Why children need nature books
My mother raised me with pine needles in her hair, Old Man’s Beard stuck to her clothes, and swirls in her heels filled with dirt. I rode horses through the woods and swam in lakes and rivers amongst fish. I knew I wanted the same for my own children.
But I soon learned it’s one thing to grow up as a child in the woods and it’s another to be the mother watching her children play in the woods. This world is filled with dangers, dangers from creeping bugs to wild animals. As my fear bubbles inside me, my children begin to take hold of those same fears as well. The nature-loving children I wanted to raise are suddenly skittish around ants and nervous at the trees’ edge.
Perhaps nature books could be the key to undoing some of this and helping us all redeem a love for the natural world again.
Nature Books Help Our Children Appreciate Rather than Fear Animals and Bugs
I’m petrified of spiders. Last summer, my kids and I walked around the house and counted about thirty of these eight-legged monsters hanging from our siding and gutters, including the biggest one I’ve ever laid eyes on. We named her Charlotte, after Charlotte’s Web, and she hung all summer long from my bedroom window. It was a bit unnerving.
There has never been a moment in my life in which a spider did not provoke fear, horror, or disgust in me. When my children began toddling outside and their curious fingers reached for the hairy, dangling spiders in their webs, I snapped my hand out like a viper to draw them back.
Our kids learn these kinds of fears from us, just as I did from my own spider-fearing mother. Charlotte Mason says the “horror which some children show of beetle, spider, worm” is “a trick picked up from grown-up people.” Snakes, bears, ticks, dogs, mice are all creatures that we humans commonly fear. We grow to either fear going in the places they might be or killing them any chance we get, and our children do the same.
I remember a time when, while I never would go near a spider, I did pick up worms, potato bugs, caterpillars, and ants. I plodded through slimy frog ponds catching tadpoles to raise. Now, as an adult, I don’t want to go near the warty toad my kids try to hand me.
But Mason tells us that while us grown-up people find the wonders of nature stale from all our years of living and learning about them, to children they are all brand new. “The flowers, it is true, are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every new flower they come upon is not to them a Piccola, a mystery of beauty to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight.” The same is true of those creepy-crawlies we detest so much.
Nature Books Help Our Children See Creatures As Part of God’s Good Design
I’d like to name spiders as a thing of the curse (and maybe there are some creatures you’d add to that list as well), but I know that isn’t right. I’ve watched their cunning webs snag the blackflies that torment us and leave welts on my boys. It’s plain that God uses even spiders for his glory and our good.
Rather than imposing my own fears on my children, I can seek to show them God, even in the spider’s web. I can let their natural curiosity and wonder grow instead of imputing my own fear onto them.
Mason says that it’s the job of parents to “point to some lovely flower or gracious tree, not only as a beautiful work, but a beautiful thought of God.” I can do the same with spiders; I can point out the hidden beauty of their webs, how they benefit us and creation, and highlight why they are a creature that I can not only be grateful for but another part of this world that proclaims the goodness and wonder of God.
Nature and animal books can be one of the ways we do that.
Nature and animal books help us show our children how every bit of the world declares God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom. 1:20). By examining how plants, critters, and animals live and grow to telling us stories about them that help us feel compassion or connection with those creatures, these stories help our children see creation as the work of the hands of a good, kind, creative, and wise God.
Stories like Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White or Crickwing by Janell Cannon helps children see creepy-crawlies as friends rather than foes. Stories that humanize animals such as the tales written by Beatrix Potter or the Bramby Hedge series by Jill Barklem bring creatures like mice that we only see in shadows into the light in a gentle, light-hearted way.
Nature Books Help Our Children Develop Compassion for Animals Rather than Fear and Hatred
These stories also give way to compassion. Having three boys, I know they can play a bit rough with nature and the small creatures that reside in our backyard. But by reading nature stories to them, it helps children learn that animals have feelings too and deserve to be treated with respect (even the scary ones we’d like to squash).
Nonfiction picture books about the ways of nature, plants, and animals can do a similar work, but they also show the intricate and methodical workings of nature that God has set in place. Books like An Egg Is Quiet and A Seed is Sleepy and A Nest Is Noisy by Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long proclaim that this world was woven together by intelligent hands and by no mere accident without ever even mentioning God or the creation story.
This world may be full of seemingly scary creatures, many of which can harm us or become a burden. Many of them should definitely not be found in our homes, yet often find their way in anyway, causing much distress for us. But we can learn to use these opportunities to declare them as still “a beautiful thought of God” even amid our broken world.
Yes, at times nature does not function as it should because of the thorns of sin. Today, one of my boys was unnecessarily stung by an angry bumblebee while playing in the sand. But when these things happen, we can point our children to the day when “an infant will play beside the cobra’s pit, and a toddler will put his hand into a snake’s den” (Is. 11:8). On that day, all of the new creation will perfectly and harmoniously proclaim the greatness of God without harm or thistle.
