The Other Paper article
Get outside. Or else.
by Richard Ades
published in The Other Paper, Sept. 27, 2007
In case you haven’t heard, this is Take a Child Outside Week. The week is part of an international effort to pull kids away from their TVs and video games long enough to interact with nature.
So if you spot an adolescent standing under a tree and pointing his game controller at a squirrel and wondering why he can’t make it disappear in a puff of smoke, that’s why.
Actually, you probably won’t see much of that in Columbus. Though the effort is aimed at children, the only organized program in Central Ohio will send a bunch of adults out in the woods.
The Leave No Child Inside Central Ohio Collaborative Summit will send officials from Metro Parks, the Columbus Zoo, Columbus schools and other organizations to Camp Wyandot on Friday to talk about ways to reunite kids and nature.
“Jenny (Morgan) is the spearheader,” said Alice Hohl, one of several women who organized the gathering at the Camp Fire facility in Hocking Hills. “She’s been talking about this for a long time, and then Richard Louv’s book came out.”
Hohl was referring to Last Child in the Woods, the book that sparked the back-to-nature movement by warning parents about the danger of “nature deficit disorder.”
And it’s nature that children need, Hohl said, not simply time outside.
“Most of the time when kids are outside these days, they’re doing something organized like playing soccer,” Hohl said.
There’s nothing wrong with organized sports, Hohl added hurriedly, but they don’t give kids a chance to let their minds run free. They can get that, she said, only through unstructured activities such as “building a tree fort, turning over a rock, killing a couple of hours in the woods.”
It’s appropriate that the summit is being held at Camp Wyandot. It was the camp’s declining attendance in the late 1990s that first alerted Morgan, a camp alumna, to the fact that modern kids had other things to entertain them besides nature.
Hohl, another Wyandot alum, said attendance may be declining because incoming campers aren’t allowed to pack electronic equipment along with their swimsuits and bug repellant.
“Parents are worried kids won’t be able to fall asleep without their iPods,” she said.
Morgan said she hates to see today’s kids miss out on the kind of experiences she had when she was growing up.
“I was outside, especially in the summertime, from morning to night,” she said.
In fact, Morgan is so committed to the back-to-nature movement that she’s written a couple of songs about it. The lyrics of one, titled “Leave No Child Inside,” read, in part:
The time has come
The time is NOW
To get our children back outside somehow
Morgan said she sent a copy of the song to a national website for the back-to-nature movement and has guarded hopes that it will one day become the movement’s official song.
“That would be wonderful,” she said.
