The Cause
It's a fact that modern childhood has moved indoors. On average, American children spend between 4 and 7 minutes a day engaged in unstructured outdoor play and as many as 9 hours a day in front of an electronic screen. This national trend has paralleled an alarming growth in childhood obesity and prescribed pharmaceuticals for kids. Many kids are tuned out, stressed out and over-scheduled. Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle author Richard Louv calls this Nature-Deficit Disorder. And this is not limited to just kids, as it can also be seen in adults, families, and whole communities.
However, youth and adults who regularly spend time outdoors enjoy priceless befits to mind, body and spirit, including improved physical health and professional or academic success through enhanced skills in leadership, self-awareness, self-confidence, communication, critical thinking and creativity. There's a wealth of information online about the importance of connecting kids to nature thanks to the Children and Nature Network, co-founded by Richard Louv, and we highly suggest checking it out.
As we educate children and families about the outdoors, we are also working to rebuild a culture of nature connection in our community. While spending time in nature is an important habit, creating a lasting culture of nature connection in ourselves, our families and our neighborhood requires a complex, multi-layered pedagogy. At Merrohawke, we are committed to this effort for the benefit of creating healthier kids, stronger families, a thriving greater Newburyport community, and a flourishing planet.
Key Principles in Practice at Merrohawke
Nature Mentoring
Many of our older child and teen programs are infused with practices that emerged from a collaborative effort worldwide led by Jon Young and the 8 Shields Institute. This approach offers an important alternative to traditional environmental education. Through a carefully crafted set of intentions and lessons that we weave into our days, and an equally passionate willingness to abandon all plans when nature offers up something else, we are creating an invisible school where deep knowledge follows individual curiosity.
If you'd like to learn more about nature mentoring, you might enjoy reading through Coyote's Guide to Connecting With Nature.
Waldorf Early Childhood Education
We believe our purpose is to preserve and protect the sacred childhood years, and to create space for children to naturally grow into the fullest expression of their unique gifts. We strive each day to make children's lives beautiful, and to create opportunities for them to discover that the natural world is beautiful.
As we grow and evolve, Merrohawke's core teaching staff are training in, and applying, principles and practices of Waldorf education into our early childhood programs in order to make for the most meaningful experiences in nature possible for our children.
Wild Nature Play
All of our programs involve time to play in nature, because this is where the taproot of deep connection to the earth--land or sea--takes hold. We intentionally create time to allow for kids to get muddy, run wild, build forts, race hand-made driftwood boats, dig to China, search for buried pirate treasure, climb trees, catch frogs in swamps, paint themselves in charcoal, or do penguin slides across mud flats. While youth believe they are "just playing," and many marvel at these moments of freedom for unstructured outdoor time, we know that recent studies have proven that childhood experiences such as these--and not the more traditional forms of environmental education as found over the past 30 or so years in 4H programs, nature centers, and scouting--directly lead to adults who are active stewards of the earth in practice or profession, or both. Youth who connect to the land on their own terms through childhood play are scientifically proven to grow to be adults who are active environmental stewards. You can read more about this in David Sobel's summer 2012 essay in Orion magazine, "Look, Don't Touch: The problem with Environmental Education."
Self-Initiated Play
Play is the work of childhood, and the key to education for all of life. Many of our programs, especially in early childhood, create time and space for open play so that children may*:
- Learn how they learn
- Develop confident and clarity of thinking
- Practice problem solving
- Develop a tolerance for frustration
- Refine their senses and develop a foundation for cognitive learning
- Digest life activity and sensory input
- Freely express individuality
- Align with our creative selves
*Courtesy of Susan Weber, Sophia's Hearth.
A few videos that inspire us: