Hiking Camp Long

Dawson said,"I want to go somewhere." He says this in the morning, when we don't have any plans. The menu of where we go is long a varied, and we have gotten into the habit of somewhere being far enough away that bus or car is necessary. In the past few weeks, I have caught myself several times giving in when Dawson seems restless. One time it was to the aquarium. Another time it was to the Junction. These activities satisfy his need for stimulation. But even on the bus, they are ritual of a highly mobile & consumptive society.

I aspire to be able to calmly set a limit and say,"Let's stay home" more often. But today, I did the next best thing. We hitched the bike trailer to my bike, stuffed snacks and extra clothes into a backpack, and headed for Camp Long. Dawson and I wandered up the trail from the Brandon Street entrance. After five minutes, Dawson was lobbying for me to carry him. I told him that I could carry him, but I would only do that if we were going home. He obviously had a desire to get to Camp Long, because he persisted forward, though he asked me several more times to be carried.

We ultimately spent three hours at Camp Long. He walked by himself over a mile. I carried him only for the last 200 feet back to our bicycle. As we were leaving, he said,"Lets go to Camp Long again!" I felt so satified to have done something "lower on the food chain".

What did it take? It took me being tired of getting in the car, tolerating my anxiety about setting limits, and sticking with him, instead of having an agenda. At any moment I was ready to pick him up and go back home if needed. I made it so that he was responsible for forward progress. That made the pace his. I went along, mostly.

Hold onto your Kids

A Canadian psychotherapist, Gordon Neufeld, published a book called "Hold on to your Kids". He discusses the epidemic of how bright, happy children grow up to become withdrawn teenagers, disengaged from their families and unresponsive to parental authority. According to him, it all starts in early childhood and hinges on whether the parents work to maintain the attachment bond with their child or not. Attachment is the natural mechanism which give parents the authority to parent.

This rings true with me. I have been an attentive and engaged parent for Dawson's first two years of life. But in the last year, things have changed. Dawson is now becoming independent. He can play by himself or with other kids more. I notice my tendency to start disengaging because I miss other things I like to do in my life: read a book, clean the house, cook good food, garden, blog. Nothing very self indulgent, but things I deferred when he was younger. I find myself playing with him less, being less "in his world". I find myself looking at him every few days with the realization that I don't really know him anymore. I fall into see him as a set of demands on me, a potential for conflict. It's a gradual and insidious transition that I think happens for a lot of well-intended parents.

I first heard Dr. Neufeld at the La Leche League conference in Redmond, WA in 2006. There he talked a lot about counterwill, commonly referred to as the "terrible twos" in our culture, but really a phenomenon that extends throughout childhood and into adulthood. Counterwill is fundementally a mechanism for the child to define himself or herself, the drive for identity. We all want that for our children, and he argues that counterwill is one of the roads on the trip to maturity. I left that lecture with a more relaxed attitude about counterwill. Things to remember about counterwill: it is not personal. The child is doing it instinctively, not because I am a bad parent. Counterwill is not "will" as in choice, it is more like a compulsion. The child cannot help himself. So trying to get the child to choose something different is not really going to work. Once counterwill is activated, reason flies out the window. Defense takes its place.

Instead of meeting counterwill in the child with reasoning or resistance, he recommends a more fluid approach. If I had to sum his philosophy up, it would be "pursue your child". Don't get complacent as they become more independent. Lay down good experiences of warmth, play and genuine good feelings between you every day. On discipline, the phrase he repeated in his lecture was,"connect before you correct". He recommends instead of getting into a big verbal exchange at the peak of the oppostion, relax. Don't go on the defensive. Recognize that your child is up against the futility of opposing reality. As Dr. Neufeld writes," the parent needs to be both an agent of futility and an angel of comfort. It is human counterpoint at its finest and most challenging." He goes on:"a parent must dance the child to his tears, to let go, and to sense the rest in the wake of letting go."(HOTYK, p.222) Staying relaxed and pointing the child to his feelings are key here. Later, when the feelings die down, you and your child can go over what happened. Solicit good intentions for future behavior at that point. You and your child are going to be able to think more clearly and feel positively towards each other.


