Let us imagine two children. Both live in a forested area, near a large mountain, with abundant water resources. Both children live in dwellings made of wood, and use wood for heat, cooking, and tool manufacture. Both children value the forest.
Toward Supporting Adolescent Emotional Health
Many times we (Americans) identify that a problem may exist with some aspect of our society, be it diet, emotional health, interpersonal communication, or whatever. Then, some expert in the field proposes a fix to the problem, a fix that isn’t always known (through long experience) to resolve the problem and sometimes might even make matters worse.
Agricultural Lifestyles Affect More Than Physical Health
Those who have been attending my recent lectures know that my focus has broadened to incorporate the study of hunter-gatherer children and how they were tended, nourished, and spent their time and how they differ emotionally from agricultural/industrial children. Suffice to say, this study has been very eye opening. I could never have imagined the full impact of our modern lives on children, which for many is sedentary, material, and divorced from nature.