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| Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Louv
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $4.19
You Save: $20.76 (83%)
New (5) Used (15) from $4.19
Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 86520
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 1565123913
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.418
EAN: 9781565123915
ASIN: 1565123913
Publication Date: April 15, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BookCloseouts scratch & dent version. New book that may have some cosmetic damage (i.e. shelf-wear, torn or missing dust jacket, dented corner...). Otherwise excellent specimen - guaranteed!
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Product Description
"I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are," reports a fourth-grader. Never before in history have children been so plugged in—and so out of touch with the natural world. In this groundbreaking new work, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation—he calls it nature deficit—to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as rises in obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and depression.
Some startling facts: By the 1990s the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to a ninth of what it had been in 1970. Today, aerage eight-year-olds are better able to identify cartoon characters than native species, such as beetles and oak trees, in their own community. The rate at which doctors prescribe antidepressants to children has doubled in the last five years, and recent studies show that too much computer use spells trouble for the developing mind.
Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. This alienation damages children and shapes adults, families, and communities. There are solutions, though, and they're right in our own backyards. Last child in the Woods is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development—physical, emotional, and spiritual. What's more, nature is a potent therapy for depression, obesity, and ADD. Environment-based education dramatically improves standarized test scores and grade point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Even creativity is stimulated by childhood experiences in nature.
Yet sending kids outside to play is increasingly difficult. Computers, television, and video games compete for their time, of course, but it's also our fears of traffic, strangers, even virus-carrying mosquitos—fears the media exploit—that keep children indoors. Meanwhile, schools assign more and more homework, and there is less and less access to natural areas.
Parents have the power to ensure that their daughter or son will not be the "last child in the woods," and this book is the first step toward that nature-child reunion.
Book Description
“I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.
As children’s connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attentiondeficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.
In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 75 more reviews...
 unplug your kids - this book will convince you May 23, 2005
119 out of 125 found this review helpful
I'm old enough to remember an unplugged childhood, and although I want my kids to play unfettered in the woods and waters, we're a different society today. We can't just let them wander alone, but we also owe them the natural formative experiences we enjoyed like building forts, treehouses and teepees, catching fish, frogs and critters, and observing nature - in nature, not through the TV. Although we try to limit the exposure to electronica - it's a pervasive force in modern life. Louv shows through dozens of examples where kids today get their lessons and experiences - more often than not through the TV or computer screen. He's concerned that a new generation of children is growing up detatched from the earth, who view it simply as a resource to be mined, drilled, and sold. He sees children losing the wonder of nature, and the earth losing a generation of would-be caretakers.
As parents we don't have to move to Montana, or trap our meals to make a positive impact. It can be many little things, like catching fireflies, wading in a small stream with your kids, following animal tracks in the snow. These are all no cost and high-benefit activities that we can do with our kids to introduce them to the wonder that lies just outside our doors.
This book is a call to action. I'm giving it to the principal at my son's elementary school. If you have kids, are thinking about having kids, or are concerned with the future of childhood - READ THIS BOOK!
We had unplugged the tv for a few months and, frankly, were wavering. (We miss it too). After reading Last Child in the Woods, the TV is staying in the cellar. Maybe for the long haul!
Its pure common sense - get kids out of the house, get them moving and have them see the REAL world December 13, 2005
90 out of 95 found this review helpful
My "wake up call" came when my friend from the city brought her toddler to my home and the little girl cried in terror when her mother tried to get her to put her bare feet on the lawn, a lawn that was free of anything dangerous. We don't have a dog so there weren't even any "droppings" to worry about.
A baby who was scared to touch ground? Her mother admitted that her offspring had never felt grass because her mother feared it might be too full of "germs". I urged her to at least let her daughter smell a handful of freshly picked clover but she looked at me as though I were crazy.
I then told her of summers spent barefoot, of exploring creeks and finding crayfish and even some snakes, of coming across a newborn fawn in the woods, etc.
That's when I realized that there could be a whole generation of children losing touch with the natural world around them and I started paying attention to the kids and teens in our neighborhood. Sure enough, very few of them were climbing trees, exploring creeks, walking through the nearby woods. Very few of them built forts or learned the joy of wading in a cold stream or simply lying on the grass and looking up at the clouds, listening to the birds or trying to identify the different types of trees in the neighborhood. All of these things were common activities for me as a child (admittedly, during a time when tv channels were limited to 3 or 4 and there weren't video games or cellphones).
If there is ONE POINT this book makes, it is that parents need to make an effort to help their children discover nature. Whether it is because parents are too busy or too fearful to let their children discover nature or whether kids have too many electronic devices to distract them and which prevent them from automatically turning to the pleasures of the outside world, the result is that children spend more and more time indoors and less time being active.