The book is worth the read, and my intention here is to only give an overview of what he has to offer. Woven through his book are hints at how place-based culture can support parents in their relationship with their children. One example he keeps coming back to is his experience in a village in Provence, France where he experienced a culture that is family based and multigenerational. Children and grandparents are included in every aspect of social life. Teachers and parents have personal relationships with each other that preceed the child. Meals are a central part of the day, a place where everyone gathers. He goes on at length about this bonding ritual:

Since our sojourn in Provence, I have come to consider the family sitdown meal as one of the most significant attachment rituals of all. Attachment and eating go together. One facilitates the other. It seems to me that the meal should be a time of unabashed dependency: where the attachment hierarchy is still preserved, where the dependable take care of the dependent, where experience still counts, where there is pleasure in nurturing and being nurtured and where foold is the way to the heart.

No wonder the the meal has been the piece de resistance of human courting rituals for eons. It also explains why the family sit-down meal si the cornerstone of Provencal culture: tables are carefully set, courses are served one at a time, no interruptions are allowed. The sit-down family meal has a huge supporting cast, including the baker, the butcher, and the vendors at the village market....The family sit-down meal was certainly the centerpiece of our own family life while we stayed in Provence. It was what our children missed the most when we returned. (HOTYK p. 207-8)

Now, if there ever was place-based culture, that's it. Returning to the same table night after night to celebrate the day together. Pulling it off well is a challenge, however, and many of us remember less than nurturing experiences at the family table. Nevertheless, I am always a bit envious of our neighbors who have family meals together and often invite their friends over to join them. I catch glimpses of them succeeding at this and creating a warm, inviting place that extends beyond their family.

Another theme of the book is to use vacations and getaways as a way to repair detachments in the relationship. Dr. Neufeld describes at length his daughter's disengagement and a vacation he took with her to win her back. Where did they go? Not Disneyworld. It was a seaside cottage that was a ferry ride away. The lack of simulation seemed like a recipe for boredom to his daughter. However, after a few days, she started seeking closeness with her father. Meanwhile, he didn't let himself get discouraged or overly solicitous. Slowly they started taking walks and doing activities together. (HOTYK p. 194-195)

I could make too much of the choice of setting. A main function of the setting was to separate her temporarily from the places and media that foster her peer orientation that supplants her parents' authority. But if there is not to be computers, iphones, DVD's, facebook and twitter, there has to be something positive that stands apart from that world, and is robust enough to replace it. The natural world is that, at least for most people.

Finally, Dr. Neufeld's last chapter is entitled "Recreate the Attachment Village". Reading this chapter, I felt so lucky to live in a cohousing community. Dawson has 40 adults that he knows, that know him, that he is attached to. It's like having 40 aunts and uncles, or like the Mexican village that Dr. Gabor, co-author of the book, describes (p. 257). We don't have to go across town to find adults who want what we want. They are here. We are also lucky to have found other sympatico parents through our local preschool.

Dr. Neufeld offers an interesting idea for how to help our children develop attachment relationships with other adults. He calls it matchmaking. This is being the behind-the-scenes support for our children's other significant attachment relationships with adults, such as with teachers. Some teachers do this well, but others and other adults who are not used to relationships with children need help. So you prime the pump. You make contact with the teacher before the child meets him or her. You talk to your child about the teacher, and let the child know that the adults are "friends". You pass on compliments between the two parties so the feelings of warmth and closeness are fostered. Some might call this meddling or codependency, but you can see that you as a parent are doing something for the child that she or he cannot do herself. I find I do some of this naturally with the adults that are important in Dawson's life. It depends in part on running into people regularly so that messages and updates can be delivered while they are current. Again, an advantage to place-based relationships. I fear that the infrequent contact parents have with teachers in the public schools makes this difficult to do.

How to Lick a Slug

A column from NY Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof entitled How to Lick a Slug explores the lack of environmental fluency in the current generation of children. He describes backpacking with his daughter, which is half of the equation: children sharing nature with an adult who models the value of nature experiences. But the other half he alludes to only with examples. It is unstructured play in a special place that is essential to forming a connection to the natural world, which fosters the love that sustains environmental responsibility in the adult person.

I will keep harping on this because that is where it happened for me. Beachcombing with my family in Amagansett and playing alone at Brookdale Park were the kind of place-experiences where I built the connection I have to the natural environment. I also had a father and other adults that modeled conservation ethics for me. But I think that is not what is in short supply for today's kids.

