A childhood spent immersed in nature sets you up for life

We do childhood differently now. Screen bowed, turned away too much from the natural world. Which is why I felt relief when my littlest took up a new hobby.

A childhood spent immersed in nature sets you up for life. Picture: istock

The littlest has discovered fishing. The relief, as a parent. Because the activity is close to sky and ocean and he’s learning the ways of animals and it’s physical, watchful and quick reacting, and it encompasses boredom and patience as well as exhilaration and wonder and he comes home at any hour, after many hours, sun brimmed and nature blasted. And my heart sings with happiness. For the mother guilt is assuaged in this moment – and that guilt is strong, often, in these parts.

Because we do childhood differently now. Screen bowed, turned away too much from the natural world. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt laments the decline of play-based childhood. He says humans need free play when young to wire up their brains for the challenges of adulthood, but many parents bunker down their kids too often because of safety fears. This loss of free play, according to Haidt, deprives children of what’s needed to overcome anxieties: deprives them of chances to explore, build friendships, manage risk.

Then there are screens but oh, the mother-guilt. And does this phone-saturated childhood of my youngest gift him the feeling I had long ago, as did many of us, that your own childhood was the best in the world? A childhood in close proximity to nature. Not even proximity, no, but immersion. Where you felt you were one with the Earth, its smells, texture, insistence; nature under fingernails and matted in hair and on the soles of your feet.

I was raised in the shadow of the mighty Illawarra escarpment; the bush my backyard. It was red-belly black snakes in roadside gutters, funnelwebs in pools and at one point a redback spider farm in ice cream containers thanks to my brothers. Our best mates were the street’s kids because they were there, always, all of us going to the same little primary then socialising afterwards until the street lights turned on.

We made up our own stories, own games, because there wasn’t a needy lit rectangle to tell us what to think. My dragster was a brumby careering down hills – and had I ever felt happier, free-er? We would disappear up the mountain without telling mums and be gone for hours and no one cared. Everything was close to the earth; to the sun and the high sweet air. It was a childhood of scratches and rashes, leeches and ticks but who cared, it was all part of life and it seemed to unspool in absolute freedom. Where were the parents? Did any hover or helicopter? Nope.

This was Pablo Neruda’s “wild garden of childhood”, and how forcefully that time engraves itself upon us. Then one day you open the door into adulthood, with all its grown-up worries and frets and suddenly childhood’s light has receded. You stop being so nakedly you; become filtered through the expectations of adults. You change. To please, to conform. Lose the high glee of being young as the wildness is beaten out of you. Dampened down, quietened. But how vividly childhood imprints itself, and how I yearn now for the freedoms and exhilarations of the endless roaming; those days of wonder. Yearn for them for my boy coming of age in our screen-dominant world.

He’s on the cusp. About to step through that door into a new world of grown-up expectations and ferments. I’m glad he’s found fishing, and hope he retains the love of it always; of the stillness under a glorious sky, quiet and patient and observant. I have a photo of him holding up his first proper catch – a 32cm leatherjacket – and hope the high glee of the child in that moment will always sing within him; for men so often seem to lose that quality, as if they’re not allowed it, or are afraid of showing it. It’s so beautiful in them, that happy, carefree boy in the man. Arresting. And it’s a snapshot a guilt-ridden mother will hold on to, in her memory, in her heart.