Strategies to Understand the Nature of your Child
For children, nature is an amusement park, excellent medicine and a classroom for learning. Contact with it improves health, attention span, motor and cognitive development, autonomy, security, the acquisition of values …
We laugh at the occurrence of the little kid who is asked to draw a chicken and sketch a roast chicken. Or of the one who asks where does the milk come from? responds “from the supermarket.” But more than comic, this reality is tragic. Evidence that today many children grow up without leaving an urban environment and their contact with plants, animals and natural landscapes comes through school, books or videos. There are pediatricians, educators and psychologists who already speak of the syndrome or nature deficit disorder, a disease that affects children who live far from contact with natural environments and that manifests itself in the form of obesity, stress, learning disorders, hyperactivity, chronic fatigue or depression, among other symptoms.
Many children leave home in the morning to go to school by car or bus, they return in the afternoon by the same means and when it comes to playing they do so at home and often with the console or the computer. Parents fill their agendas with activities to prepare them for the future and are concerned about their safety, to keep them in protected environments, that they do not get wet, do not get dirty, do not get bitten by bugs … The result is millions of children who do not play freely in the park or in the field, who do not climb trees or build log huts, who do not hunt lizards or insects or throw stones into puddles so as not to get stained. Experts say that, deprived of these experiences with nature, these children lose important spaces for cognitive and emotional development, they lose the capacity for exploration, creativity, the ability to coexist and solve problems. And they allude to various research studies that prove that rural children get sick less, have better concentration and self-discipline, better physical coordination, balance and agility, are more imaginative, have more ability to have fun and collaborate in groups, are more observant, show more reasoning skills and more inner peace. Those from the city, on the other hand, are more fearful, develop more allergies, have more overweight or obesity problems, are more nervous and insecure, get more bored …
Safer and more autonomous The differences between urban and rural children are observed almost daily by Cristina Gutiérrez, co-director of La Granja, Fundació per a l’Educació. “Children from the village, city, P3, high school, public schools, private centers pass through our school farm in Santa Maria de Palautordera (Vallès Oriental)… About 10,000 a year. And we have 20 years’ experience. And we see that those who come from cities or towns with very urban environments arrive very nervous, accelerated, speaking very loudly; They run and they don’t stop moving and wanting to go quickly to see everything, as if their time were running out; those from the village are calmer and serene, more independent, with fewer fears, as more integrated with the rest of the world; those from the city do not dare to enter the forest, they do not sit on the ground so as not to get dirty, they complain if there are stones on the road or if it rains because they think that everything has to be adjusted to their interests and needs ”, Explain.
“Nature offers such a high amount of stimuli that contact with it makes the child find himself in an open space, with a feeling of freedom, with the ability to move freely, to observe the processes that occur, and this is essential for the development of their movement skills but also a stimulus for their neurons, for their emotions and for their learning; it is a vital experience that allows children to feel and measure themselves differently than they do in the city ”, sums up Mari Luz Díaz, psychologist, director of the Huerto Alegre educational innovation center and president of the Onda network of educational centers. environmental education of Andalusia.
More awake, Díaz explains that contact with nature has a direct impact on movement, and neuroscience has shown that this has an impact on the number of neural connections and favors a rich and varied brain organization, greater plasticity, so that it favors development intellectual and cognitive learning. “Falling, getting up, exercising the muscles and senses, putting oneself to the test, catching insects, planting seeds, are stimuli for the brain and also for the emotions, because smelling a flower, contemplating a field of poppies or seeing a calf being born provokes to the child sensations that, in turn, arouse emotions, and those emotions are then important to build knowledge, because what we learn linked to emotions is more easily recorded in our memory and is more difficult to forget ”, points out the director of Huerto Cheerful.
More balanced That contact with nature improves children’s motor skills Cristina García has it very clear: “Children between one and three years old from our nursery walk through the forest