Glendening told me that only 6 percent of children ages 6 to 13 spend any time in outdoor unstructured play per week. Most kids are too busy with scheduled activities or "plugged in" to be outside playing.
The Museum of Life and the Environment will connect the next generation with its surroundings.
More on play and ADHD from the UK.
Are children diagnosed with ADHD simply suffering from play starvation? This disturbing possibility emerges from studies carried out in America over the past 10 years.
Hyper parenting in Canada.
Over-the-top child rearing is nothing new, but it's this latest wave -- 10-year-olds scheduling extracurricular activities with BlackBerrys, teenagers suffering from sports injuries previously only witnessed in professional athletes and a stream of Prozac and Ritalin flowing from the drugstore to lunch boxes -- that's earned the title hyper-parenting.
An OpEd from New Hampshire hits the mark.
It is these connections to nature, the sense of wonder in the moment and the memories that last a lifetime, these are what we need to provide to our children and our children's children. Without real experiences in nature ... the dirty fingernail, smell-the-earth kind ... how will they come to care about preserving the natural world? It is up to us to turn off the television, put aside the mouse, and choose nature with our children, for their future and the future of all life on Earth.
