Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child's life. You'll likely never see a slick commercial for nature therapy, as you do for the latest antidepressant pharmaceuticals. But parents, educators, and health workers need to know what a useful antidote to emotional and physical stress nature can be. Especially now.

Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

Most people are either awakened to or are strengthened in their spiritual journey by experiences in the natural world.

If a child never sees the stars, never has meaningful encounters with other species, never experiences the richness of nature, what happens to that child?

Nature introduces children to the idea—to the knowing—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.