058: What are the benefits of outdoor play?

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Transcript   Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re part-way through a series of as-yet undetermined length on play at the moment.  We kicked off with a conversation with Dr. Stuart Brown on the overarching topic of why play is important not only to children, but also to adults.  Today we’re going to talk about outdoor play, and this is such a big topic that we’re going to split it up a bit.  Today we’ll talk about why outdoor play is so critical for children’s development, and then soon we’ll talk with Dr. Scott Sampson about realistic ways that real people can really get their children outside more (and, preferably, get outside more with their children).  Hopefully after that we’ll also look at risky play, and maybe even imaginary play…but let’s take things one at a time. The way we have defined “nature” and “wilderness” has changed a lot over the years.  Park Ranger Jen is going to come out for a few minutes here – perhaps it won’t surprise some of you who have seem pictures of us in my fortnightly newsletter grubbing around in the muck that I used to want to be a ranger for the National Park Service – and preferably at a park in the middle of nowhere.  A lot of days I still do, but you have to be realistic when you marry a guy who works in advertising. European settlers of the New World were familiar with wilderness even before they got here because at that time there was still quite a bit of wilderness on the continent.  The most notable idea they had was that wilderness is something different and alien from man, something that civilization can and should and must struggle against.  Judeo-Christian tradition is filled with this kind of symbolism, and it had an enormous impact on the settlers.  “Good” land is flat and fertile; “good” trees produce shade, or fruit, or preferably both; water is plentiful, the climate is mild, and animals live in harmony with man.  Picture the Garden of Eden – it’s a fecund place where branches are drooping with fruit, there’s no need to be afraid of any animal, and Adam and Even don’t need to do any work to survive – but after they sin in the garden they are driven out into the wilderness.  This view of wilderness in the Judeo-Christian religion is in stark contrast to the way wilderness was viewed in other places; many of India’s early religions, including Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism emphasize compassion for all living things because man is a part of nature, not apart from it.  The ancient Chinese sought out wilderness in the hope of more clearly understanding the unity and rhythm that they believed pervaded the universe.  Japan’s first religion, Shinto, was a form of nature worship that actually preferred mountains, forests, and storms over the fruitful, pastoral scenes so important to Westerners.  We grew intermittently softer and less-soft toward wilderness over the years until the 1960s and ‘70s, when the terms “environment” and “ecology” became household words.  For the first time in a long time we started to see ourselves as being a part of nature, although it’s a neater idea in theory than in practice.  We increased the pace of setting aside lands for conservation purposes, signing the Wilderness Act in 1964 which specifically provides for places that are “untrammeled by man.” This makes wilderness areas unlike the national parks which had been created sixty years earlier, because in parks people and nature had always uneasily coexisted, at least – White visitors and nature had, because all the natives had to be kicked out before the park was created.  Some of us now view wilderness as a place to go to feel renewed, but then we want to go back to our technology-centered lives and we sort of forget about wilderness until the next time we want to feel renewed.  Many children these days understand why we should recycle and can tell you about endangered species and climate change, but have no physical experience with nature themselves.  I’m going to argue today that if we can reframe the way we see wilderness and nature and see it as part of our everyday lives, rather than ‘that amazingly cool thing over there that we only visit very occasionally,’ that both we and our children will benefit. I also want to try to carefully acknowledge – without unintentionally stepping on anyone’s toes – that there are a lot of issues related to colonialist, industrialist, capitalist that we should acknowledge when we talk about nature and our relationship with it.  Indigenous and First Nations communities in many, many places around the world see a spiritual connection to nature as just part of how life is lived, as inextricable from human life.  While these cultures have this idea of a connection to nature in common, they are each unique in the way in which they express that connection – the cultures may have commonalities across them but they are not monolithic.  Colonization has obviously had what we can politely call a negative impact on native peoples in the U.S. and in many other countries, and I think we should acknowledge that for years now we’ve told indigenous peoples that their way of life is wrong and that they need to live the way we live and adapt to our customs and practices, and now we’re seeing that their cultural practices and the way in which they see themselves as a part of nature actually has a great deal of value, and that we should somehow try to understand these practices without appropriating them like we’ve appropriated things like dreamcatchers and headdresses and Pocahontas.  I’m the first to say that this is not my area of expertise and am not exactly sure where this line of appropriation lies, or whether we might cross it by accident, but I at least want to acknowledge that the line exists and also that, as usual, the vast majority of research on children related to the outdoors has been conducted on White children by White researchers, and the perspectives of people from non-dominant cultures are not well represented.   It won’t be a surprise to anyone who has read – or even heard of – Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods that children are spending less time than they were even just a generation ago – a LOT less time.  A raft of studies shows children spending less time outside, more time in front of the TV and computer, and a dramatic increase in the incidence of childhood obesity.  We’re beginning to understand why that is – nature is filled with inherently fascinating scenery which attracts our attention in a gentle, general way.  