Children Losing Connection With Nature, Say Experts

According to the 2010 Bio Index Report, 1 in 10 children don’t know what endangered species are.
Children Losing Connection With Nature, Say Experts
HAPPY OUTDOORS: Galya Dobreva with her two children during a vacation at the seaside. (Photo courtesy of Galya Dobreva)
Kremena Krumova
12/19/2010
Updated:
12/20/2010

<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/DSC08612_medium.JPG"><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/DSC08612_medium.JPG" alt="HAPPY OUTDOORS: Galya Dobreva with her two children during a vacation at the seaside. (Photo courtesy of Galya Dobreva)" title="HAPPY OUTDOORS: Galya Dobreva with her two children during a vacation at the seaside. (Photo courtesy of Galya Dobreva)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-117425"/></a>
HAPPY OUTDOORS: Galya Dobreva with her two children during a vacation at the seaside. (Photo courtesy of Galya Dobreva)
Both children’s lack of direct experience with nature, and their poor understanding of global issues, is cause for concern for parents and experts.

According to the 2010 Bio Index Report, 1 in 10 children don’t know what endangered species are, and 14 percent have the wrong idea thinking the danger to the animals is natural instead of caused by humans.

The report looked at 10,000 children ages 5 to 18, in 10 countries around the globe. The study was commissioned earlier this year by the U.N. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which asked Airbus, a France-based aircraft manufacturer, to conduct the survey.

Manager of Communications at Airbus Americas, Mary Anne Greczyn, said the news from the report is not good.

“Our children, who are tomorrow’s citizens and decision makers show a dangerous ignorance when it comes to the natural world. This fact is doubly concerning because according to the U.N. CBD’s Global Biodiversity Outlook, humans continue to drive the rate of species extinction up to 1,000 times the natural background rate.”

According to Harvard University biologist, E. O. Wilson, 27,000 species are currently being lost per year as compared with the background rate of species extinction, which is 10 per year. In his book “The diversity of Life” published in 2002, Wilson estimates that by 2022, 22 percent of all species will be extinct if no action is taken.

The Bio Index Report cautions that in order to change the current destructive cycle, people and especially children need to be better educated. “We cannot win such an uphill battle for life on Earth if the coming generation has little knowledge of what is at stake.”

Nature and Psychology


Svetla Stoikova is a clinical psychologist at Alexandrovska University Hospital in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, where she works in the child psychiatry clinic. Walking around the clinic, she points at numerous symbols of nature—snowflakes on the window, Christmas stars, Santa’s reindeer, and toys in the shape of animals and plants.

“All of them are evidence of man’s need, and of the child’s need of nature,” she says.

“Connection with nature stimulates intellectual, socially-communicative, psychomotor, and emotional development in children.”

<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/71047272_medium.jpg"><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/71047272_medium.jpg" alt="HEALING NATURE: A Dutch boy suffering from celebral palsy plays with a dolphin during a therapy session in Mediterranean city Antalya, Turkey, May 2006. Psychologists say that connection with the natural world is part of human nature, and if we do not maintain it, we will not develop our full physical and psychological abilities. (Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images)" title="HEALING NATURE: A Dutch boy suffering from celebral palsy plays with a dolphin during a therapy session in Mediterranean city Antalya, Turkey, May 2006. Psychologists say that connection with the natural world is part of human nature, and if we do not maintain it, we will not develop our full physical and psychological abilities. (Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-117426"/></a>
HEALING NATURE: A Dutch boy suffering from celebral palsy plays with a dolphin during a therapy session in Mediterranean city Antalya, Turkey, May 2006. Psychologists say that connection with the natural world is part of human nature, and if we do not maintain it, we will not develop our full physical and psychological abilities. (Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images)
Stoikova says that from a very early age, children show a strong interest in the natural world—in plants, animals, stones, and soil.

“If you place a bunch of flowers and a telephone apparatus in front of an 8-month old baby, it reaches for the flowers. If you give a 4-year-old girl [the choice between] sand with stones, or dough with milk to cook a meal for her doll, she will choose the former. If you offer to take a 14-year-old teenager to hike a mountain peak, or to let him or her chat on the computer, he or she will choose the mountain.”

