Keynote speaker at 2014 national conference

Jay Griffiths’s question is simple: why do our children feel so unhappy? Her main
answer lies in the title of her new book, Kith. Now used only in the phrase ‘kith
and kin’, the word has come to mean something like ‘extended family’ or ‘circle of
friends’. But it originally referred to a person’s ‘home territory’, the country or
region where they lived. For Griffiths, our children have been cooped up indoors,
imprisoned in front of their screens (whether television or computer), and they
have lost all contact with their kith – with the woods and the wilds, the mountains
and moors, the rivers and streams. That, she argues, is the heart of the problem.