Member-only story
Could We Make Up For Lost Opportunity
To restore a generation’s health
This short story I believe, will be currently playing out more often than we might imagine, in countries all over the world.
Still, it’s worth a share, and who knows, parents may find themselves taking stock strategies that may help their children.
One of the things I love about my daily walks is the abundance of wildflowers I see. As we all know, where there are wildflowers, there is a veritable world of little creatures to be observed in and around them.
What made me sad today was coming across a mother, out stroller-walking, with her two children aged, I’m guessing, two and three years.
There was no family conversation, no drawing the children’s attention to anything new, the larger-than-life pine cones, for instance, that had been dislodged during the storm the previous night.
Now that would have been an interesting lesson!
I imagine none of them even noticed the nearby tree that had been struck by lightning.
Instead, the children were totally focused on their smartphones, and another electronic toy which I can’t name, and Mum was happily chatting to a friend on her phone.
I passed them twice, each of us I suppose, on our way home the second time.
On the second pass the children had swapped their toys, and Mum, I presumed, was still in conversation with a friend.
That the mother was at least exposing her children to fresh air is highly commendable.
Still, I couldn’t help but compare this to my childhood, where Dad would take us out for long walks into the country and educate us on points of interest … the reaction of a hedgehog, for instance, when he gently touched it with his shoe, the cry of a local bird, or the noise of an animal making its way home.
Of course, in time we developed our own curiosity about the world we live in.
There was always something for us kids to learn, sometimes just in our back yard!
But these days I rarely see families walking together, occasionally a few families of cyclists, but very few walking or stopping to take in a…