According to Stoikova, this is because inherently they connect with nature. But, she says, this connection has to be nurtured and maintained.

Stoikova says that surveys of people living in cities show that they were more at risk of psychological problems. She says that contemporary medicine knows that nature makes children and people in general stronger; that the variety of skills children develop through interacting with nature makes them more stable when they have to deal with unstable environments like separation from parents, death, and so on.

The loss of connection with nature has a negative effect on children and on humankind as a whole, she said.

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[xtypo_dropcap]A[/xtypo_dropcap]ccording to Stoikova, a major obstacle to the developing connection between children and nature is society’s push to be successful. She said because of this push, people are apt to spend more time between walls than outside and some people have begun to think that nature obstructs success, with ideas such as that being outside is a waste of time. This she says is not true.

“Connection with nature is part of our own nature, and if we do not maintain it, we will not fully develop physical and psychological abilities; in the end our success will be skin-deep.”

Case Example


Galya Dobreva, a 34-year-old telecom company employee and a mother of two small children, lives with her family in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Sofia. Her daughter is 5 and her son is 2 and although living happily, her family’s hurried lifestyle, like many urban lifestyles, rarely includes contact with the natural world.

“In town, parents often don’t allow children to have a pet: instead we buy a fluffy toy dog in a plastic cage,” she said. “The artificial pet is accompanied by a comb and other accessories, so that children can take care of it and enjoy it. In the end, our children know and enjoy fake animals instead of real ones.”

Dobreva admits that her two small children still don’t have a clue what endangered animals are, but says that it is the family’s job to educate children about the natural world. She said that on a recent nature walk, her son came upon an anthill “and his first reaction was to stomp on it and kill the insects.”

This was because he had never seen one before she said. She stopped his destruction and explained to him that ants are living creatures that work hard and with much difficulty to build their homes.

However, Dobreva’s children are luckier than many as the family owns a house in the countryside and regularly travels there, giving the children the opportunity to come close to living animals.

“My children see cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, and chickens, either in the village, or along the road,” she said.

Dobreva said her children also love zoo animals, and taking them to the zoo is a good way to teach them about exotic animals.

“We read the information on the tags, especially about exotic animals. We teach them where the animals live, if they like warm or cold, etcetera.”

Dobreva says that children naturally love animals and often make associations linked to them. “When seeing a hole on the road, my daughter exclaimed, ‘Mummy, look, it looks like a hippopotamus,’ or when seeing a cloud in the sky my son compared it to an elephant.”

She says that her daughter’s favorite animals are small dogs and cats, while her son is most impressed by big animals like brown bears and elephants. Both children often say they want to fly like birds in the sky.

The U.N. CBD report says that mammals are the most popular animals scoring 50 percent among the children interviewed. Reptiles came next with a 23 percent vote and only 6 percent of children voted for plants.

When asked which animal abilities they would like to copy, 66 percent of children surveyed said they would like to fly like birds, 27 percent said they would like to be able to see in the dark like cats and owls, and 22 percent said they would like to swing through the trees like monkeys.

Dobreva says she thinks children are much more connected to nature than adults, adding regretfully that instead of nurturing this connection, adults unconsciously stifle it by not giving children access to experience nature.

She says modern children are given a whole variety of games, books, and multimedia to help them learn and understand nature. But because of urbanization they are still deprived of access to real nature.

Dobreva says that it is important to instill in children a sense of responsibility toward nature, to teach them to preserve it and keep it clean, and for parents to answer their children’s “why” questions about nature.

“Like in the famous “five whys” mind technique, where you ask yourself why and why, until in the end you find the root cause. So it is good that children ask many questions. This is a great chance for parents and teachers to teach them well.”
Kremena Krumova is a Sweden-based Foreign Correspondent of Epoch Times. She writes about African, Asian and European politics, as well as humanitarian, anti-terrorism and human rights issues.
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