Can Children Learn to Love Real Food?

A group of 5 year old children wearing ear muffs and biting into pears may sound like a bizarre way to tackle obesity, but the founders of the new sensory food education initiative Flavour School would disagree. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that taste preferences in adulthood are closely linked to what we eat in childhood.

Children and Nature

In his book “Last Child in the Woods” and “The Nature Principle,” US author Richard Louv coined the phrase “Nature-deficit disorder,” which comes from children no longer exploring woods or bogs and having adventures. Children who are obsessed with computer games or driven from sport to sport, Louv maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around in wild places.

Letting Children Roam

When I talk to my elderly neighbours, or read interviews with people from earlier eras, one of the things that most comes through about their childhoods, and seems dramatically different than the way children are raised today, is how far and freely they roamed. Unlike most modern children, they did not spend most of their time indoors watching television or playing video games, or following one adult-led activity after another.

Adios Auto! Children Have Legs

“Going to school together helps children feel like part of a group”, says Antonio Moya, an architect by profession. He is one of the four masterminds behind the Pas a Pas (Step by Step) project in Jávea, which aims to give children an active role in urban life. Since April 2016, more than 100 children from four primary schools have been walking to school together in this town on Spain’s East coast. They have been joined in autumn by students from another two schools.

Rewilding the Imagination

It can’t be like “We need a policy for a rewilded childhood”, because we could be waiting forever, and that ain’t going to happen. And we haven’t got time to wait forever I don’t believe. So it’s what do we all do to rewild our own family, our own community, our own school?

Other than Mother? The Parenthood Decision with Resilience in Mind

I’m happy to continue to have conversations about the parenthood decision and ‘otherness’ and to offer spaces for others to meet, because it strikes me that these conversations are at the heart of the sort of resilience we need and are increasingly likely to need in the coming decades – and because it’s the least I can do for the biosphere.