Mihir Pathak | મિહિર પાઠક

Reopening Children's Imagination

· Mihir Pathak

I. A Child Watching an Ant

Watch a young child encounter an ant. They crouch down, lean in close, and follow its path with their eyes — absorbed, unhurried, full of questions. They want to know where it is going, what it is carrying, whether it can feel anything. This quality of attention, quiet and entirely unselfconscious, is one of the most striking things about young children in nature. They are not yet afraid. They are curious.

This curiosity extends to most small creatures. Spiders weaving webs, worms surfacing after rain, beetles tucked under stones — all of these hold a child’s attention in ways that many adults find puzzling, even faintly unsettling. The child does not yet have a category called “pest.” They have only the creature in front of them, which is moving, and therefore alive, and therefore worth attending to.

This quality of attention is not incidental. It is the beginning of a relationship with the living world — one that, if it is tended, can deepen into something like ecological sensitivity, even ecological care. But something happens to it. And what happens is worth examining carefully.

II. What Happens to the Curiosity

As children grow older, many of them stop crouching down. The ant becomes a pest. The spider becomes something to be feared or crushed. The immediate response, where once there was curiosity, becomes removal, or revulsion, or simple indifference. A child who once spent twenty minutes watching a beetle explore a stone now steps on it without thinking.

This shift is so common that it can seem natural — a predictable feature of growing up, like losing milk teeth or outgrowing picture books. But it is not natural in any deep sense. It is learned. Research in developmental psychology and environmental education consistently shows that fear of and disgust toward insects is not an innate human response but an acquired one, shaped by repeated cultural exposure. Children are not born finding spiders horrible. They are taught to find them horrible, and the teaching is so ordinary, so woven into daily life, that it rarely announces itself as teaching at all.

The cost of this is not merely aesthetic — a loss of wonder, a narrowing of what children find interesting. The relationships children form with small living beings in their earliest years often set the tone for how they relate to the natural world throughout their lives. A child who learns early that insects are disgusting is less likely, as they grow, to feel the loss of the ecosystems those insects sustain. The emotional distance that begins with a single spider becomes, over decades, something much larger: a civilisation-wide difficulty in caring about the living world at all.

III. How the Learning Happens

The mechanisms through which children acquire these attitudes are worth understanding in some detail, because they are not dramatic. They are quiet, repetitive, and almost entirely unintentional.

The first is adult behaviour. Young children are meticulous observers of the adults around them. Long before they can reason abstractly, they are reading emotional responses — learning what is safe, what is dangerous, what matters, and what can be ignored. The psychologist Albert Bandura demonstrated that children absorb not just actions but the emotional reactions accompanying those actions. When an adult reacts to a spider with a shriek, or swats a fly with visible disgust, or pulls a child away from a worm with undisguised alarm, the message is transmitted clearly and immediately. No explanation is required. Over time, these encounters accumulate into what psychologists call schemas — stable mental frameworks for interpreting the world. Insects are dirty. Insects are dangerous. Killing them is unremarkable. Once formed, these schemas are not easily revised; they become, quite literally, habitual ways of seeing.

The second mechanism is story. Stories are among the earliest means through which children learn to organise their experience of the world, and the stories they encounter about nature carry considerable weight. Traditional collections like the Panchatantra and Aesop’s Fables use animals to illuminate human moral life — a tradition of genuine richness and depth. But as a side effect, they often assign fixed identities to animals that have little to do with their actual ecological lives. Modern media tends to be less subtle, frequently portraying insects and spiders as threats, villains, or sources of horror. These portrayals are rarely neutral. They arrive loaded with emotion, and when they combine with adult reactions of disgust or fear, they quietly reinforce the idea that certain creatures are simply not worth attending to — or are worth actively avoiding.

