Green exercise improves psychological health.
There is a real world, beyond the glass, for children who look, for those whose parents encourage them to truly see.
No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus.
Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.
As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.
Reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival.
Here is the beginning of understanding: most parents are doing their best, and most children are doing their best, and they’re doing pretty well, all things considered.
When you’re sitting in front of a screen, you’re not using all of your senses at the same time. Nowhere than in nature do kids use their senses in such a stimulated way.
These days, unplugged places are getting hard to find.
A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that’s not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define ’nature.
As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
I do not trust technology. I mean, I don’t think we’re in any danger of kids, you know, doing without video games in the future, but I am saying that their lives are largely out of balance.
If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There’s not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war.
Leave part of the yard rough. Don’t manicure everything. Small children in particular love to turn over rocks and find bugs, and give them some space to do that. Take your child fishing. Take your child on hikes.
There’s a generation now that didn’t grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don’t know where to start.
Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.
We are telling our kids that nature is in the past and it probably doesn’t count anymore, the future is in electronics, the boogeyman is in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.
In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.
Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.
We tend to block off many of our senses when we’re staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.