Nowadays, with an increasing number of families moving to live in towns and cities, children have limited opportunities – if any at all – to learn about and get in touch with the natural environment, grow their own fruits and vegetables, and have great fun outdoors, while being creative at the same time.
droplets was originally uploaded to Flickr by Susan Jane Golding and is reused here under the terms and conditions of the CC BY 2.0 DEED Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons
As a result, there is a missing link with the traditional way of living that parents, grandparents, and earlier generations before them were used to, and they get most things from supermarket shelves.
Children may know from going to school, reading books, and from their parents, that an egg is laid by a hen, however a hen will probably be a product of their imagination, and chances are that they have only seen one drawn on paper, or on TV, or on the Internet, so I strongly doubt whether they have actually seen one live!
The same applies even more to plants, with modern children perhaps finding it much harder to identify some of them correctly.
The only things that children are now very familiar with are the Internet and mobile devices, blocks of flats made of concrete, and tarmac roads everywhere (you never get to see what real soil looks like); ah, and plastic food, I forgot.
It is obvious that heavy urbanization has the result that children no longer feel that they are an integral part of the natural environment, and humans share the planet with animals and plants, which we need, in order for us to be able to survive. They don’t have first-hand, practical experience of this important truth.