I think backpacking trips can form the sense of place, if, as Mr. Kristof's family does, it involves returning to the same place every year. It doesn't have to be daily, just routine and sustained. I hope his daughter gets days where they don't travel, but just get to goof around the campsite.

Place-based education - research summary sheet

Go to promiseofplace.org for a two page pdf of research summary collected by Louise Chawla on the benefits of nature for children.

These include:
Improving concentration and impulse control
Assisting children with handling emotional stress
Inspiring more creative play
Fostering environmental stewardship
Reducing ADD and ADHD
Improving motor skills

I have appreciated Dr. Chawla's work which has been referenced in Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods as well as David Sobel and other educators' work.

Protecting Children from Death Anxiety in Environmental Ed

From a posting on the Ernest Becker listserv:

I work in the environmental restoration field, and I have recently been taken with the work of David Sobel of Antioch New Hampshire. I heard him speak at the National Recreation and Parks Association Environmental Summit in Portland in 2008. He wrote a wonderfully thin book called "Beyond Ecophobia" where he argues against teaching "gloom and doom" environmental curriculum to elementary age children. Instead, he argues for "curriculum" that contains an abundance of unstructured play and just enough teaching to satisfy the student's natural curiosity about his/her world. This parallels developmental capacity. The young child's developmental task is to bond with the local environment. Asking him or her to identify with the rainforest or polar ice caps is not an abstraction that he or she is capable of. Abstract and relational thinking develops in adolescence and that is where the gravity of environmental issues can first be effectively introduced, according to Sobel.
He gives an illustrative example from one of his researchers, Steve Moore. Moore interviewed students in four classrooms. He showed them 25 iconic pictures and asked them choose three pictures that seemed most important to them. In two of the classrooms, the children picked pictures like an eagle, earth from space, a deer. In the other two, the children picked the baseball, home, and dog pictures. In the interviews, the children in the first two classrooms the children talked about saving the planet, stopping pollution, protecting eagles. But they didn't seem to enjoy the activity. The children in the second two classrooms talked about home, family, pets and were enthusiastic about the activity.
The researcher returned to interview the teachers. It turned out that the teachers in the first two classrooms had conducted an Earth Day unit recently, while the teachers in the other two classrooms had (apologetically) just taught regular curriculum. When he tallied up the responses from the student interviews, he noticed that actually more children expressed an appreciation for the natural environment from the non-Earth Day classrooms. While the Earth Day students expressed concerns for many things, they expressed little appreciation their world. His overall conclusion was that the Earth Day students' natural interests in their friends, families and play had been squashed by their awareness of global problems. This observation has been supported by research in Germany in the aftermath of Chernobyl. German schools launched a curriculum to raise awareness of nuclear issues, hoping to created empowered global citizens out of school children. However, in follow up studies, researchers found students felt hopeless and disempowered.
Elsewhere, Sobel talks about a movement in Freeport Maine to ban styrofoam containers. Apparently, high school students did a unit on global warming and the following week were out picking up litter on the highway. When they noticed how much of the litter was styrofoam food containers, they petitioned the City Council to ban the CFC containers. The Council did so, and McDonalds quickly stepped in to sue. The City of Freeport eventually won the case with support from the students.
The backstory on this is that the high school leaders of the CFC ban had mostly come from one of the elementary schools. This particular school had a 2/3 acre woods next to the schoolyard. The students played in there at recess everyday. They built forts, houses, roads. They formed clans, bartered for goods. They even had money in the form of asphalt chunks. The more glittering mica in the chunk, or the bigger the chunk, the more valuable. These woods were for all practical purposes off-limits to the adults. Students who complained about something that happened in the woods were told to work it out with the other kids. I am sure that these woods were heavily impacted from an environmental standpoint - the understory trampled, bare dirt everywhere. But it seems that the experience of peer-to-peer play in the natural environment taught caring for a place as well as social order and leadership skills to enough of the participants that they were able to take those abilities and convert them to real-world issues as adolescents.

