Why Kids Need Nature!

"When I was a kid, I’d be out the door first thing in the morning and back home when the sun set. I can’t even remember eating," Ron King told Playground Magazine during a recent interview. 

Not far from our home there was a foothill to the small mountain behind our house with an old growth pine forest covering the hillside. The dense pine canopy limited the undergrowth, so it was nice and open beneath the branches.

There was bedrock on the hill, and water would seep out between its layers in the early part of winter, slowly flow down the hill, and freeze over. And then it would snow, so we had a perfect combination of white fluff on the sides (to cushion potential crashes) and a center run that was almost sheer ice, and fast. Our Radio Flyer sleds (I still have mine!) had steel runners and a crossbar handle that bent the runners left or right to make you feel like you had control.

The run was only about 500 feet, but to us it seemed like a mile, and we would do it over and over and over again, all day long, up and down the steep hill, up and down. No supervision, no rules, just lots of exercise, and free, natural play we happened to discover one day.

Summertime was glorious, and freed us to travel further on our bikes to other parts of town, discovering backyards, stream corridors, swamps, wildflowers, and tall trees.

We don’t live far from my hometown, so I frequently visit the old neighborhood just to check it out. It’s more developed and the lower part of the small mountain behind our old home is now crisscrossed with roads and yards and fences and everything else that curbs wild exploration. But higher on the mountain there are still expanses of woods and forests and streams and rock outcroppings that will always be there and always beckoning, but apparently not to today’s children.

Young families continue to move in with lots of children, but the neighborhood is dead. No groups of kids gathering together to plan the day. No laughter, no street games, no pickup baseball, no sled- ding, nothing. Not even on weekends.

Roaming the neighborhood used to offer an excellent opportunity to experience all kinds of natural, discovery-oriented play, but most kids don’t do this anymore. Not only are their parents more protective (so their kids aren’t allowed outside on their own), but kids themselves are busy with organized sports and weekend games, after school activities, increased homework, and being plugged into TVs, computers, electronic games, or social websites for hours a day.

Further, their outdoor play is limited to metal, plastic, or wooden equipment in playgrounds surrounded by chain-link fences, so free, natural play is just not possible for most children.

What’s troubling about this is many children don’t like this play situation one bit and would rather have what I had. Further, numerous studies prove that the lack of natural play opportunities is bad for their health.

In a recent survey of 543 children commissioned by the Children’s Play Council, the British Market Research Bureau found that almost 90% of children “would rather play in natural spaces such as gardens, parks, and local fields building dens and getting muddy, to playing computer games,” and that nearly three in four children would like to play outside more often.

Taylor says that exposure to the natural world improves the ability of children to concentrate (2002), Crain says it increases their powers of observation and creativity (2001), Pyle says it improves their awareness, reasoning, and observational skills (2002), Wells & Evans say it increases their ability to deal with stress and adversity (2003), and Grahn, Fjortoft, and Sageie say that children who play regularly in natural environments show more advanced motor fitness, including coordination, balance, and agility, and are sick less often (1997, 2000).

Other research shows that exposure to the natural world helps children to more easily assimilate geographical, ecological, analytical, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills, and to better integrate math, science, language arts, and the social sciences.

So, does play in a natural environment offer amazing benefits to the overall well-being of children? Yes, we all know that, yet here’s where it begins to get interesting.

Playgrounds are built by adults, and typically they don’t ask children for advice. So back in 2002 we thought it might be a novel idea to survey children and get them to tell us about their favorite outside play activities - just to see what they’d say. Then, we reasoned, we could design playgrounds that let kids play the way they prefer.

Over the years we’ve asked over 6,000 children about their favorite outside play activities, and sure enough, 95% prefer playing in natural environments. They want all the things we preferred when we were kids: playing in the leaves, climbing trees, looking for bugs, climbing on rocks, and making forts. They also want places for quiet reflection, listening to the wind, and watching things grow and change. They like building and inventing things, exploring and discovering, playing in the dirt, playing in the rain, and socializing.