The third mechanism is language. The words we use to describe the natural world determine, in ways that are easy to underestimate, how we relate to it. When insects are routinely called “pests” or “bugs,” these words carry emotional freight. They mark certain creatures as problems rather than organisms. The writer Robert Macfarlane has reflected at length on what happens when nature words disappear from everyday language — when words like “acorn,” “kingfisher,” or “bluebell” fade from common use. His concern is not merely etymological. When the words go, something of the attention goes with them. A child who has a name for a creature is more likely to notice it; a child without that name may look without seeing. Naming is a form of relationship, and its loss is a form of estrangement.

IV. What Is Actually at Stake

It is tempting to frame this as a problem of attitudes — children hold inaccurate views about insects, and those views can be corrected through better education. This framing is not wrong, but it does not go deep enough. What is at stake is not primarily a matter of opinion. It is a matter of development.

The biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed, in his concept of biophilia, that humans have an innate tendency to feel drawn toward other living beings — that this orientation toward life is not cultural but biological, shaped by millions of years of co-existence with the rest of the living world. Young children demonstrate this vividly in their unguarded curiosity toward ants and spiders and worms. The curiosity is already there. What changes, under the pressure of repeated cultural conditioning, is not the capacity but what is done with it. The curiosity is not destroyed; it is redirected, suppressed, or gradually starved of the encounters it needs to grow.

The naturalist and writer Yuvan Aves has extended this line of thinking in a way that feels both more specific and more urgent. He proposes that just as the human body has evolved in intimate relationship with the natural world, so too has our inner life — our imagination, our emotional range, our capacity for certain kinds of attention. He calls this the co-evolved psyche. From this perspective, other living beings are not simply objects we observe from the outside. They are presences that have shaped, and continue to shape, what happens inside us. Watching ants work together, or sitting quietly near a tree while a beetle moves across its bark, or following the logic of a spider’s web — these encounters do not merely inform us about the world. They open kinds of attention and imagination that cannot be reached any other way.

This connects, in a quieter register, with the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who wrote about the importance of what he called a holding environment — a reliable, sustaining surround that allows a child’s inner life to develop. Winnicott was writing primarily about human relationships, but the natural world can serve a similar function: as a quiet, unhurried presence that holds the child, offers space for reflection, and does not demand anything in return. A child who has grown up with this kind of contact carries something that is difficult to name precisely, but that those who have had it tend to recognise immediately.

If Yuvan Aves is right, then the loss of everyday contact with nature is not only an environmental concern. It is a psychological one. Children who grow up without meaningful encounters with insects, plants, and other living things may be growing up with something underdeveloped — some capacity for attention, imagination, or relatedness that has not had the chance to form because the encounters that would have formed it were never available. The wound is not visible, but it is real. And it compounds: each generation more estranged from the living world is less able to pass on the quality of attention that contact with nature requires.

V. The Nature Detective Program

The Nature Detective is an experiential learning program designed for children between the ages of three and ten — an age when curiosity is at its most open and the living world is still, for many children, genuinely wondrous. The program can be led by educators in school settings or by parents at home, in a garden, on a walk, or in any outdoor space where living things can be found. It requires no laboratory, no specialist equipment, no formal training in ecology. What it requires is time, attentiveness, and a willingness on the part of the adult to follow the child’s curiosity rather than direct it toward predetermined conclusions.

The underlying conviction is straightforward: children develop care for the living world through direct, unhurried experience of it. Not through being told that nature is important, not through worksheets or screens, but through real encounters — with real creatures, in real places — encounters that are supported by story, art, movement, and play. In this sense, the Nature Detective program is less a curriculum than an invitation. It asks children to become careful observers of the world immediately around them, and it gives them the tools to do so with genuine curiosity rather than anxiety.

The program moves through several registers, each addressing a different dimension of how children learn.

