I grew up in the countryside and the article's conclusion of "let your kids eat some dirt" has always been rather anecdotally obvious to me; I tromped through a lot of mud and unwisely put a lot of weird things in my mouth and I seem to have a much more robust immune system than my peers who didn't.
That said, "growing up in the countryside" isn't itself necessary. You just need to grow up with some decent nature within walking distance. Yes, many urban environments have unwisely paved over all their green spaces with parking lots and high rises. But that's not a necessary feature of a city; look for cities that value green spaces, e.g. Pittsburgh's Frick Park/Schenley Park/Hazelwood Greenway triangle provides ample opportunity for getting lost in unmanicured woods.
Part of what gets my goat is the idea that humans only evolved to live in bucolic, pastoral locales. Humans have been banding together in cities for 6,000 years now; we have plenty of adaptations for urban living (such as, ironically, disease resistance; the notion that city living is cleaner than country living is a modern phenomenon).
> That said, "growing up in the countryside" isn't itself necessary. You just need to grow up with some decent nature within walking distance. Yes, many urban environments have unwisely paved over all their green spaces with parking lots and high rises. But that's not a necessary feature of a city; look for cities that value green spaces, e.g. Pittsburgh's Frick Park/Schenley Park/Hazelwood Greenway triangle provides ample opportunity for getting lost in unmanicured woods.
I can scarcely imagine city parks providing the country upbringing experience of running off into the woods after breakfast and not coming home until dinner, every day of summer until school season started again. Visiting the park for a few hours once or twice a week just isn't the same.
I encourage you to visit the places I've mentioned if you're ever in Pittsburgh. They're not "parks" in the sense of mowed lawns and baseball fields (Pittsburgh has lots of those too, though). These parks contain legitimate woods in the heart of the city, Frick most especially.
I looked up the parks when I left that comment and saw that they have forests. But I am driving at the difference between visiting a park once or twice a week, probably with parental supervision / transportation (young free-roaming children in American cities is largely a thing of the past, the cops will scoop up your kid and possibly accuse you of neglect) vs running around in the woods unsupervised for 12 hours a day, every day of summer.
I think it was Steven Pinker who claimed that we were best evolved for life on the savanah, bucolic pastoral type settings with wide open fields. Settings that are easy on the eyes and provide a good line of sight while also providing corners to duck for cover. A setting which has mostly been replicated by the suburbs. True that we have adapted to live in cities fairly well, but even a few thousand years I would think would be too short for evolution.
While this may or may not be the case, Pinker is a linguist and has neither the expertise nor evidence to back up this assertion. I don't think modern American suburbs resemble the African savanna. But the chaparral terrain on much of the California coast where I often hike is a lot closer to it.
He is a psycho-linguist and his field is evolutionary psychology. He never claimed a complete resemblance between the savannah and suburbia, but just that both contain many of the key features which would make it highly suitable for the species, at least from an evolutionary perspective.
That said, "growing up in the countryside" isn't itself necessary. You just need to grow up with some decent nature within walking distance. Yes, many urban environments have unwisely paved over all their green spaces with parking lots and high rises. But that's not a necessary feature of a city; look for cities that value green spaces, e.g. Pittsburgh's Frick Park/Schenley Park/Hazelwood Greenway triangle provides ample opportunity for getting lost in unmanicured woods.
Part of what gets my goat is the idea that humans only evolved to live in bucolic, pastoral locales. Humans have been banding together in cities for 6,000 years now; we have plenty of adaptations for urban living (such as, ironically, disease resistance; the notion that city living is cleaner than country living is a modern phenomenon).