Synopses & Reviews
Once upon a time -- until only half a century ago -- in city and country alike, children grew up mostly outdoors, in close communion with plants and animals, and with a hands-on understanding of how the things upon which daily life depended were grown, made, and used. When they weren't helping with the work of the household, they were exploring their surroundings, on their own or in one another's company, absorbed in the apparently aimless meandering and puttering that have enthralled children from time immemorial.
This unmediated experience of the landscape of childhood was just what nature ordered, Sara Stein says. Drawing upon her observations as daughter, mother, grandmother, and naturalist, she describes how the world unfolds meaningfully before the eyes and fingertips of a child. And using linguistics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, she illuminates the features human nature has wired our species to expect: a place we will explore and come to know intimately; resources that bear on our needs for food, shelter, and manufacture; a chance to develop skills through play; and growing involvement with a community that will need those skills and that will pass along to us, through myth and lore, a way to comprehend the relationship between nature and culture.
By showing us the ecology of childhood as it was meant to be, Stein helps us to understand how the environment with which we have supplanted it has encouraged children to become disappointed and diffident, to grow away from us as they grow up. She also shows us that it is within our grasp to resurrect in our own homes and back yards the essential physical and intellectual environment children need, and she offers dozens of thoughtful suggestions to that end.
Review
"What constitutes the 'real world'? Sara Stein helps answer that...provides a deep service to parents and to the planet." Bill McKibben
Review
"This book [is a] hopeful but challenging manifesto for our shared future with the other creatures of this diverse and wonderful world." Gary Nabhan
Review
"Sara Stein is an elegant writer who knows plants and sees children as the complex organisms they both are." Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Review
"[A] wake-up call to parents, teachers, and others who...inadvertently indoctrinate [children] into a fearful apprehension of the natural world." Louise J. Kaplan
Review
"From the author of Noah's Garden (1993), which advocated conversion of suburban lawns into more natural and ecologically sound gardens, comes an expanded thesis: We must 'wild the land' not just for the benefit of other creatures but for the sake of our own species....Grandmotherly wisdom, with practical advice for parents concerned about the way their children are growing up." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Yet Stein does a great service by reminding us how the pieces of a child's environment should fit together and to pay attention to each piece. If you have to stop for chicken nuggets, she would say, at least let your kids hop out of the van to pick the buttercups poking through the cement. Then show them how to smear the yellow fuzz all over their round little cheeks." Washington Post
Synopsis
A passionate call to reclaim the physical and intellectual environment children need. By showing the landscape of childhood as it was meant to be, Stein reveals how indoor environments have encouraged children to be disappointed and diffident as they grow up.