When Did We Stop Letting Children Meet the Earth?

When Did We Stop Letting Children Meet the Earth?

By Margot Prins

There is something quietly heartbreaking about watching a child who knows the name of every character in every show — but has never noticed what the elder does in spring, or why the soil smells different after rain.

I live on a 120-acre regenerative land project in the south of France. Every season, I watch  the land go through its cycles — what opens, what retreats, what signals something is shifting. After years of living here, I’ve come to understand that this isn’t just agriculture, or ecology, or even permaculture. It’s relationship. The land speaks a language, and children — when given the chance — hear it instinctively.

But that chance is becoming rare.

I’m speaking here about children growing up in the modern, urbanized world — where the pace of consumption has replaced the pace of the seasons.

Many children today move through a world that has almost entirely filtered out the natural one. Not because their families don’t care. But because the invitation simply isn’t there anymore. The rhythm of the seasons has been replaced by the rhythm of the screen. The quiet of a morning garden replaced by notifications.

And we cannot ask a child to feel responsibility for the earth if they’ve never had a real relationship with it. We cannot expect the next generation to become stewards of something they’ve only ever seen through glass.

What changes things isn’t more information. It isn’t documentaries, or lessons, or well-meaning adult explanations about ecosystems. What changes things is contact. Simple, repeated, sensory contact with the living world — noticing that the elder flowers before the oak even wakes up, that caterpillars appear exactly when they always have, that something outside is always in motion, always responding, always alive.

That noticing — when it happens in childhood — becomes a thread that doesn’t break.

We believe that the next generation doesn’t need to be taught to love nature. That love is already there. What they need is the time, the space, and the invitation to be in it — without agenda, without a lesson plan, without the pressure to produce something at the end. Just presence. Just attention. Just the slow, quiet discovery that the world outside is endlessly alive and endlessly generous to those who show up for it.

This is not a small thing. How a child relates to the earth in their early years shapes how they will relate to it for the rest of their life. It shapes what they notice, what they protect, what they feel is worth slowing down for. We are, in a very real sense, planting seeds right now for the kind of humanity that will exist in thirty years. And those seeds need soil. They need seasons. They need to get outside.

This is the heart of what we’ve created with the Little Forest Elves activity packs. Seasonal, hands-on nature activities for children that follow the real rhythm of the year. Not worksheets. Not curriculum. Just genuine invitations to go outside and pay attention to  what’s already there.

For parents, for teachers, for homeschooling families — for anyone who believes that reconnecting children with the earth is not a luxury, but one of the most important things we can do right now.

Find the activity packs at the Dream of Gaia Academy, and follow our daily life on the land at @lerevedegaia on Instagram.

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