Pregnancy makes you think in two directions at once: back to those who came before, and forwards to those yet to come. As a mother-to-be, you become a bridge – carrying what was handed down, while shaping the world your child will inherit.
What I inherited was a connection to nature, instilled early by my mother. She named the flowers, pressed moss into my palms after rain, and showed me the quiet joy of being outside. That gift carried into adulthood – so much so that I made it into a career as an ecological engineer – but when I was pregnant for the first time, it shifted, deepened, and took on new meaning.
Trees I had walked past a thousand times suddenly looked different. Their shade felt protective, their rootedness reassuring, their branches almost watchful. The ash outside our Amsterdam window, storm-scarred and dusted with traffic, became a companion. I’d press my hand to its bark as if asking it to steady me. A sparrow’s flicker between branches, the rough bark beneath my palm was tiny proof that I belonged to something older, larger.
Exploring the natural world – parent and child
What began as a coping mechanism became a ritual, and that ritual carried into motherhood. After an emergency delivery that nearly cost me my life and my son’s, I shuffled down the street for the first time, stitches tugging with each step, a dull ache radiating through my abdomen. The air stung my lungs, yet it somehow lifted me. Sunlight on my face gave me more than a dose of vitamin D; it gave me proof we were still here, fragile but alive. Five weeks later, newborn strapped to my chest, I discovered parenting was infinitely easier outdoors: the air softened his cries, the breeze lulled him to sleep, the trees quieted my racing mind. Now, at two and a half, his first words each morning are, “Outside, mama”, as he points to the window. And so we go.
To him, the 50-m2 pocket forest around the corner from our fourth-floor walk-up is Yellowstone: towering, wild, infinite. Roots are mountains. Puddles, oceans. Pigeons, miracles. To me, it is an easy, short walk, a reliable refuge. A reminder that the ordinary green close by can, in fact, be the most transformative of all.
Research supports the power of this “nearby nature”. Dr Kathleen Wolf of the University of Washington has amassed a vast literature on the concept of “metro nature”, the everyday greenery in our streets, pocket parks, and neighbourhood corridors.[1] We can also consider “nature” gardens, courtyards, urban rooftops, or rural fields. Wolf’s work shows that these everyday green places really do make us feel better, think more clearly, and even save billions in healthcare and societal costs – often more than rare trips to wild places far away. Dr Timothy Beatley[2] calls this the “nature pyramid”: just as a healthy diet depends on daily fruits and vegetables, our wellbeing depends on regular doses of nature, with deeper immersions layered on top. A UK study of 20,000 people found that spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature (an average of just 17 minutes a day) – whether in a local park or on a forest trail – significantly boosted health and wellbeing, with little added benefit beyond that threshold.[3] It isn’t about extremes or bucket-list hikes; it’s about steady, nourishing contact with the green just outside our doors.
Wolf, K.L. (2008). Metro nature services: Functions, benefits and values. In S.M. Wachter and E.L. Birch (eds), Growing Greener Cities: Urban sustainability in the twenty-first century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Beatley, T. (2012) Exploring the Nature Pyramid. The Nature of Cities. Available at: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2012/08/07/exploring-the-nature-pyramid/ (accessed January 2026).
White, M.P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B.W., Hartig, T., Warber, S.L. et al. (2019) Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports 9: 7730. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3
Nature as alloparent
Anthropologists use the term alloparents for those who share care: grandparents, siblings, neighbours, friends, or paid caregivers. I’ve come to think of trees and parks that way, too. They held my child when I could not soothe him. They steadied me when I felt raw. They widened our world when the apartment walls closed in.
My work explores the idea that urban nature can be a kind of medicine, something we should prescribe. Better still would be to embed it so deeply into our modern routines that we no longer have to seek it out. But in too many communities, greenery is treated as a luxury, not a necessity, leaving countless new parents and caregivers without this quiet, everyday form of support. It also means that too many newborns are growing up disconnected from nature.
