Kids At One With Nature: It's More Than Mere Play

by Allison Pease, Executive Director

For many of us, childhood memories are rich with images of playing in nature - exploring woodlands, climbing trees, building snow forts or watching stars late at night.

As it turns out, those experiences were more than just play. They gave us lifelong foundations of imagination and wonder.

Building boats with sticks, we became engineers. Exploring alleyways and window wells, we became adventurers. Catching salamanders and grasshoppers, we became biologists. Trying to keep them alive, we become doctors and nurses.

Our childhood experiences have filled the world with technological marvels spanning everything from medicine to communications, cell phones to hybrid cars. By playing outside in nature, we learned to explore and create.

But what if the next generation never plays outside, builds a snowman, or catches fireflies? What if the next generation is more concerned with video games, television and virtual sports? What if the next generation is the generation growing up now?

Emerging research suggests that the way children play has changed from outdoors to indoors in a single generation. One study reports that children 8 to 10 spend an average of six hours a day watching television and using computers, while another says that on any given day a child is six times more likely to play a video game than ride a bicycle.

Research is measuring everything from escalating childhood obesity to decreases in a child's ability to self-organize. While these studies cite too much time with computers and television, they highlight time spent outdoors as a critical factor in increased physical health, emotional well-being and attention spans among children.

And that's not all. Time spent outside may also have direct implications for nature.

Our children may be overly informed about big ecological events like hurricanes, tsunamis and fires. While these events offer opportunities to teach children about ecology, biology and even philanthropy, without joyful experiences that connect them to nature, kids are associating nature with disaster. They are becoming afraid of the outdoors, disconnecting from nature in a cycle that pushes them even further into the realm of video games.

Yet all too soon, our children will have to solve nature-based problems like local water rights and forest management or global warming and petroleum declines. What's increasingly clear is that children need early, direct and joyful connections to nature, connections that will inspire them to solve problems as adults.

The good news is that connecting children to nature is easy. All you need is patience and a picnic.

Take children outside. Let them bring a favorite doll or figurine. Collect rocks for a fort or sticks for a boat. Let them play, just play.

It's in the wonder and joy of nature that children become great adventurers or discover magic under a rock.