Generation Farm Essay

For our fourth class we went to Generation Farms in Cedar, they run multiple programs, but the one we learned mostly about is their equine facilitated wellness for youth. Generation Farms employs two child and youth care workers on staff who continuously related the program to what we have been learning over the course of our degree. While at the farm they spoke about the clientele they gain for their equine facilitated wellness programs, many of the youth have high anxiety and tend to have no control in their lives. Consequently, their understanding of boundaries is very low as they have never been taught how to establish boundaries for themselves. This is an issue I can relate to; I grew up in foster care and was rarely given the chance

This was very impactful, because multiple times that I have worked with children and youth who begin exhibiting unwanted behavior, if you take them outside or get them involved in an activity suddenly it is no longer prevalent. When they were speaking about this it made me think of the article by Windhorst and Williams where they state, “Louv argued that, among other things, rising rates of attention deficit disorders, depression, and anxiety in today’s children—and adults—may stem from Western society’s progressive detachment from the natural world (Louv, 2005, 2012).” (2015, p.115). I believe that there does need to be a focus on getting children outside more regularly specially to combat mental illness, even for myself, I know that when I have spent an extended amount of time outdoors throughout the week my own symptoms of mental illness diminish, whether you are being active or purely sitting outside, nature is therapeutic and it is a primal need to spend time outside. The primal affinity for nature is also shown in Mantler and Logan’s article where they explain how the brain lights up