Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A group of 5 year old children wearing ear muffs and biting into pears may sound like a bizarre way to tackle obesity, but the founders of the new sensory food education initiative Flavour School would disagree. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that taste preferences in adulthood are closely linked to what we eat in childhood.
Conceived by Australian creative planner and urbanist David Engwicht in 1992, the Walking School Bus is an agreed, set route to and from school supervised by adult volunteer “drivers” (often parents) who collect students from various stops.
Learning primitive skills offers an opportunity for people to reconnect to the environment and to gain a deeper understanding of sustainable living. The U.S.-based MAPS Meet provides a forum to learn these skills.
In his book “Last Child in the Woods” and “The Nature Principle,” US author Richard Louv coined the phrase “Nature-deficit disorder,” which comes from children no longer exploring woods or bogs and having adventures. Children who are obsessed with computer games or driven from sport to sport, Louv maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around in wild places.
When I talk to my elderly neighbours, or read interviews with people from earlier eras, one of the things that most comes through about their childhoods, and seems dramatically different than the way children are raised today, is how far and freely they roamed. Unlike most modern children, they did not spend most of their time indoors watching television or playing video games, or following one adult-led activity after another.
“Going to school together helps children feel like part of a group”, says Antonio Moya, an architect by profession. He is one of the four masterminds behind the Pas a Pas (Step by Step) project in Jávea, which aims to give children an active role in urban life. Since April 2016, more than 100 children from four primary schools have been walking to school together in this town on Spain’s East coast. They have been joined in autumn by students from another two schools.
Playing in the street, the “really good thing” Jo and her neighbours stumbled across, has many benefits. Children need to play, it’s vital for their physical and emotional development.
It can’t be like “We need a policy for a rewilded childhood”, because we could be waiting forever, and that ain’t going to happen. And we haven’t got time to wait forever I don’t believe. So it’s what do we all do to rewild our own family, our own community, our own school?
I’m happy to continue to have conversations about the parenthood decision and ‘otherness’ and to offer spaces for others to meet, because it strikes me that these conversations are at the heart of the sort of resilience we need and are increasingly likely to need in the coming decades – and because it’s the least I can do for the biosphere.
The sadness and absurdity of thinking we have improved on the past by infantilizing our children, swaddled even into youth and young adulthood, their girth and limbs malformed, their intelligence maladapted to the work of being men and women.
First of all, we are at a moment when we’re in political crisis, we’re in ecological crisis, and the ability to imagine a different world, to imagine different solutions to the world we’ve created, to imagine different ways of dealing with the problems we have has never been more pressing.
What makes a person feel a sense of belonging, meaning, and connection in a place?
