Think back to your childhood and remember watching the stars and catching fireflies on a warm summer night, playing hide and seek in the woods with friends, biking aimlessly just for the sake of a ride, skipping stones over a nearby creek.  Now think about your own kids’ experiences. 

Kissing a frog

 

Our children spend less time playing outdoors than any previous generation. Through an increase in extracurricular activities, advances in technology, changes in family life, and urban sprawl, we, as a society, have unconsciously disconnected our children from nature.

 

Today’s kids have hyper-structured schedules that include countless combinations of after-school activities, sporting events, dance classes, clubs, and church and social events. In fact, studies show that over the last 25 years, children’s free time has declined by nine hours over the course of an average week. And when today’s children are able to enjoy free time, they’d prefer to spend it indoors with computers, cell phones, iPods, and an ever-expanding list of screens. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, children between the ages 8 and 18 spend 6.5 hours per day on television, electronic games, computers, music and other media.

Chardonnay by Katie Yamasaki

Adding to the disconnect with nature, parents fear leaving children  unattended outdoors—a fear that is aggravated by a media environment in which rare crimes receive spectacular attention. Further exacerbated by changes in city design and school focus, the disconnect grows.

 

These trends have come about slowly over the years and have affected our lives in both highly visible and less obvious ways. But the long-term implications of these trends should be enough to convince every parent that we should be doing anything and everything we can to increase the amount of time our children are able to spend outdoors. 

 

Studies show that nature is important to children’s intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual and physical development. Outdoors activities are important for creativity, problem-solving and intellectual development in younger children, and they provide enhanced self-esteem, self-confidence, independence, autonomy and initiative in teens. And these effects hold for many years; they don’t disappear the minute children go back indoors.

Girls Celebrate Urban Birds in the park

 

Meanwhile, obesity rates among today’s children are higher than ever, and this generation is the first to have a shorter life expectancy than its parents. While nature alone won’t solve these problems, our future health will benefit from an increase in contact with nature and each other.

 

Research shows that positive direct experience in the outdoors and being taken outdoors by someone close to a child – a parent, grandparent, or other trusted guardian – are the two factors that most contribute to individuals choosing to take action to benefit the environment as adults. If this generation of children loses touch with nature, where will the next generation of environmentally conscious people come from?

 

Boy explores nature.  Grupo Talca

In an effort to make significant changes, The Conservation Fund and author Rich Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder) teamed up this summer to launch a National Forum on Children and Nature. The Forum is comprised of governors, mayors, corporate CEOs, and community, health and education leaders who will be working together over the coming months to find and fund 20 significant projects across the country that reconnect children and nature.

 

The Forum’s goal is bring more balance to the lives of today’s children--to educate them about the joys of the great outdoors, to improve design of our communities and cities, and ultimately to engage all ages and sectors to work together for our children’s health and well-being. With your help, we hope to build on this project.

 

While it will be many months before the Forum has a direct impact on the lives of our children, you can start today.  Take your kids on a hike.  Go fishing. Or just wander into the back yard and turn over a rock to see what lives underneath.  Nature is waiting. Go outside and play.