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Abstract
Children's gardens have recently been shown to increase life skills. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects that gardening/plant activities from the Junior Master Gardener curriculum, Literature in the Garden, have on children's life skills. The life skills examined were leadership, teamwork, self-understanding, decision-making skills, and communication skills. About 130 third-grade students from a Lee County, AL, school participated in the study. Students were equally divided into control and experimental groups, and each student was given the youth life skills inventory (YLSI) as a pre- and posttest. The experimental group participated in eight gardening/plant activities after the pretest, whereas the control group did not complete the activities. No significant differences were found between pretests and posttests for teamwork, self-understanding, decision making, communication, and overall life skills. Significant decreases from pretest to posttest were found on leadership skills for the experimental group. Several trends were observed with students who read more for fun, read more each week, and read more garden books generally increasing in life skills.
In today's society, children have many obstacles to overcome to mature into a healthy adult. One possible impediment is that children today are more often disconnected from nature, which they view academically as they watch programs about nature but rarely experience personally. The lack of time spent in nature may be because United States children spend ≈30 h per week either in front of a television or computer (Louv, 2005).
Along with everyday decisions, many children are being forced to make increasingly more significant decisions about their well-being, such as whether to join a gang or carry a gun to school, and they must make these decisions at surprisingly young ages (Shuvall et al., 2010). According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2001), juveniles were the victims in 10% of murders, 70% of sexual assaults, 11% of robberies, and 17% of aggravated assaults. Also, in a study of nearly 1000 youth in New York, about one-third of participants were gang members; however, they accounted for around 70% of self-reported violent crimes and drug dealing (Krug et al., 2002).
A seemingly less pressing issue than violence among youth is the general decline of face-to-face social interaction among individuals (Kraut et al., 1998; Lee et al., 2010)....