Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder author: Richard Louv rating: asin: 1565123913 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $16.47 USD

As adoptive parents, we can find ourselves struggling to deal with the aftershocks of our child's birth. There is trauma, which Faith wrote so eloquently about earlier this month. There is the lingering effect of toxic elements, like alcohol or pollution that may have been part of the child's early development. These problems can constrain a child's performance in school, his relationships with family and friends and, ultimately, the course of his life. 

And what if the key to righting some of these wrongs lies in a tree? 

Ten days ago, I began reading Richard Louv's 2006 book "Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder". Louv's premise is that the sharp decrease in the amount of today's children spend in contact with nature is inextricably bound to the sharp increase in childhood obesity and depression, as well as in the difficulty that many children have concentrating in school and healing from trauma. 

But wait, you say, my kid spends lots of time outside, on sports teams and those shiny new monkey bars on the playground. That's not Louv's idea of the great outdoors. He believes that kids need to get eye-to-eye with the bugs under a rotting log. They have to be free to climb a tree, dig in the mud or fall into a creek--just, I admit, as I did when I was a kid. As they learn to focus on the sights and sounds of nature, they gain focus, heal from trauma and establish confidence in their ability to tackle the world. 

Modern life narrows our sense until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to the dimension of a computer monitor or TV screen. By contrast, nature accentuates all the senses, and the senses are a child's primal first line of self-defense. Children with generous exposure to nature, those who learn to see the world directly, may be more likely to develop the psychological survival skills that will help them detect real danger, and they are therefore less likely to seek out phony danger later in life. 

Do Louv's observations play out in real life? Last weekend, I took my sons on a short hike on an abandoned railroad line that runs through woods near our home. As we stepped onto the trail, the tree branches closed over our heads and the birds drowned out the car traffic. My little guy soon began to whistle like the birds, while his older brother tried to figure out which vines were strong enough to shimmy up. We didn't get very far, but then we hadn't come to score a goal or take a test. 

"Last Child In The Woods" is going to be released in paperback in late April. I highly recommend getting a copy then, or tracking down the original hardback. We're going back into the woods this weekend, and for many days to come.