With the beautiful fall weather now arriving, what a wonderful time to spend outdoors.  I recently read in the Healthy Child Healthy World Blog an article that really focuses on this very thing  ~spending more time in the natural world, particularly with our children and grandchildren.

Mentioned in this article was the fact that so many children have been removed from direct contact with animals, farms, forests, and wild places causing a kind of “nature deficit disorder,” an incalculable loss of both spirit and competence.

Immersing children in the artificial world of television, entertainment, and virtual reality (I think we as adults even spend too much time here!) without too much thought to the toll that counterfeit reality would exact on their humanity is the thread of what is discussed in  The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture and Human Intention,  by Dr. David Orr, professor of environmental studies, Oberlin College, a book discussed in this article.

Healthy Child Healthy World suggests protecting children and childhood by changing priorities which includes fewer shopping malls and more parks; less television and more family time; fewer roads and more trails.  The article included the following tips to parents who want to incorporate the durable standards of decency and compassion…..

  • Love our children thoughtfully and consistently
  • Slow the velocity of life by eating together, playing together, reading together, working together
  • Eat well, which means mostly local, organic, and unprocessed foods.
  • Engage the natural world – more accurately – to enjoy a love affair with it.  The natural world is not an abstraction – yet.

If I were to add anything to this list it would be to create a non-toxic home, using chemical free household products.  I also would definitely recommend story-telling.  I found that sharing stories of my own life and that of my husband’s was definitely something my grandchildren enjoyed.  Now that they are grown, I was recently given a gift by my daughter of a way to publish these same stories  into a book for future generations.

What about you? How would you create a better world for our kids?

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