Richard Louv is off on book tours to promote his Last Child in the Woods, the eloquent case for freeing children from electronic gadgets and overprotective mommies and daddies and letting them experience the natural wonders of their world first-hand. But already it’s been recognized by Dan Burden, founder and director of Walkable Communities. Commenting on my recent column that co-featured Louv’s book and Tony Hiss’s new H2O, Burden wrote an intriguing e-mail about “free-range children” in which he describes the bicycle, in the hands of a young person, as a marvelous “learning machine” leading to “distant places never seen by car, foot or any other means.”
He’s right! I’m sure I’m one of millions who remembers childhoods biking far and wide, instinctively “free range.” I got my chance in the 1940s on a sturdy single-speed cycle, exploring the wondrous rolling hills and old stone houses and forest patches of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Unwittingly I was converted to a love of the natural, as well as farm settings, that effectively controls my writing perspectives to this day. And I’ve kept on biking!
How do the next generations get there? Louv’s book is all about that. Parents can do lots to free their own children, he suggests, but adds: “Ultimately, we need an institutional network that would reach across issue boundaries, joining zoos, aquaria, and natural history museums with urban designers, livable cities organizations, the child obesity groups, educational organizations, service groups and environmental organizations, etc., etc.
I suppose Louv’s right about the institutions. But couldn’t we just set the kids free on their two-wheeled, self-propelled, cycle-where-one-will “learning machines”?
From Dan Burden’s email —
From one risk taker to many others. Tony Hiss (author of The Experience of Place) sent me the following article by Neal Peirce. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that Neal, Richard and Tony are right on track …. By 1990 we had narrowed the free range of children to one-ninth of what it was when I was a child. Indeed, I suspect if I were to map my personal childhood range, it eventually grew to 1:400 of current children. A worthy and easy bit of science could collaborate this.
I think to this range we could measure time/duration/saturation (By age 15 my daily self-discovery time grew to 12-14 hours per day), as well as distance, diversity and variety of experience. By age 20 I was describing the bicycle as a “learning machine” since it often took me to distant places never seen by car, foot or any other means.
By age 21 (still a child), despite living in the Midwest, I was walking,free range, the neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant with a growing hands-on interest and experience in sociology and geography. It is our ability to be “free range children” that determines a big part of ourability to learn, our humanity, civility, confidence, useful knowledge, wisdom, maturity, ability to share and our ultimate achievements in life.
By age 23 I was writing letters, poetry and prose under trees no one had ever sat under looking out over bays few people had ever seen. I was already writing about situations and experiences in life most of my friends had not lived.
Do these articles and books by Louv (earlier Childhood’s Future) imply that children’s strongest neural pathways now have more to do with the latest modern “Pac Man”, “Newspaper Boy”, or “Bad Boy” electron adventure (something too new for my media deprived brain) than being a real newspaper carrier?
In real life I recall jumping real curbs with a personally rebuilt Schwinn cruiser that refused to collapse under my tall, lanky body weight and added pressure of 80 pounds of papers. It was a bike I maintained by learning from my dad and friends how to tear apart and rebuild every part of a bike, including complex internal hub brakes. This brake got cleaned, polished and reassembled, often several times before it worked.
Free range includes learning precision skills of well directed underhanded tosses of fast-folded papers (while riding no handed) to exact center porch landings … learning to collect money from deadbeat or busy household newspaper customers at the age of 12-13, how to accept semi-threatening but friendly teasing of customers in a very different neighborhood than where I lived, such as a beer drinking cop sitting on his front porch who called my dad (firefighter) a “nozzle squeezer.” Free range is also learning the
habitat and habits of creek critters, how to track on crisp early morning snow and ice the range and habits of mink and muskrats, ponder how a tree became bent the way it did, recognize a snake species from its discarded skin, or where to find the best patches of milkweed, pond lilies or bull brushes….
Maybe Willy Nelson’s song, “Mothers don’t let your children grow up to be Cowboys ….should warn them to keep their children caged better than my mom did.