Beating the Senior Blues or Children and Nature

Beating the Senior Blues

Author: Leslie Eckford

Depression among older adults is more common than ever. Based on the authors' experience working with seniors, this self-help guide teaches readers how to improve nutrition and fitness, evaluate medication options, deal with anxiety, build self-esteem, and connect with community resources.

Interesting textbook: Dog Parties or Menus from an Orchard Table

Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations

Author: Peter H Kahn

For much of human evolution, the natural world was one of the most important contexts of children's maturation. Indeed, the experience of nature was, and still may be, a critical component of human physical, emotional, intellectual, and even moral development. Yet scientific knowledge of the significance of nature during the different stages of childhood is sparse. This book provides scientific investigations and thought-provoking essays on children and nature.

Children and Nature incorporates research from cognitive science, developmental psychology, ecology, education, environmental studies, evolutionary psychology, political science, primatology, psychiatry, and social psychology. The authors examine the evolutionary significance of nature during childhood; the formation of children's conceptions, values, and sympathies toward the natural world; how contact with nature affects children's physical and mental development; and the educational and political consequences of the weakened childhood experience of nature in modern society.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction
1	The Primate Relationship with Nature: Biophilia as a General Pattern	1
2	The Ecological World of Children	29
3	The Development of Folkbiology: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Children's Understanding of the Biological World	65
4	Children's Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia	93
5	Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative Development in Children	117
6	Animals as Links toward Developing Caring Relationships with the Natural World	153
7	Animals in Therapeutic Education: Guides into the Liminal State	179
8	Spots of Time: Manifold Ways of Being in Nature in Childhood	199
9	Adolescents and the Natural Environment: A Time Out?	227
10	Adolescents and Ecological Identity: Attending to Wild Nature	259
11	Political Economy and the Ecology of Childhood	279
12	Eden in a Vacant Lot: Special Places, Species, and Kids in the Neighbourhood of Life	305
	List of Contributors	329
	Name Index	331
	Subject Index	341