Richard Louv Quotes

When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky - poor parents! - I would be home before it got dark.

As a kid, I was just led out in the morning to go spend my day with my friends and just run in the woods. And I'd only come home to eat or when I was thirsty.

I think outdoors has been my second home. My parents wouldn't be like, "Go and do a puzzle," they'd be like, "Hey, there's a forest across the street. You need to go play in it."

Back then, as a kid, you could really just do whatever you wanted until your parents got home.

As a boy, I didn't need a lot of playmates to have a good time.

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?

I have a hard time with free time.

I'm terrible when I have to fill up free time. My days, if I'm not working, I wake up and figure out a way to kill time until it's time to go to sleep.

I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.

And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it, walk home, take my time, kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school, so that was cool.

That's another thing, we made up games. We didn't have equipment. When it snowed, we would play slow motion tackle football. We would play hockey, but we wouldn't skate. We just made things up. I loved doing that.

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

I had a lovely, feral, free childhood - out and then come back when you're hungry or it gets too dark. I feel slightly cruel that I'm not offering my children the same.

We used to play a lot outdoors, not in leagues, but just in our spare time.

We have a lot of pressures on children very young. We have ambition. We over-schedule our children. We want them to have soccer lessons and violin lessons... I think children need to have at least an hour of fun a day.

Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.

When I was a kid, being outside was the norm. Rain or shine, our parents would tell us to get out of the house.

I was part of a generation where kids had a lot of freedom and aimless downtime. I had no scheduled after-school activities. As long as you came home for dinner, everything was fine.

I had a wild imagination as a kid - wild! - and I was outside all the time, swinging around in trees by myself.

You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.

I think back to my childhood, and I remember running around as a kid. We were all running around then. It wasn't about getting into shape. It's just what we did.

Mom would say, 'Get out of the house,' and we would just go. We had all sorts of large swings and flying foxes and various death traps throughout the forest that we'd try and do our best to hurt ourselves on. It was a great childhood in terms of being creative, I think.

As kids, we played on the streets without shoes, and the game didn't stop for oncoming traffic.

I had a lot of time as a kid to dream. There wasn't much else left to do.

When I think back to my childhood, I just think of the word 'freedom.' In the summers, we spent all day on the beach.