.jpg)
A boy, his grandfather, and the environment: a love story
Home » Blog » A boy, his grandfather, and the environment: a love storyHow can you help your child fall in love with nature?
We’re doing our city-best to teach our seven-year-old to respect the world he lives in. He learns about rainforest destruction in an Enviroschool that is cramped and perched on the side of a hill—more concrete and classrooms than grass and trees. He catches the walking bus each morning, past a steady stream of four-wheel drives idling and spewing their emissions at the school gate. He’s visited a local worm farm and the city poo-ponds. He saves water and power and, each week, cheerfully puts the green-waste bin out on the street.
Our son likes to do the ‘right thing’ to please his parents, his school and the planet—but I’m far from smug about it. At his impressionable age, if we as a loving family dedicated ourselves to a household ritual of eating truck tyres, he’d be right into it. The acid test often comes in the teenage years.
A former respect for the environment can be ditched if its sole basis is that it’s the ‘right thing’ to do. Not only is the ‘right thing’ up for grabs (what do my idiot parents know, anyway), but often doing the right thing, at 16 years old, is not exactly riveting. Particularly if being green conjures up visions of urban worm farms and mum catching the bus to work. Yawn.
If it’s going to last, kids need to develop their own, independent relationship with nature. A relationship. Like a love one. And their own one—not mine or yours. This deepening respect for the environment into an emotional bond is a personal journey and one which is more likely to endure past childhood.
We’re lucky that our son has chosen my father to share this relationship with. At first, I thought my old man had overwhelmed his grandson with a kind of one-way flood of enthusiasm for walking and exploring—the poor boy really had no choice but to be inspired. But then I remembered my own childhood, and I realised it was by no means a given that this love for the outdoors would transfer across. As a kid I was runt-skinny and terrified of anything remotely physical or ‘sporty’. My brother was overweight and more interested in watching TV. It was a battle for our father to coax us outside and a rare visit to the bush would be disastrous—the pair of us whingeing and arguing, making the trip into a long, ugly day. My love for the environment came more quietly as a child, sitting under trees reading, rescuing birds, wandering through parks and spending time by the river at the bottom of our garden.
My son, on the other hand, has grabbed the great outdoors by all its horns. Whilst he loves his life in the city, he nags us to let him visit his Papa John in the holidays, in Southland. There, in the beautiful Waiau Valley, against a backdrop of the Takitimu Mountains, the two of them climb limestone cliffs, explore the bush, go caving and take the motorbike down to the south coast to collect shells and stones. Evening meals are cooked and eaten outside. They sit on camp chairs, eating their bangers and train-smash, warmed by a brazier of wind-felled oregon they have chopped that day. They play cricket amongst the red garden tussocks while watching the sun set over the ranges. They have competitions to spot the first star. They talk skies and trees and birds and speculate when the boy will be old enough to canoe the white water rivers with his grandfather.
My father would quite happily visit my son solely in our city, if he preferred. But he is delighted his grandson wants to share with him what’s shaping into a life-long relationship with nature. And it’s a love one.
