Columnist Susan Snyder: Going out to play a lost art

Monday, Aug. 22, 2005 | 8:13 a.m.

The last time I went to the gym ...

OK, wait.

Let's be honest. The last time I went to the gym was in January.

Anyway, while there I noticed there was no shortage of youngsters sweating it out alongside those of us embarking on the Middle-Age Mystery Tour.

We're talking kids about 10 to 14 years old. They looked bored and out of place. And as I suffered and wondered how they lifted so much with such skinny little arms, I also wondered something else.

Why weren't they out playing?

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I didn't care about fitness. I just wanted to poke at the crawdads in the creek that ran under the bridge next to Storer Junior High School. Mom said the creek was polluted -- and it did smell bad.

But that never kept my pals and I from messing around in it. After all, that's what soap was for. Some days we simply roamed through the woods and empty lots looking for wild strawberries or field mice.

I was reminded of these adventures while reading "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder," a recently released book written by Richard Louv. He is a San Diego author and impressively credentialed child development advocate.

Louv explores scientific and anecdotal studies suggesting the health and development of American children is adversely affected by increasing absence of wild, unstructured and unsupervised play outside in natural settings.

"Our lives may be more productive, but less inventive," Louv writes. "In an effort to value and structure time, some of us unintentionally may be killing dreamtime."

With the best possible intentions, Louv said, adults turn children's leisure time into extra-credit projects.

Parks are sterile, structured playing fields, rather than wildlands to be explored. At home, community associations often prohibit the tree houses and uneven shrubbery that provide children with hours of self-regulated adventure.

Given free reign, Louv says, most children will choose to play in a park's rocky, ragged edges rather than on the liability-approved surface under the jungle gym. But we teach them to appreciate nature at a distance.

"A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest," Louv writes, "but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move."

Among the startling facts Louv explores: The radius around home a child wandered in the 1990s was a ninth of what it had been in the 1970s. A child can now identify a dozen cartoon characters but not a single tree in his own neighborhood. The rate at which children are prescribed anti-depressants has doubled in the past five years.

This is what happens, he says, when children no longer just go out to play.

I vaguely remember piano, dance and art lessons. And there was a guy who drove around in a Mustang we were told to avoid when walking to school.

But I sure remember that night we played kick-the-can and Julie Frizzell hurled herself from the top of the apple tree because of a littleold bat. Man, that was funny.

And our parents didn't even know.