Teen Age Drug Abuse and Nature Deficit
Mental health professionals are continuing to urge parents to bring nature back into their families lives. Parents are looking towards nature to offset and diminish the many negatives of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder by removing iPods from their teens ears and putting hiking boots on their feet.
From Stephen Scharper at Children & Nature Network:
“… Louv writes…as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.”
Does that strike you as a very vital observation? The human experience is indeed very rich, a tapestry woven with thousands of memories and emotions. At least it used to be. But do teens even understand how vast and infinite the human experience is or has their vision been narrowed and truncated, their emotional range attenuated?
The connection to teen age drug abuse might be tenuous, but. speculatively speaking, if teens are not taught how to extract all of the richness of experience from their lives, are drugs acting as a substitute? Does life seem so flat to teenagers that drugs offer them a depth of emotion that prior generations used to obtain by riding bikes from dawn to dusk on hot summer days, by laying next to a pond and listening to frogs and counting stars.
Relevant Tags:attention deficit hyperactive disorder, nature, nature deficit, teen age drug abuse“A kid today,” he writes, “can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest — but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching clouds move.”
