Nature-deficit Disorder: What Kids Lose Without Enough Outdoors Nature-deficit Disorder: What Kids Lose Without Enough Outdoors
i
Photo by Vitolda Klein/Unsplash
The Other School

Nature-deficit Disorder: What Kids Lose Without Enough Outdoors

Jaimee Bell
Reading
time 4 minutes

“Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.” – Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

The term “Nature-Deficit Disorder” was coined by Richard Louv, not to serve as a medical diagnosis, but to give meaning to a significant problem in modern society – the human costs of alienating ourselves from nature. There is an ever-growing gap between human beings and nature due to open green space being urbanized and large advancements in technology.

Since the term was coined in Louv’s 2005 publication “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, it has been used as a rallying point for a movement called

Information

You’ve reached your free article’s limit this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription. If you have an active subscription, please log in.

Subscribe

Also read:

Learning to Swim Learning to Swim
i
“Children on the Beach, Valencia”, Joaquín Sorolla, 1916
Wellbeing

Learning to Swim

Mikołaj Łoziński

1.

Not many people remember how they learned to walk or talk as children. But it seems like everyone remembers swimming lessons. Even if they didn’t work.

Continue reading