My musing about this here is about developmental psychology and death-denial. It seems that children's defenses are not fully formed and neither are their cognitive abilities. Therefore they are vulnerable to "real world" information damaging their sense of self and security. I find it ironic and perplexing that perhaps to foster the future generation of environmental leaders we have to protect them from death awareness up to a point. Which makes me wonder if our insistence on teaching "gloom and doom" currriculum comes from adults trying to "client" their death anxiety onto school children. I can hear ourselves collectively saying,"Oh, my god, the world is really a mess. Since I am not together enough to do anything about this myself, I will place my hopes on the next generation and make sure they understand what they are getting into. Maybe they will have a better chance of doing something than I have in my self-paralysis."
It makes me also consider one of the differences between a "heroism" that serves humanity and one that is damaging. It may have to do with how well attached and secure a child is able to become in his or her world at an early age. Then the heroism is guided partly by deep structures in the cortex and limbic systems. I would appreciate hearing what others may have written about this idea.
Paul

Seattle Urban Forestry Meeting - Love of Place

"Am I young enough to believe in Revolution
Am I strong enough to get on my knees and pray
Am I high enough on the chain of evolution
To respect myself, and my brothers and my sisters
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way."

Pilgrim's Progress Kris Kristofferson

July 1: A room full of earnest, caring people deeply involved in urban forestry. Tree company owners, municipal arborists from other cities, consultants, engineers, citizen activists, planners from the City, and nobody thinks it's OK the way it is. Tree canopy in Seattle is about 23%. Everyone wants it to be more.

But that's where our agreement ends.

The better part of the 4 hours is spent discussing four goals:

• Better understand the tree resource and improve management tools
  
• Improve tree maintenance and management
  
• Better engage the community in stewardship of the urban forest
  
• Enhance tree preservation and planting through regulations and incentive

Many ideas were generated for how to accomplish these goals. The tone is sometimes strident, and arguments can be found in every topic. It will be the work of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment, along with the City's internal Urban Forest Coalition to sort these out.

What I am reflecting on now is why we are convinced that trees are so great, when it isn't obvious to the general public. We know that people don't like trees for various reasons: they fall down; they block views; they drop leaves; the block sunlight; they cost money to maintain.... And then there's the benefit side. Trees trap air pollution, cool urban microclimate, buffer storm water and reduce erosion on slopes. They improve property values, encourage recreation, speed healing in clinical settings, and reduce neighborhood crime. But the research on these benefits is debatable. Right now, many tree advocacy groups are touting the CO2 sequestering power of urban trees. I have looked at the data provided by the US Forest Service, and I find little evidence that urban trees would make a dent in the drastic reductions that are needed in atmospheric CO2.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that trees provide benefits, and that these probably are greater over the course of the tree's life than the costs. There is no single dramatic benefit that trees provide, so the average person is not likely to get upset about a gradual decline in urban forest canopy.

Us tree advocates are probably stuck in our strident ways partly because we feel despair about the loss of trees, and what that means for the world and it's future. The loss of a magnificent tree in Seattle reminds us that magnificent trees are being cut by the shipload everyday around the world. The thoughtlessness that is manifest in the big picture we project on to the specific instance. Sometimes it is justified. Trees are removed in the city for stupid reasons, but that is not the rule in my experience.

But to save trees on a global scale, we will need more than regulations and incentives. We will need to raise children who love this place as much as we do. This place, the earth, is only perceived after the first "this place" - the home. That's where trees come in. For the benefits assigned to trees, such as property value, recreation, aesthetics and community building, there is a subtext about how we feel about the place we live. Do we feel connected or not? Do we feel a sense of permanence and heritage? Do we find wonder and beauty there?

And the problem with urban forestry is that not everyone finds their sense of place the same way. The business executive that cherishes his view of Elliott Bay is connecting with his sense of place. The retiree who cherishes her vegetable garden is connecting with her sense of place. The father who coaches little league and wants a ballfield is connecting with his sense of place. They are all finding place in their own way. I also see the limitations in these manifestations, just as there are limitations on making the focus of place the trees.

I would like us as, as urban environmentalists, to be more respectful of the way others are trying to realize their visions for the way they'd like to see our city work. I'd like us to focus less on trees and more on the ecosystem, which includes humans. I would like us to see where people are trying to manifest "love of place" in their own way, even if it differs from ours. I think this is the common thread that could make the whole discussion of the urban landscape more expansive and inclusive.