Shownotes
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Brussoni, M., Rebecca, G., Gray, C., Ishikawa, T., & Sandseter, E.B.H. (2015). What is the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children? A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12(6), 6243-6454.
Centers for Disease Control and Prvention (2016). Playground safety. Author. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/safechild/playground/index.html
Capaldi, C.A., Dopko, R.L., & Zelenski, J.M. (2014). The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 1-15.
Gregory, A. (2017, May 18). Running free in Germany’s outdoor preschools. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/t-magazine/germany-forest-kindergarten-outdoor-preschool-waldkitas.html?_r=0
Hung, W. (2013). Problem-based learning: A learning environment for enhancing learning transfer. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 137(31), 27-38. doi 10.1002/ace.20042
Lund, H.H., Klitbo, T., & Jessen, C. (2005). Playware technology for physically activating play. Artificial Life and Robotics 9(4), 165-174.
Mawson, W.B. (2014). Experiencing the ‘wild woods’: The impact of pedagogy on children’s experience of a natural environment. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 22(4), 513-524.
Moss, S. (2012). Natural Childhood. London: The National Trust.
Nash, R. (1982). Wilderness and the American Mind (3rd Ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Natural Playgrounds Company (2017). Website. Retrieved from http://www.naturalplaygrounds.com/
Outdoor Foundation (2017). Outdoor Participation Report. Author. Retrieved from https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2017-Outdoor-Recreation-Participation-Report_FINAL.pdf
Otto, S., & Pensini, P. (2017). Nature-based environmental education of children: Environmental knowledge and connectness to nature, together, are related to ecological behavior. Global Environmental Change 47, 88-94.
Potvin, P., & Hasni, A. (2014). Interest, motivation, and attitude towards science and technology at K-12 levels: A systematic review of 12 years of educational research. Studies in Science Education 50(1), 85-129.
Richardson, M., Cormack, A., McRobert, L., & Underhill, R. (2016). 30 days wild: Development and evaluation of a large-scale nature engagement campaign to improve well-being. PLOS ONE 11(2), 1-13.
Roisin, H. (2014, April). The overprotected kid. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/
Scott, J. (2000, July 15). When child’s play is too simple; Experts criticize safety-conscious recreation as boring. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/15/arts/when-child-s-play-too-simple-experts-criticize-safety-conscious-recreation.html
Sloan, C. (2013). Transforming multicultural classrooms through creative place-based learning. Multicultural Education 21(1), 26-32. Retreived from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1045830.pdf
Ulset, V., Vitaro, F., Brengden, M., Bekkhus, M., & Borge, A.I.H. (2017). Time spent outdoors during preschool: Links with children’s cognitive and behavioral development. Journal of Environmental Psychology 52, 69-70.
Waite, S., Rogers, S., & Evans, J. (2013). Freedom, flow, and fairness: Exploring how children develop socially at school through outdoor play. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 13(3), 255-276.
Waller, T., Arlemalm-Hager, E., Sandseter, E.B.H., Lee-Hammond, L., Lekies, K., & Wyver, S. (2017). The SAGE handbook of outdoor play and learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Williams, F. (2017). The nature fix. New York, NY: WW Norton.
Wyver, S. (2017). Outdoor play and cognitive development. In T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagster, E.B. Hansen Sandseter, L. Lee-Hammond, K.S. Lekies, and S. Wyer (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of outdoor play and learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Young, J., McGown, E., & Haas, E. (2010). Coyote’s guide to connecting with nature. Owlink Media.
Transcripts
Jen:
Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We're partway 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 the benefits of outdoor play and why it's 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 step at a time. The way we've defined nature and wilderness has changed a lot over the years. Park Ranger Jen is going to come out for a few minutes here.
Jen:
Perhaps it won't surprise some of you who subscribe to my newsletters and have seen pictures of us 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 fertile and flat, and good trees produce shade or fruit or preferably both.
Water is plentiful, the climate is mild, and animals live in harmony with man. You picture the Garden of Eden, it's a fecund place where branches are drooping with fruit and there's no need to be afraid of any animal, and Adam and Eve don't need to do any work to survive, but after the sin in the garden they're driven out into the wilderness. This view of wilderness in the Judeo-Christian religion is in stark contrast with the way wilderness is viewed in other places.
Jen:
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 that were so important to Westerners.
We grew intermittently softer and less soft towards wilderness over the years until the nineteen sixties and seventies 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, citing the Wilderness Act in nineteen sixty-four, which specifically provides for places that are untrammeled by man.
