PAD and BAD and Nature Deficit Disorder

I am in mediterranean climate fynbos habitat. So. No lawn. Some inherited commonorgarden. Steadily filling the gaps with locally indigenous lowland fynbos. Insects and birds. A frog croaking, an owl hooting.

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I see many of the plant trees messages coming from drought prone areas of Africa. Are these areas better served by grasslands restoration?

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My second link is academic research. Ideally botanists would study the local plants and restore the appropriate vegetation type in each place. For example - rainforests are carbon sinks, but not when you burn and clear for agriculture. Healthy grassland in fact traps more carbon in its roots than rainforest. Traditional management of pasture by fire allows the grass to keep growing from the roots with the first rain.

When I was at school my (London born) mother was delighted by a book about a woman planting trees to regreen the Sahara. Decades later some biologists have moved on and no longer see desert as dead and wasteland.

Africa is also battling big ag forcing in GMO crops, instead of the huge variety of locally adapted crops grown by small farmers. Staple diet of GMO maize / corn ?? (Rant over)

One gem I remember from first year science lectures at UCT. Traditional rural diet of maizemeal porridge is paired with a wild greens relish. Now I suppose something amaranth? Together the amino acids from maize and greens provide complete protein.

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‘Nature-deficit disorder is the idea that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors than they have in the past, and the belief that this change results in a wide range of behavioral problems.’

Sounds to me like that’s exactly what it means.

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As a moderately visually challenged iNatter I find plant blindness and equivalents perfectly fine - they convey the meaning in a way everyone understands and the words are not in any way discriminatory or derogatory let alone ablest. The world really does have bigger problems … even iNat has bigger problems.

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Yes it is. But Nature Deficit Disorder isn’t really about individuals not spending enough time outside, rather society as a whole not allowing children outside. I recommend you read Last Child in the Woods if you are interested.

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I think this thread has highlighted exactly the problem of using labels/acronyms. More time is spent discussing how correct the labels are rather than the content of the subject. Especially when the terms are designed to obfuscate something potentially unpleasant with a ‘kind’ label.

Sure, it can be a prompt for curiosity, but kind of in a ‘dark-pattern’ way or like click-bait headlines. “You might have PAD! → Click here to find out”

The first article seems to be just re-explaining plant blindness and how it fits the new acronym.
The second study is interesting, and the label might give an easy shortcut to discuss it, but I think better to have a title for the study rather than an acronym for future reference, as the acronym can now easily be appropriated elsewhere and this study ‘lost.’

(meant to reply to all, not specifically to you @raymie, sorry)

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I admit to reacting to the alphabet soup first. That was how I saw the presentation of the post. I then did click and read. The second one got scimmed, as it’s written above my head, but I’m think I got the gist. ( You can tell me if I’m off base)
My thoughts on the first one are that by the time the researcher was asking about plant awareness the students were older. That’s playing catch-up. Children can only learn what they are exposed to, so the key to preventing PAD/BAD/NDD is to start young. Schools need support to try to incorporate more of this. And they need parents to tell them this is the desired direction . Not going to be easy, but I have seen improvement from when I was a student.
The second study was more difficult for me to wade through. I was left with the feeling that restoration should mean putting back what was there and is now missing. I missed the simple common sense that restoration of forest wants trees and restoration of savanna wants grasses. Each environment needs its own restoration and money needs to be appropriately spent.
And the humans need to VOLUNTEER to do the work, whether it’s getting your hands dirty planting grass plugs or telling your children the names of who lives with them!
(Editing the misspellings, hopefully.)

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Please don’t call it Nature Deficit Disorder (Sounds like Attention Deficit Disorder) OR Plant Awareness Disparity (use simpler language please) as it is not a disease or medical condition as I understand it. Nature unexposure/underexposure or unawareness is more descriptive. PAD in medicine stands for Peripheral Arterial Disease. PAD is also used as an acronym in aviation, the military, finance and retail and we don’t need to use the acronym too. l.I learned that I have prosopagnosia,(other family members have it) lack of facial recognition 90% of the time. It is not called facial blindness so don’t call it plant blindness either. Keeping it from becoming pathological is important. I see well educated people everyday out and about that do not even look at the plants or trees around them as they listen to their music or podcasts. Thank you for addressing this issue.

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The first article was a blog version of her PhD - which 44 of you have clicked.

And 20 of you persevered with the second one which is academic research.

That getting children into nature intention - is why my heart sings when I see a school class in Kirstenbosch or at the Aquarium. Or a bunch of (blurry - sorry) photos from a scout hike - there I try hard to ID as much as I can. You are out in nature? You have earned an ID!

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That’s one thing I don’t understand – why a generation of free-range kids grew up to require everyone to be helicopter parents. Karen got to roam the neighborhood when she was a kid, but now she’ll call Child Protective Services if she sees kids doing just that.

I googled outdoor preschools and found several. I believe more have open since the beginning of Covid. Maybe we can get somewhere with it.
My generation was definitely outside a lot, usually unsupervised.
My children were outside a lot with more supervision and rules.
Society changed. More cars, more dangerous streets. More crowding. And for me? It seems less safe, there’s more bad things that happen. Assault to kidnappings , human trafficking… Explaining to your child that they need to be careful and watchful and don’t talk to strangers. And it would take 10 seconds to throw you in a car and be on a highway in less than five minutes. Maybe that’s why parents let the kids stay inside with electronic babysitter?

Nothing changed in that area really, there’re tons of kidnapping and assaults that happened in 70s, 50s and before in the US and other countries, one thing that changed is media, we learn about more events than people did before and it seems that something is different.

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I think you’re right that we hear more about the bad things now vs then. Because society changed. More double income families where Mom is not available all day. More people are crowded and more roads and highways to travel.
And it is different how one perceives the dangers from childhood to young adult to parenthood.

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That little country town, or village, where everyone knows the kids. That has changed. Many people don’t know their neighbours now, especially in big cities.

But our older generation has also changed. My parents gardened, my father hiked. Twenties and thirties parents today … not so much. Then the kids don’t have a nature oriented parent or grandparent.

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You’re so right.
We lived in a village when my first child was 6 and my second was born. We walked everywhere because all the basics were within a half mile. I could send my 6 year old on errands. The library to drop off books, the post office to pick up mail, the grocery to get a loaf of bread, the library to choose a book and home. I could call all but the post office to check on her. We moved to a city and my very responsible 9 year old wasn’t allowed to cross the street.

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It’s hard to get reliable data on this, but very likely kids are at less risk now than they were in the 50’s. However, we hear about all the problems! A child is kidnapped across the continent, and the story may make our newspapers; it is certainly easy to find on the internet.

Plus, we’re more crowded, more urban, living in spaces where we may not even know the neighbors who would (in most cases) be happy to keep an eye on the kids when they’re outside. I might be scared to let the kids out, too, if I had them, but what a loss!

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I found that living stacked up in apartment buildings we practiced being more anonymous, giving a false sense of privacy. Which is part of the “why” in the decision of moving. In my case farther out. The children are adults and live more urban. I take it as a win that my younger daughter is a county park ranger.

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Brava to the young ranger!

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Children are at vastly higher risk from adults they know than from adults they don’t. But ‘child abused by uncle’ doesn’t get 24 hour coverage on Fox.

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