When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.

I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees.

Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokemon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree.

Studies of children in playgrounds with both green areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas.

Nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.