Book Chronicles Dad Connecting Kids with Nature

Packet Online – June 11, 2008
By Adam Grybowski

Two years ago Rick Van Noy packed his car and, with his two children, drove 800 miles from their home in Virginia to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. The children wanted to learn about tide pools. Once there, they witnessed minnows, crabs, mussels and sea urchins.

”We found some exquisite creatures, some we couldn’t even name,” Mr. Van Noy says.

It was no accident his children — son Sam,10, and daughter Elliot, 8 — instigated such a long trek to explore the natural world. Mr. Van Noy, an associate professor of English at Radford University in Virginia, has sought, and succeeded, to provide his children with the experiences of being outdoors and away from computer screens and video games.

He has written a book, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons (University of Georgia Press, $16.95), that chronicles his attempt to get his children outside. Mr. Van Noy will discuss and read from his book at the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed in Pennington June 26.

”The program is part of a larger mission by the Watershed Association to connect children to nature,” Communications Manager Gwen McNamara says. The Watershed is also offering information sessions for parents in a companion series called “No Child Left Inside,” which in the coming months will visit local communities throughout central New Jersey.

Both the Watershed and Mr. Van Noy were inspired by Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005) by Richard Louv. While Mr. Louv’s book dealt with the issue sociologically, Mr. Van Noy’s book focuses on the experience of bringing children back outdoors and allowing them to play without structure.

In a series of essays organized mostly by season, Mr. Van Noy describes his experiences swimming, creek walking, gardening and fishing with his family.

The family’s trip to the tide pools of Maine also served as a pilgrimage for Mr. Van Noy. Rachel Carson’s 1956 essay, “Help Your Child To Wonder,” was an inspiration for the book. Carson spent summers near Boothbay Harbor and extolled the majesty of tide pools in her writing.

Carson wrote of her hope for children to be given “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years.”

Nature, Mr. Van Noy says, is an anti-boredom tool. While the television is an easy way for parents to amuse their children, simply put, “There are other things to do with their time that would be more beneficial,” he says, before ticking off a list of benefits.

Children benefit emotionally. Adults may consider time spent in nature as an opportunity to reflect and experience calm, but children get outdoors and cheer and scream and squeal, he says. “I think all kids are somewhat inclined to be outdoors. When you give them permission to get their feet wet and their hands dirty, they kind of like it.”

Children benefit cognitively, he says, by enhancing their problem-solving and creativity. In his book Mr. Van Noy mentions a game his kids invented. They variously call it “hawk,” “tiger” and “horse,” and only they understand the rules. “It’s hard for an outsider, or any adult, to decode the rules,” he writes. “Most of it is nonverbal: they take their cues from each other’s actions and their environment.”

There is an ecological benefit, as well. People who value a local stream, for example, are more apt to protect it from garbage or pollution than if they had no contact with it.

Finally, Mr. Van Noy describes the social benefit of playing outdoors: it is often done in a group or as a family instead of in isolation. “We create a lot of memories,” he says. “There’s something about that sensory contact with the outside world that stays with us. Even the mishaps have been memorable.”

A Titusville native, Mr. Van Noy often swam in the Delaware River while growing up. The river culture of his childhood has changed. While people might use the river to boat or go tubing, he finds they don’t swim as much now, attributing it, at least partially, to “eco-phobia.” Without direct contact, potential swimmers may be too worried about things like being bitten by fish to get in the water.

Why else are children spending less time outdoors?

”Parents don’t want to let their kids out unleashed,” Mr. Van Noy says, adding that while abductions are down, the news of kidnappers or sexual predators is more present in our lives. Such knowledge leads to fear.

Mr. Van Noy also points to less direct contact with neighbors. “Where I grew up I just used to know the houses in town, from trick or treating or whatever,” he says. “We’re more on the move now,” and maybe we don’t know our neighbors as well as we once did.

Also, people are busy. “There’s a lack of spontaneous time, that kind of free time to pick through the clover,” he says.

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