Is it any wonder that there is an epidemic of childhood obesity? I'm not naive enough to suggest that spending time outside will cure obesity but I DO believe that it might encourage children to at least contemplate the idea of running through a grassy field, climbing a tree (carefully and respectfully) or simply chasing a butterfly through a meadow, trying to see where it goes.
Most of all, this book might help both parents and children realize that nature can be as mysterious, powerful and awesome as any video game or television show (I'd say even MORE so). If our children, our future generations, are going to learn to care about the environment and preserving the wonders that are out there, it is up to parents, teachers and other role models in their lives to foster that appreciation...and, hopefully, that passion...early on.
 silly nostalsgic nonsense September 18, 2006
36 out of 95 found this review helpful
Having spent most of my adult life working in the non-profit conservation field, and as a parent, and as someone who had the good fortune to spend lots of time in nature as a child, I read this book in the hopes of learning important things. That turned out to be a forlorn hope.
By a quarter of the way through I was rolling my eyes; by the halfway mark I was actively insulted that this author would expect anyone to buy what he was shoveling. I finished the thing only out of grim curiosity.
Louv has about three major points:
(a) American kids circa 2005 are much less active outdoors than American kids circa 1965 were;
(b) that change is due to computers, personal-injury lawyers, and various other things that people Louv's age don't like;
(c) being "in nature" is important to kids' development and to human health generally.
Point (c) is blindingly obvious, is not news to anyone, and is the only major point for which he offers any actual evidence which wouldn't get laughed out of the offices of a peer-reviewed journal.
For points (a) and (b) he offers zero evidence, nada, zip -- absolutely nothing but anecdotes, leading rhetorical questions, and straw men. He sounds like nothing so much as Joseph McCarthy wondering whether Communists "might be" undermining American foreign policy from within the State Department. Indeed he uses precisely that rhetorical construction repeatedly, always a signpost of intellectual flabbiness.
Obvious logic flaws abound, as do laugh-out-loud factual mistatements. In the first half of the book I started jotting down glaring holes in his argument but gave up in disgust when I realized that most of his factual claims weren't even footnoted! Louv isn't even consistent in his straw men: one moment he's talking about when he was a child (1960s, roughly) and the next moment he's quoting somebody talking about how much kids were outdoors in 1910, or 1860!
While he offers no actual evidence for his broad proposition of a new "nature deficit disorder", he does throw tangential facts around some of which I am in a professional position to quickly confirm. I checked a half-dozen such, and the score was that he got 1 substantially correct, distorted 2 beyond recognition, and got 3 dead wrong.
I could go on but enough already. This thing isn't worth the paper it was printed on.
 Children. Outside. Playing. How intriguing... June 3, 2005
24 out of 26 found this review helpful
An intriguing and thought-provoking work about our failures as parents, educators, and community planners to provide opportunities for unfettered nature play to our children, and the consequences of this oversight. According to Louv, in "Last Child in the Woods," the lack of opportunities for unstructured nature play, the decline of close-to-home open space, and the rise in programmed sporting activities are all contributing to a condition he labels "Nature Deficit Disorder." Although going to great pains to point out that this is not an identified medical disorder, it remains Louv's hypothesis that the modern disconnect between children and nature can and is to be blamed as a contributing factor to ADHD, obesity, lack of creativity, a loss of respect for nature and the living world, and a number of other social ills. Backed by lots of fascinating interviews, anecdotes, and research, Louv lays out a compelling argument for changing some modern social arrangements (educators, lawyers, and over-protective parents take a few lumps here) and letting today's children play the way we played as children: set them free in the outdoors, and let their imaginations do the work that we too often allow computer games and TV to do for them. Although the book drags a little the last 40 pages or so, it's only because Louv has already won you over to his argument. I highly recommend this work for local planners, educators, parents, and all others concerned about the disconnect between today's youth and the natural world.
Thrilled this book was written! January 3, 2006
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
As a child, I recall fishing, hiking and riding our horses through the woods. It added so much flavor and richness to our lives that I couldn't imagine not passing it on to our own children. Building memories with our children in the outdoors, and teaching them the beauty of playing outside, has helped shape them into healthier and happier people.
For this and other reasons I was thrilled that Richard Louv wrote this book! His interview on NPR convinced me even more that he is sincere in wanting to help generations of children and their parents to see how nature can serve to enrich our lives. Our youngest child, who complains that he's the only one without a t.v. in his room, was listening to the program as well so we appreciated the 'vindication' for our lifestyle choices. My husband and I both feel that had it not been for the access to woods and outside play when we were young, we both would've either been medicated or getting into serious trouble.
Chrissy K. McVay
author of 'Souls of the North Wind'
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