The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children today
spend an average of seven and a half hours a day consuming electronic
media. Shockingly, less than four
minutes a day is spent in unstructured outdoor play. The Nielsen Company says that preschoolers
log in excess of 32 hours of TV per week and has seen more than 5,000 hours of
television by the time they reach kindergarten.
That’s equivalent to the amount of time it takes to earn a college
degree.
Some people argue that one of the key disconnects of modern
society is that many people no longer have a direct connection to where their
food and fiber come from. Do your kids
know how their supper grows, or where their cotton t-shirt comes from?
As society becomes more urbanized, many people do lose touch
with agricultural production. This
causes those individuals to undermine agriculture’s role as a staple in our
society.
Vegetable gardening—whether in small, backyard containers or
larger spreads—is a great way to introduce kids to the food production
process. Watching plants grow from a
seed to food you can eat is instructive and opens up opportunities for all
kinds of ecological lessons throughout the growing season.
Children are used to eating things like chicken nuggets or
hamburgers but have no idea where the food actually comes from. If we are going to use animals for food, we
need to realize it came from something other than a box in the refrigerator. If people understand their connections to an
animal, we will have more respect.
Spoilage and waste will decrease.
Our hope is simple.
As we raise our kids to be a part of rural Texas, we hope that the love
and longing for the outdoors is planted deep within them. Those memories they are making each time they
head outdoors are eternal. One day, they’ll
pass on these lessons to their own children.
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