Recently it’s been a delight to welcome some children from our church family to help on the allotment.
There’s nothing like digging up worms when you’re six years old, or watering young plants in the hot weather (I’m referring to the lettuce, not the children). As I’m sure every parent knows, getting children out into nature is good for them. It really isn’t just clever advertising by the makers of washing detergents.
Yet these children are atypical. Some years ago, the RSPB commissioned research into how well-connected children are with nature, which found that only a fifth of children in the UK were thought to demonstrate a reasonable connection with nature. Further research examined how best to measure this among children, teenagers and adults, and looked at the links between connection to nature and caring for it.
