MOVEMENT MATTERS Total human movement is undergoing an exponential decline. If we represent the whole of human history with a single twenty-four-hour day, it took only one hour for anatomically modern humans to transition from hunting and gathering to farming, and a single minute for our culture to shift from farming to the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. In mere seconds our bodies have gone from the dawn of computers to having computers that fit in our hands (and are in our hands for hours each day). Each of these technological steps forward was also a step toward decreased movement, but we are now in entirely new territory of rapidly accelerating sedentarism. This is true for all humans, but for the sake of this book and our species, I need to stress that human children have never moved as little as they move today. Most people reading this grew up in an unprecedentedly sedentary culture, but in one generation we've lost a tremendous amount of the little movement we had left. Today's kids are more sedentary than their parents, and are living experiments of a super-sedentary culture. The status of "digital native" awarded to today's children is unwittingly packaged with its sister status, "sedentary native": a body born into a new landscape with almost no movement. Our kids are movement aliens. How is so little movement possible when our bodies require so much of it to function well? It helps to consider what movement is and where movement used to fit into life. Human movement is any change in shape of the body. In its most obvious form, movement is the lifting and bending of the arms and legs, and the rounding, straightening, and twisting of the spine. It's the takeoff and landing of a jump, the stiffening of cartwheeling arms, and the tightening of hands around a monkey bar. Movements that are harder to see include the expansion and contraction of the heart, lungs, arteries, and veins. These coordinate their shape changes with those in the ribcage and abdomen as we breathe and work hard. Bones change shape slightly under compressive (think jumping) or bending (think picking up something heavy) loads. Our eye parts change shape when they shift between looking at something twenty inches and twenty feet away. Trees or monkey bars push into hand-skin as we climb, changing its shape and stimulating its cells to form a callus. These movements are impossible to see without special equipment. Perhaps the most difficult movements to see, let alone imagine, are changes in shape that happen on a cellular level when we stay in the same position for hours at a time. Though the arms and legs aren't changing position and the heart and lung movements are small, our body's cells are moved nonetheless, even when we're still. They simply move into shapes that accommodate static positioning. "Being still" is an exercise program the body adapts to, and sitting has become the most practiced out of all the kid movements. For almost the entire human timeline, movement has been woven into all aspects of humanity, beginning at birth. Eating, learning, dressing, playing building, foraging, celebrating, and traveling all required changing your body position over and over again, in different ways. Movement was inseparable from human necessities; every task was accomplished through movement. Millennia after millennia, children's bodies grew up experiencing all-day, every-day movement via loads created by walking and being carried a variety of miles each day, squatting, sprinting, climbing, jumping, digging, gathering, play-hunting, carrying, hanging, and sitting and lying on hard ground. The bodies that resulted could withstand all the movement required to succeed in that environment once they became adults. It's a perfect biofeedback loop: the work required to meet your biological needs today creates a shape capable of continuing to do that work tomorrow. Humans are excellent tinkerers, though, and over time we've fashioned a society stuffed with conveniences that save us movement. Consider how we get drinking water. Instead of the leg, arm, torso, heart, and lung motions that go into walking to source and gather water and then carry it home, a small turn of the wrist brings tap water right to us. Instead of using complex and abundant movements to search and dig for tubers, clean them, and then chew them a ton, today's kids take a few steps and reach to open the cupboard for applesauce in a disposable tube. Modern food, clothing, education, games, homes, and travel have become attainable with almost no movement of our bodies required. For many, life has become comparatively movement-free, and the children in this sedentary environment are growing up in the human equivalent of a force-free greenhouse. But here's the problem we haven't been able to tinker our way out of: our bodies and basic biological needs are the same as those of our ancestors who moved all day, every day, for everything they needed. Our physiology still requires all those bends, flexes, loads, lifts, and jumps as we're growing; all we've eliminated is the environment that easily prompted us to move. I assert that the vast amounts of stillness created by abundant convenience, technology, and indoorness (and the corresponding lack of outdoor/ nature inputs) is a contributing factor to the majority of the health issueswe and our children now face. Like greenhouse gardeners, we scramble to create numerous interventions to keep our bodies going in the face of the overwhelming effects of what is perhaps the most altered aspect of a human's environment: the mechanical one. That all sounds pretty heavy, but the good news is that while most of us no longer perform the amount and types of movement our physiology needs, these movements are not extinct. Children and adults alike can get moving again, moving in all the ways that nourish and benefit our bodies, by making small changes to the way we set up our daily life. We have a big problem, yes, but we also have a simple, accessible solution. Our big problem might not be that complicated after all. MODELING MATTERS I was inspired to write a book on kids' movement a few years ago after witnessing my daughter, almost three years old, try a movement that she saw on the cover of a book sitting on the kitchen table. The image was of a young woman in the midst of climbing up an angled pole; she had only one hand and one foot touching the pole. My daughter studied the picture for about two minutes before she climbed onto the kitchen table (which we allow, even encourage, for reasons made clear in this book). The windowsill was beyond her reach, but she could fall in its direction and catch ahold of the ledge if she was okay with that moment of falling. I watched her reach her arms toward the window, stretching as far as she could but falling just a few inches short despite her best efforts. Then she climbed down to measure how far she was short, looked back at the cover, climbed back on the table, and leaped from the table to the window, where she caught herself and hung by her fingertips. That moment clarified for me the difference between teaching and modeling. The cover of that book did not instruct; the cover modeled. Humans have been moving in complex ways for millennia, reflexively copying the older and more skillful humans around them. It is only recently, in the almost entirely sedentary society we've created, that the idea of teaching movement has emerged. ENVIRONMENT MATTERS I've been teaching adult humans to move well for more than twenty years, but children's desire and potential to move are so reflexive, so innate, that teaching is not necessarily required. What is required is an environment that signals and permits movement. Adults create and are the environments--the villagers, if you will--for humanity's collective offspring. That means we all, consciously or unconsciously, set the boundaries of movement for every human child (and future adult human) who passes through our space. So our spaces--the literal shape of them, the behaviors modeled within them, and the behaviors required of people within them--are also raising our children. We've heard it takes a village to raise a child, but let's get more specific about what a village is made of. Certainly it's the community of humans that live there, but a village includes many other elements: the sky, the dwellings (and the furniture inside of them), what you wear as you're running around them, the rules (no running!), other animals, the plants, dirt, bugs, and microbes, and all the movements happening between and because of these parts. Each of the village's many elements lends itself to our childrearing each day, but there is more to life than a village. The nature surrounding each village, the "forest," if you will, is equally important. There has never been a village or villagers without a forest to raise them. You could say it takes a forest to raise a village. I once read a lovely explanation about natural selection (the process by which groups of living things adapt to their environment) that went something like: "A solution doesn't have to be optimal to be favored; it just has to be better than the alternatives." Every movement in this book will increase some element of a natural load, but it doesn't have to be perfect. We're simply seeking ways of increasing the movement nutrition of our lives. If you don't have a village or a forest that is movement friendly and nurturing, please don't worry. The beautiful thing is that no matter what your life looks like now, you can find elements of movement, nature, and community described in this book and incorporate them into your existing home, routines, habits, and life. And you can meet new people, and you can plant trees. Even if everything is not available to you, something always is. Bodies don't come with all the movements they'll do, and no village and forest always existed; all are created over time. Excerpted from Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-family, Nature-rich Guide to Moving More by Katy Bowman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
