Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature

"Very much so. He examines the role that nature, and the absence of nature, has on children. He focuses on his own three children, and on the children he meets when he works as a volunteer at a ‘wild nursery’, and various ‘forest school’-type projects. He’s plainly a superb father, and on one level the book can be read as a touching account of the business of fatherhood and an illustration of the crucial principle that we learn far, far more from our children than they can ever learn from us. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If I’d written this book, I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to use my children as a platform from which to broadcast my own assumptions about the importance of the natural world. But what makes Barkham’s book remarkable is that he seems more interested in finding out the truth about the relationship between human children and the natural world than in preaching his own gospel. That’s very unusual. It demands a rare degree of respect both for one’s children and for the truth of the matter. And yes, as you say, it’s very timely. Everyone is talking about the damage that we do to our children by keeping them locked up. That damage is real. But there’s treatment available in green places. Barkham’s book demonstrates the reparative power of nature. I don’t think it’s too late, because human beings are naturally wild animals rather than suburban or inner city animals. We’re not made for suits or central heating. Therefore, however old and however urbanised a person is, they will react immediately and often dramatically to exposure to the wild. I’ve seen that again and again. I think one impressive piece of testimony is how little exposure to the wild you need in order to have the effect of protecting against ADHD or depression. And the same applies to physical illness too—not that there’s any real distinction between physical and mental illness. You really don’t need much of a view of trees through your hospital window to reduce significantly the time you’ll take to recover from an operation. We’re highly sensitive to the natural world; even tiny doses of it have a massive effect. All of this is expertly summed up by Patrick Barkham; he offers masterly summaries of the scientific literature."