Reviews article index >>

Noah's Children Restoring the Ecology of Childhood

Once upon a time -- until only half a century ago -- in city and country alike, children grew
up mostly outdoors, in close communion with plants and animals, and with a hands-on
understanding of how the things upon which daily life depended were grown, made, and
used. When they weren't helping with the work of the household, they were exploring their
surroundings, on their own or in one another's company, absorbed in the apparently aimless
meandering and puttering that have enthralled children from time immemorial.

This unmediated experience of the landscape of childhood was just what nature ordered,
Sara Stein says. Drawing upon her observations as daughter, mother, grandmother, and
naturalist, she describes how the world unfolds meaningfully before the eyes and fingertips
of a child. And using linguistics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, she illuminates the
features human nature has wired our species to expect: a place we will explore and come to
know intimately; resources that bear on our needs for food, shelter, and manufacture; a
chance to develop skills through play; and growing involvement with a community that will
need those skills and that will pass along to us, through myth and lore, a way to comprehend
the relationship between nature and culture.

By showing us the ecology of childhood as it was meant to be, Stein helps us to understand
how the environment with which we have supplanted it has encouraged children to become
disappointed and diffident, to grow away from us as they grow up. She also shows us that it
is within our grasp to resurrect in our own homes and back yards the essential physical and
intellectual environment children need, and she offers dozens of thoughtful suggestions to
that end.

Author
Sara Stein is the author of Noah's Garden and several other books for adults and children.
She lives in Pound Ridge, New York.
Published by North Point Press June 2001; $25.00US/$39.95; 0-86547-584-9
http://www.fsbassociates.com

Reviews article index >>