In a 2025 study, Dr Miles Richardson modelled 220 years of human–nature relationships and found something sobering: our collective connection to nature has declined by about 60% since 1800. The model points to a powerful driver: parents no longer pass on an orientation towards nature to their children.[4]
Richardson, M. (2025) Modelling nature connectedness within environmental systems: Human–nature relationships from 1800 to 2020 and beyond. Earth 6(3): 82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/earth6030082
Richardson calls this the “extinction of experience”, the gradual loss of direct, meaningful engagement with the living world around us. What we notice, value, and make routine is what our children inherit. Working with families and parents to engage children with nature and to focus deliberately on intergenerational transmission is key.
For families in crowded megacities, arid zones, or communities with legacy inequalities, even a patch of grass can be rare. Richardson’s model also warns that adding a few parks is not enough. Reversing the decline requires radically greener cities and towns (where most people now live) and families who weave nature into daily life from the very beginning.
Policies are beginning to move in this direction, but, as Richardson argues, we need to think in transformational terms. Not a modest 30% increase in tree canopy cover or parkland, but a tenfold leap in how much nature is woven into our daily lives. This is the scale of change that can shift culture, not just policy. Much has been said about the need to (re)connect children with nature but as Richardson reminds us, the task may be simpler: don’t disconnect them.
A newborn today is biologically much the same as one born in 1800 – each arrives wide-eyed, attuned, already fascinated by the living world. I see it in my own son, who reaches for leaves and lingers over ants. The challenge isn’t sparking that wonder; it’s keeping it alive as they move from the crib and into the classroom.
It starts with parents.
The neuroplastic windows that build human–nature relationships
At the inaugural Van Leer Fellowship retreat, I learned from renowned neuroscientist Susana Carmona that pregnancy offers a rare biological opening: the brain reorganises for caregiving. New grooves can form. If we use that window to plant tiny, repeatable nature habits (read: a morning walk to the pocket forest, a pause to notice birdsong, a nightly goodnight to the moon), those patterns are more likely to hold through the fog of postpartum and beyond. They become the rhythm in which our children grow up.
But early parenthood is chaos; beautiful, bone-tired chaos. Good intentions evaporate at 3 am when you have been awoken for the fifth time and cannot bear to know the hour, because somehow that makes it worse. That is where gentle tech can help, not to replace nature but to nudge us back towards it.
One morning, bleary-eyed, I opened NatureDose, an app I helped develop that tracks your exposure to nature. The number staring back was embarrassingly low. Twenty minutes with nature became my daily target: doable, not heroic. Watching those minutes tick up turned a vague intention into a habit loop: cue (morning restlessness), routine (stroller to the pocket forest), reward (calmer baby, calmer me).
As a Van Leer Fellow, this is what I’m exploring: can a simple “nature prescription” during pregnancy – 20 minutes in nature every day – work if it is supported by objective tracking (so exhausted parents don’t have to remember a thing) and brief reflections on what was noticed (because moments, not minutes, are what deepen connection)? The hypothesis is as old as parenting: if we seed nature habits in the neuroplastic window of pregnancy, we are more likely to carry them into the tender months after birth, and our children will grow up inside those rhythms.
Early childhood is also a unique window – my son’s early experiences in nature will form a deep, lifelong bond with the natural world. When he pats the ash tree’s bark with his small hand, I imagine that tree watching us both, as it once watched my grandparents and may one day watch his children. The grandeur of protected landscapes matters, of course. But for the work of transmission, it is the daily, reachable green that counts: the nearby pocket forest that to a toddler feels vast, and to a parent feels like refuge.
If we want children to feel at home in the natural world, we must first keep parents at home in it – especially in pregnancy, when new rhythms are forming. If you’re asking yourself how to stop a 200- year slide, the answer is not abstract – it’s lived. Go outside, and bring the next generation with you.
