Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Updated, Expanded)

Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. This alienation damages children and shapes adults, families, and communities. There are solutions, though, and they are right in our own backyards. Last child in the Woods is the first book to bring together cutting-edge research, showing that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development in terms of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

• Print Length: 335 pages
• Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making.
• Even creativity is stimulated by childhood experiences in nature.
• Yet sending kids outside to play is increasingly difficult. Computers, television, and video games compete for their time, of course, but its also our fears of traffic, strangers, even virus-carrying mosquitoes, fears the media exploit, that keep children indoors.
• Meanwhile, schools assign more and more homework, and there is less and less access to natural areas.
• Parents have the power to ensure that their daughter or son will not be the "last child in the woods," and this book is the first step toward that nature-child reunion.