Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 13 No. 1 (2003) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations Kahn, Peter H. Jr. and Kellert, Stephen R. (2002). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 348 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0262611759. Nature nurtures children who become adults who nurture nature; as nature disappears from children’s lives, what then? Do experiences of the natural world play a crucial role in children’sdevelopment– in who they become and what they care about? In thisbook, distinguished authors examine this notion through a diversecollection of disciplinary lenses, using perspectives from cognitivescience, developmental psychology, ecology, education, environmentalstudies, evolutionary psychology, political science, primatology,psychiatry, and social psychology. Some of the ideas are familiar butimportant in this context, and there is much that is new here as well.The result is an intellectual banquet– a succession of varied entréesforming a surprisingly unified whole. Three themes run through this slim, important volume. The first is thatexperiences with nature play a unique, irreplaceable role in healthychild development. The second is that early experiences with nature arevital to the forging of later environmental commitments. The third isthat children’s contact with nature is increasingly diluted and alteredin modern society and that this has far-reaching implications for bothchildren and nature. Healthy Child Development The primary theme of the bookis that contact with nature is not merely beneficial to children butcrucial and even irreplaceable in their healthy development. This is anambitious thesis; nonetheless, Children and Nature goes a long way in 235 establishing the importance, if not the necessity, of contact with nature. Some of the arguments are theoretical and explain why we might expectvarious distinguishing features of the natural world to be uniquelypowerful in fostering child development. The arguments are diverse:Verbeek and de Waal, and then Heerwagen and Orians examine myriad waysin which children may be suited for the natural world as a result ofevolution, suggesting that child development is, in a sense, designedto unfold in a natural context. Other authors, especially Kellert andPyle, offer reasons why contact with nature might facilitatedevelopment in particular domains, whether physical, cognitive,affective, moral, social, or character development. For example,Kellert points out that the natural world is extraordinarily rich ininformation and hence may be unmatched as a ground for learning,reasoning, and observing. On another note, Katcher joins Myers andSaunders in exploring how and why children’s social and emotionallearning might uniquely benefit from interactions with social,nonhuman beings. These and other proposals are given substance in the book through closeanalysis, illustrative examples and phenomena, and a few dollops ofsystematic evidence. What evidence is provided is intriguing andsuggests that perhaps the relationship between children and nature isspecial. Heerwagen and Orians provide numerous examples for theirthesis that children show instinctive, stage-specific, and adaptivepatterns of attraction and fear with respect to the natural world; thisis later echoed in Kaplan and Kaplan’s chapter on adolescents andnature. Coley, Solomon, and Shafto note that children show a strikingproclivity and talent for inferring larger principles about thebiological world, for constructing models of the natural world fromlimited input. Thus children seem to possess a special competence withrespect to the natural world; moreover, they seem to have a specialresponsiveness or resonance to the world of nature. Kahn studiesinner-city San Antonio children and finds a reverence for nature evenin 236 children whose experience of nature is severely limited. Kellertreports that most participants find an outdoor challenge experience tobe one of the most important in their lives and one that exerted majorimpacts on their personality and character development. Katcherobserves that working with animals can bring striking, often profound,changes in children with developmental disorders including autism,Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), and oppositionaldefiant disorder and cites research demonstrating that children withpets are better at decoding nonverbal human emotional cues (Guttmann,Predovic and Zemanek 1985). Taken together, these arguments and phenomena demand seriousconsideration, particularly in light of their diversity and cumulativeweight. At the same time, the grain of salt with which findings areusually best taken is sometimes wanting here. Much work remains to bedone, primarily by way of making more careful comparisons between whatis “natural” and what is not– or perhaps more tenably, between what ismore natural and...