grow up thinking of it as the too-fancy-for-everyday-use living room. It has to be the playroom, where happy memories are made.

    And let’s start by…getting kids outside!

    To that end, let’s encourage more time out there! If you live near the woods, a park, or even someplace where weeds grow unwhacked, make it a place where kids gather. Consider starting Free-Play Fridays (or Thursdays! Or every-other-Sundays! Whatever!), as recommended by The Anxious Generation – and me! And Let Grow!

    Bonus: The more at home your kids feel outside, the less they will wish to be inside. As Simon Stumpf, a director at the  Ashoka Fellowship of Social Entrepreneurs, likes to say, “Nature in my co-parent.”

    That makes your parenting job a lot easier.

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    2 Comments

    1. Kenny Felder on March 17, 2025 2:13 pm

      Great point as always, Lenore. If you look at the names we associate most with environmentalism—John Muir, John James Audubon, whoever—they fell in love with nature when they were children by getting their hands dirty, not just climbing but also pulling and plucking and shooting. Take that experience away and they would not have grown up to be the passionate defenders of nature that we now revere.

    2. Reziac on March 17, 2025 3:38 pm

      My very first clear memory (I was about three and a half years old) is of playing outside. I’m out on the boulevard (that strip of grass on the street side of the sidewalk) climbing into my cardboard “barn”. From there I can see our house, and the piles of leaves we would later jump into.

      In fact, most of my early memories are of doing something outdoors. Another is being shown how to make mud pies. All of my mom’s old pots wound up full of mud, carefully seasoned with grass clippings and flower petals,

      Give your kids great memories. Let them run free outdoors.

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