here is a certain grim irony in Patrick Barkham’s book coming out during lockdown. His quiet but compelling arguments about the importance of kids getting out more and connecting to nature might appear slightly surreal at a time when children the world over have been so long stuck indoors. Barkham tells us how much the area over which children roam has shrunk over three generations; little can he have imagined when he wrote Wild Child how much more constrained their lives were about to become.
But precisely because of these extreme conditions, Wild Child is a book that deserves to flourish. A generation of children and parents is learning the harshest possible lesson about how precious our right to roam really is. Never have we valued our green spaces more, as the passionate rows over the closure of city parks attests. Never have we thirsted so viscerally for the natural world; with shops and entertainment venues closed, many of us have taken the time to appreciate the bulbs coming up, and the spring blossom on the trees. In the absence of cars, animals have been venturing into the streets, much to the delight of children everywhere (even if they have to watch it on YouTube).
One of the many inspiring things about this book is Barkham’s insistence that you don’t need to live in the countryside to help your children enjoy and connect with nature; often, the wild spaces in our cities can be more interesting and ecologically diverse than intensively farmed agricultural land. His three children’s love for the natural world is formed in a cemetery in Norwich, where they pick blackberries, make friends with a stray cat, and one memorable day spot two muntjac. They dig a tiny pond in their back garden, and soon find it brimming with insects, snails, frogs and newts.
With these gentle tales of nature at its most accessible, Barkham, who writes for the Guardian, is actually asking parents to think critically about our education system, with its narrow focus on academic achievement and testing. He volunteers in a “forest school” nursery, where he sees how an outdoor setting fosters children’s resilience, creativity and mental health. The heroes of this book are a new generation of outdoor educators, who are finding ways to reconnect children with nature in the face of a system that seems wilfully blind to its benefits.
Thanks to our involuntary crash-course in home schooling, parents today will be becoming more tuned in to what works for our kids – and what doesn’t. Inevitably, this will inform what we want from schools; it may open up possibilities for real change. Wild Child gives us some bold and inspiring ideas about what an education system that is truly fit for the 21st-century might look like.
• Wild Child: Coming Home to Nature is published by Granta (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
