Top 10 Things Nature and Parenting Have in Common
The separation of humans and nature is an illusion. We humans have artificially distanced ourselves from nature to a certain extent. But we are just as much a part of nature as the trees, birds, and rivers.
1) Human children and nature’s other offspring all need food, light, air to breath, and an advantageous environment.
2) Love flows through the veins of human parents and through the mommy and daddy fish that protect their eggs in rushing rivers.
3) Not only human children cry, pout, or scream when they want that extra something they shouldn’t be eating too much of at the dinner table. Children of other species often do their best to aggravate their parents.
4) Both children and nature contain surprising elements such as a wonderful heritage provided by intricate genes. Human parents, animals, and even plants have a great deal in common from a genetic point of view.
5) We all have certain strategies or instincts with which we select our partners to bear our children.
6) We all have a home — whether it is a house, a hut, a cave, a meadow, a forest, or a nest — we are all parents and/or children and we are all part of nature.
7) Nature and parenting contain a flexibility to be blown by life’s storms, yet return to stand strong and steadfast. We bend, but do not break.
8) When loved and introduced to nature by parents, children’s “natural intelligence” increases and they remain closer to their natural roots.
9) Children’s closeness to parents and closeness to nature are both important and go hand-in-hand. Parents give children love and information. Equally important is the information and love children receive from their environment, which their parents indirectly provide them with by placing children in the lap of nature.
10) Parents and nature change form with time. But we all endure!
Healthy parenting and interaction with nature help drive our children’s natural senses. A natural stepping-stone to allow relationships across the entire ecosystem is thus formed. Children thereby remain part of their natural surroundings, instead of the missing piece of a puzzle.
The Author:
Mark Stevens, American author of Luisa’s Nature, is a journalist for Crain’s Automotive News Europe.
Photo. HaiNguyen