Urban environments (and digital media) demand our directed attention so we don’t get hit by a car, or so we can get better at whatever is the hot video game app this week, which is mentally tiring for us. A generation ago, children found nature everywhere – in vacant lots, in fields, in ditches – as they roamed with friends for hours at a time unsupervised.  Journalist Hanna Rosin wrote her seminal article The Overprotected Kid in The Atlantic in 2014 that when her daughter was about 10, her husband suddenly realized that in her daughter’s whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult.  Not 10 minutes in 10 years. In the U.K., the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90% – half of all children used to regularly play in wild spaces a generation ago, and now it’s less than one in ten.  Children don’t walk to school alone any more, or play outside by themselves – instead they’re indoors and if they’re aged between four and nine they spend on average over 17 hours a week watching TV or playing video games.  The Outdoor Foundation (which is funded by the National Park Service and outdoor retailers) found that participation of all people over six years old in outdoor activities (not including organized sports) declined between 2006 and 2016, but the participation rate of 6-12-year-olds declined the most – 15%.  Most of that decline happened between 2006 and 2009, and it’s been pretty much flat-lined at around 62% of children participating for the last several years.  Journalist Florence Williams reports in her book The Nature Fix that two thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns come from trees, and while she doesn’t source that particular nugget and I couldn’t find it independently, the overall feeling is one that is echoed in other reports. At the same time, academics are being pushed ever-harder in schools, in the name of helping individuals to ‘get ahead’ so companies can sell more stuff and our GDP can rise ever-higher.  As we see often in parenting, when we prioritize one thing we inherently de-prioritize something else – just because we can’t pay attention to everything.  If we prioritize academics, we de-prioritize spending time outdoors and engaging in unstructured play. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule.  There are more than 1500 forest kindergartens in Germany – some have a kind of ‘home base’ structure for bad weather but others just shuttle the children to a park on public transit, and keep them outdoors whatever the weather.  Children don’t play with toys, but with sticks, rocks, leaves, and whatever else they can find.  Far from being wild, uncivilized children who struggle in schools, forest kindergarten graduates have a “clear advantage” over the graduates of indoor kindergartens, outperforming their peers in cognitive and physical ability, as well as creativity and social development.  The Wild Network, an organization that tries to increase the amount of nature in children’s lives, has identified several barriers to what it calls Wild Time, which are categorized into four groups.  In the fear category are stranger danger, a risk-averse culture, and dangerous streets.  Time constraints include time-poor parents, a lack of nature in the curriculum, and a lack of unstructured free play in nature.  Spatial issues include vanishing green space and the commercialization of childhood seems to be lumped in here as well, while the rise of screen time is the primary technological concern.  It’s too simplistic to say that too much of all of these things is always terrible – for example, technology can be a great enabler of the outdoors.  My 3 ½-year-old is getting into geocaching, where you use a map on a phone to locate a small hidden object – I mostly use the technology at the moment but I’m sure she’s going to want to do it soon.  I would argue that our children can handle more risk than most of us let them experience, but how much is the right amount? As I mentioned earlier, part of the problem of getting children outside is that their parents have a perception that danger lurks around every corner, which is why playgrounds in Western countries tend to consist of a play structure, some rubberized flooring to prevent injuries, and a fence around the outside to keep people who aren’t supposed to be playing with their children out.  In the 1960s, children were safe wandering around New York City because neighbors and shopkeepers kept a collective eye out for children as they played.  Today that collective responsibility has been replaced by governmental actions (for example, putting signs on playgrounds saying that adults may not enter without a child) and quasi-governmental organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which aims to safeguard children but also contributes to the feeling that stranger danger is a real thing.  In reality, children are almost never kidnapped from playgrounds.  Family members are usually involved when children are kidnapped, and even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is refocusing its attention away from putting missing children’s pictures on milk cartons and toward child molestation, which unfortunately remains an enormous problem. I only want to address injuries briefly, because we’ll cover them in greater depth in the episode on risky play, but I do want to make the point that while the Centers for Disease Control reports that more than 200,000 children are treated in emergency departments every year for injuries sustained at playgrounds, this number has remained steady as the population has increased and most of the injuries treated were minor with the child being sent home without being admitted.  40 children died on playgrounds in the eight-year period between 2001 and 2009, mostly from either strangulation related to swings, jump ropes, dog leashes, and the like, or falls.  While these deaths are tragic, we should put that into context: the same number of children are killed on our roads every two weeks.  The result of the focus on reducing injuries is the standardization of play equipment, which is why you can walk into pretty much any playground across the country and see the same bog-standard equipment – a metal pipe climbing structure, a slide, as few moving parts as possible, and a sea of rubber mat flooring.  I’m probably going to do an episode dedicated to risky play in this series so I won’t get into it too deeply here, but I do want to mention that the type of outdoor play that most Americans think of with the standard playground structure surrounded by a fence and with rubberized flooring underfoot isn’t really very interesting or challenging for children.  This model has developed through parents and cities trying to remove all risk from playgrounds and while playground standards have been effective at reducing