Leave No Child Inside

A few months ago, CPOP supporter Elaine Blanchard wrote a lovely guest post about kids and nature that quoted from the book Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv.

If you'd like to hear more about why parents should encourage their kids to play outdoors, author/journalist Richard Louv will be speaking at the Germantown Performing Arts Center at 7:00pm on October 21.

Perhaps you have a ravine behind your house, or a little woods at the end of the cul-de-sac. That is hugely important to children. Adults sometimes can't see the importance of it because they expect nature to be so much bigger, but to that child, that ravine is a universe. Paying attention to that -- protecting those little spaces in cities -- is a step in the right direction.

In older cities there's often more nature than we suspect. Can you imagine a city building Central Park today? They're still finding new species in Central Park. In newer cities, everything is over-manicured, over-controlled. What is a kid supposed to do? I'm just as concerned about kids growing up in those kinds of neighborhoods as I am about inner-city kids. [ Source ]