Emotional Health

Producing and nurturing: For inner city kids, especially those from low-income families, opportunities to engage in their urban surroundings in a productive way are limited. Living in such surroundings in the twenty-first century can be a very alienating experience for children and teens. They can feel powerless in the face of seemingly insurmountable social and environmental problems, both locally and globally. Opportunities to become positively engaged in their community can be incredibly meaningful for young people.

On an emotional level, nurturing and taking care of plants is a healthy experience. Urban young people often don’t have much opportunity to practice nurturing. There’s also enormous value in the spontaneity and unexpectedness of what happens in gardening and growing. You plant a seed and you don’t know what the outcome will be—a big contrast with the predictable interactions with technology that children are so engaged with on a daily basis.

The garden is a place where individual participation can make a difference. It’s a place where young people can be producers as well as consumers. It’s emotionally rewarding and satisfying to produce food, to help create green space, to turn the soil and watch the plants grow. Sometimes children in our programs save their garden harvests to bring home. Providing their families with a fresh bag of greens or other fresh veggies can be empowering.

Sharing and collectivity: Even more than any one individual’s contributions, the chance to be part of a larger effort at transforming a piece of the urban jungle into a healthily productive space, can be a rewarding experience. Some of the children in our programs don’t have other group opportunities to make a difference in their lives. The cooperation that’s fostered in a community space like the school garden is unique compared with others kids’activities such as team sports. Participating in the school garden is not only collaborative but requires empathy.

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Content last modified on April 05, 2010, at 04:27 PM EST