Stories and puppet shows come first, and they serve a specific purpose: to open an emotional space before the encounter begins. Children meet ants, beetles, spiders, and butterflies as characters with complex inner lives — characters whose perspective the child is invited, briefly, to inhabit. This is not a moral lesson about the ecological importance of insects. It is something more delicate: an invitation to imagine the world from inside another creature’s existence. That small shift in vantage point is often enough, in young children, to loosen fear and make room for something else.

Direct observation follows. Slow walks through gardens, parks, or patches of scrubland — wherever living things can be found — are the heart of the program. Magnifying glasses and simple microscopes are the primary tools, but the real instrument is time. Children who are given permission to stop, to look for as long as they wish, without being hurried or guided toward a correct answer, begin to see. The structure of an ant’s body becomes visible. The geometry of a spider’s web becomes astonishing. The pattern on a beetle’s wing becomes beautiful. What the encounter does, at its best, is dissolve the label and replace it with a presence. Research by Kristin Miller and colleagues found that hands-on encounters with insects significantly changed how children spoke about them; after experiential learning activities, many began describing the same creatures they had previously called disgusting as fascinating.

Art extends and deepens this process. When children draw the insects they have observed, or build clay models, or find some visual form for what they have discovered, they are required to look again — more carefully, more slowly, with more of themselves committed to the looking. The act of making deepens the act of seeing. And it opens a channel for something that observation alone cannot always reach: wonder. A child drawing a beetle is not only recording; they are finding a way to hold their amazement, to give it a shape that can be returned to.

Embodied learning comes finally through the body. When children imitate the movements of insects — crawling like ants, stretching like caterpillars, imagining what it would feel like to weave a web with their own limbs — they are using the most immediate instrument of understanding available to them. This is not simply play, though it looks like play. Embodied experience of this kind creates a different quality of knowing than observation or language alone. The memory that forms in the body runs deeper and lasts longer. A child who has felt in their own muscles the effort of carrying something three times their size has understood something about ants that no description could fully convey.

Any educator, parent, or caregiver can offer this kind of experience to a child. It does not require a forest or a wildlife sanctuary. It requires only a patch of ground, a willingness to slow down, and the recognition that a real encounter with a living thing — however small — is among the most valuable gifts an adult can give to a child. In a world increasingly mediated by screens and shaped by interior spaces, the simple act of crouching beside an ant with a three-year-old and saying, quietly, look — is an act of restoration.

VI. The Shift in Perception

When children have these kinds of encounters repeatedly — when they hear stories about insects, observe them closely, make art inspired by them, and feel their movements in their own bodies — something changes. It is not a dramatic change; it does not announce itself. But the schemas that once marked insects as dangerous or disgusting begin, quietly, to loosen. Ants carrying food become interesting. A spider’s web becomes something to stop and look at rather than something to back away from. A beetle on a leaf becomes a neighbour, going about its life alongside our own.

Research on experiential environmental education, including work by Huseyin Gunes, has demonstrated that this kind of learning produces real and lasting changes in children’s ecological awareness and attitudes. The changes are not superficial. They reflect a genuine shift in how children perceive and relate to the living world around them — a shift that, when it happens early enough, tends to stay.

The goal of the Nature Detective program is not to teach children that insects are important, or to replace one fixed idea with another. It is something more modest and more profound: to restore, or protect, the quality of attention that young children already possess before the world has had its say. To give that original curiosity the encounters it needs to survive and deepen, rather than wither under the accumulated pressure of fear and indifference.

A child who has crouched beside an ant and truly looked — who has drawn a beetle’s wing, who has felt in their own body something of what it is to move through the world as a small creature — that child is less likely, as they grow, to see the natural world as a backdrop to human activity, or as a collection of problems to be managed. They are more likely to see it as a neighbourhood, full of lives running alongside their own.

That is what is at stake in a child’s relationship with the living world. Not merely their attitudes toward insects, but the quality of attention they carry into their lives — their capacity to notice, to feel, to care. Whether the living world, in all its intricacy and strangeness and beauty, will have people in it who can still really see it.

References

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