My Childhood Experiences: Children's Connection To The Natural World

Louv (2008) argued children's connection to the natural world is weakening, and it is negatively impacting their mental and physical health. My childhood experiences negatively influenced my creativity, my decision making ability, and my fears, yet it showed no detriment to my physical health. In concurrence with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, my childhood illustrates that direct and indirect influences of different environmental systems impacted my interactions with the natural world, and then consequently my childhood development. As Louv (2008) suggested, my guardians and society widened my disconnect with the natural world in some ways, but in other ways they strengthened my connection.
Nature can be a place of privacy for children,
As an adult, I struggle with decision making. I learned as a child to rely heavily on parents and other adult figures, and now I still do. Throughout elementary school I participated in gymnastics, soccer, basketball, volleyball, and a lot of swimming. Even though each of these provided active play experiences, some outside, they were not considered free play because I was usually being told what stroke to swim or what drill to do, and I obeyed the rules. Obedience is a powerful Christian and American ideology. Many pieces of my microsystem, home, school, and church, all worked together towards a common goal: to teach me to be obedient. Every class had “classroom rules” and sunday school taught the Ten Commandments. I felt these expectations of obedience even in the natural world. I became so reliant on instruction that when I was given the freedom to make my own choices, I stressed. Hanscom (2016) reasoned that adults overrule children’s ideas because they feel like they know best, and so children’s freedom to choose is limited. The age hierarchy is very prevalent in the US; people believe people become wiser as they age. This attitude in the macrosystem influences how parents treat their children; most of the time parents control how children spend their time because society has given them the power and perceived ability to know better than the child about what they need. Parents sometimes do know best, and obedience is a necessary and beneficial component in society, yet these components may have also indirectly decreased my ability to make decisions on my