Nature deficit threatens children’s health – 01/13/2024 – Education

In the middle of one of the busiest regions of Santo Amaro, in the south of São Paulo, a municipal school created a small agroforest. Surrounded by businesses and in front of a bus terminal, the area has become a “green breath” amidst the noise of cars and horns.

The agroforestry of Emei (Municipal Early Childhood Education School) Borba Gato was created just over three years ago, where there was previously a vacant lot that accumulated condemned trees. The idea of ​​creating the mini forest came not only from the need to recover the abandoned space that posed a series of problems for the school, but also to provide children with greater contact with nature.

“Like most children in São Paulo, our students live in apartments or houses without a yard. At most, they had contact with nature by going to a park, but this experience needs to be daily”, says Priscila Arce, 38, School’s director.

The school director’s concern is in line with what research has identified: increasingly restricted contact with nature harms children’s physical and psychological development. With extreme weather events becoming more frequent on the planet, this threat to children is likely to worsen.

The solution found by the school follows a trend that has gained strength in large cities around the world, of creating small green areas in highly urbanized regions. Without requiring a large investment, these spaces can provide more frequent and beneficial contact with nature.

That’s what happened in Borba Gato. In just three years, the children not only began to harvest acerola, blackberries, bananas and vegetables from the agroforest, but the space also changed the school’s activities and way of teaching. “Just as nature has its time, we began to better understand children’s time, giving them more freedom to develop their activities”, says Priscila.

The students, for example, take classes in the middle of the garden, where the trunks of old condemned trees have become a table and stool. They also have the freedom to leave the classrooms in the middle of classes to play when they have difficulty maintaining concentration.

Greater contact with nature also led the school to practically get rid of all plastic toys. “The children lost interest in these toys when they started to play more freely. It was a process that came from them. They began to entertain themselves more by playing with leaves, sticks and stones that they found in the school spaces.”

They also began to show less interest in online activities proposed by the school, such as lessons that require using a tablet or computer.

A report published by Unicef ​​(United Nations Children’s Fund) last year highlighted the need to ensure all children have access to green spaces. According to the document, they must have one of these accessible areas within walking distance of their homes.

“The greater and more routine contact children have with nature, the greater the benefits. Therefore, we advocate a policy that invests in the concept of ‘near nature’, that is, that children have close to home or at school a space, even if small, to have this experience”, explains Maria Isabel de Barros, specialist in Children and Nature at the Alana Institute.

This close contact with nature is, however, a very distant reality for most children in São Paulo. On average, the city has 54% of its territory covered by green areas, but these spaces are still very concentrated. Of the 96 districts in São Paulo, 83 have less than half of their area covered by vegetation — of these, 60 do not have even a quarter of coverage.

“Large cities need to invest so that everyone has a little piece of nature nearby. We can’t just have big parks, like Ibirapuera or Villa-Lobos, which people can only get to by car or bus and end up not going as often as is important especially for children”, says Maria Isabel.

According to the Unicef ​​report, international studies have identified that children with regular contact with green areas have, for example, lower levels of stress hormones and lower blood pressure.

Other research has also identified benefits in developing motor skills. Children who play daily in green areas, instead of playgrounds, showed better results in balance and motor coordination tests.

It also cites advantages for socio-emotional development, since, in green areas, they have the opportunity to interact with more children, which stimulates different social skills.

The benefits mentioned in the document have been proven by the Borba Gato pedagogical team in recent years. In general, children who start school at the age of 4 do not have the habit of interacting with nature on a daily basis and go through a quick period of adaptation.

“Some children arrive afraid of getting dirty, they don’t like putting their feet directly in the sand or they are afraid of climbing trees. In a few weeks, they lose their fear and start to love this contact. It’s such a quick and positive change, which makes us increasingly convinced that they need to be in the middle of nature”, says Priscila.

The Childhood and Climate series received support from the “Early Childhood Reporting Fellowship” program, from The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma project, at Columbia University