What is nature-deficit disorder?
It's the cumulative effect of withdrawing nature from children's experiences, but not just individual children. Families too can show the symptoms -- increased feelings of stress, trouble paying attention, feelings of not being rooted in the world.
Scientific research suggests children who are given early and ongoing positive exposure to nature thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their "shut-in" peers do not. By reducing stress, sharpening concentration, and promoting creative problem solving, "nature-play" is also emerging as a promising therapy for attention-deficit disorder and other childhood maladies.
There is the "biophilia"hypothesis (“the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life”), which in some quarters is controversial, but that suggests we are still hunters and gatherers and biologically we have not changed. That hypothesis says there is something in us that needs natural forms, that needs association with nature in ways that we don't fully understand. I think we instinctively understand that there is something about being in nature that you cannot get on a soccer field or in front of the discovery channel.
Many times children are kept shut up "safe" inside their homes sitting in front of the Media because Parents are paranoid. It's not good for human beings to live with fear all the time. In this society we are increasingly living in fear, whether it's of terrorism or "stranger danger" -- and statistically, most of that fear is not warranted. Child abductions by strangers are, in fact, rare, and criminologists and others report that the number of them may have decreased in recent years. A 1988 report by the National Incidence Study on Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children in America, stated that there were between 200 and 300 children abducted by strangers in 1988. The most recent such National Incidence Study, found 115 children kidnapped by strangers in 1999. A relatively few child abductions are amplified into the appearance of an epidemic through nonstop coverage by the media!