This makes wilderness areas unlike the national parks, which had been created 60 years earlier, because in parks people and nature had always uneasily coexisted, or 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 and 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 they have no physical experience with nature themselves.
Jen:
I'm going to argue today that if we can reframe the way that 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 and carefully acknowledge, without unintentionally stepping on anyone's toes, that there are a lot of issues related to colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism 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're not monolithic. Colonization has obviously had what we can politely call a negative impact on Native peoples in the US 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 they need to live the way we live and adapt to our customs and practices, and now we're saying 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 we should somehow try and 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 I'm 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 Louvre's book Last Child in the Woods that people are spending less time outdoors than they were even just a generation ago. A lot less time.
A raft of studies shows children spending less time outdoors, more time in front of the TV and the 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. A journalist Hannah Rosen wrote in her seminal article The Overprotected Kid in the Atlantic in two thousand fourteen 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 UK, 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 1 in 10.
Jen:
Children don't walk to school alone anymore, or play outside by themselves. Instead they're indoors, and if they're aged between 4 and 9, 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 6 years old in outdoor activities, not including organized sports, declined between two thousand six and two thousand sixteen, but the participation rate of 6 to 12 year olds declined the most, 15%.
Most of that decline happened between two thousand six and two thousand nine, and it's been pretty much flatlined 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 don't know acorns come from trees, and while she doesn't cite the source for 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 deprioritize something else, just because we can't pay attention to everything. If we prioritize academics, we deprioritize spending time outdoors and engaging in unstructured play. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule.
Jen:
There are more than fifteen hundred forest kindergartens in Germany. Some have a kind of home-based 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 and civilized 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 a stranger danger, a risk-averse culture, 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 there 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.
Jen:
For example, technology can be a great enabler of the outdoors. My three-and-a- half-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.
And 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 out who aren't supposed to be playing with their children. In the nineteen sixties, 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.
Jen:
Family members are usually involved when children are kidnapped, and even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is refocusing its attention from putting 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 two hundred thousand children are treated in emergency departments every year for injuries sustained in 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 two thousand one and two thousand nine, mostly from either strangulation related to swings, jump ropes, dog leashes, and the like, or falls.
While these deaths are tragic, we should put them 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 too deeply into it 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 with rubberized flooring underfoot, isn't really very interesting or challenging for children. The model is developed through parents and cities trying to remove all risk from playgrounds, and while playground standards have been effective at reducing death from strangulation, which used to be more common, they've also removed much of the challenge that gave children a reason to play there.
The research provides cautious evidence supporting the idea that risky play encourages children to play more, promotes social interactions, creativity, and resilience, and accident rates per thousand hours of risky play are much lower than when children participate in sporting activities. Some researchers think that the excessive predictability of playgrounds leaves children unable to cope with anything that doesn't fit that mold. They lose the ability to judge risk, and then they get hurt when they come across something different.
Jen:
Personally, I think that a large part of the problem here is that it's hard for anyone to make money off playgrounds that are locally manufactured out of locally appropriate materials. It's a much better business model to have a standard set of offerings that Recreation Department managers can select from a catalogue. There are some exceptions.
The Natural Playgrounds Company builds locally appropriate playgrounds in a way that invites children to interact with materials in a challenging and yet inherently safe way. Their websites, as a contractor, estimated a cost of $100,000 to build a 22,000 square foot natural playground, which has so many things in it. It has a rain garden, a labyrinth, an amphitheater, a big sand play area, a fairy village, a stream, caves, a slide built into a hill, fruit benches, trees, a discovery path, and so on.
And this is apparently about the same cost as it would be to build a 3,000 square foot traditional play structure with rubberized flooring, a fraction of the size of the Natural Playgrounds one. I was also amused to note that this is approximately the same price as I was quoted a couple of years ago to do some minor re-landscaping of our garden in Berkeley, which measures about 300 square feet. Needless to say, that plan is on hold for the indefinite future, and as a result of doing this research, I'm in the process of installing a mini-adventure playground for our daughter.
Stay tuned for more info to come on that in future episodes. I'd also like to spend a bit of time talking about technology and outdoor play, since this intersects with other ideas that we've studied, notably on raising children in a digital world and the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on screen time. So what are the impacts of technology on children's play, and how is this linked to outdoor play? The famous psychologist Jerome Brunner theorized that the first type of cognition to develop comes from doing things that children love to do.
Rolling balls, climbing steps, pouring water, rolling down hills, digging in dirt or sand, and these all help them to understand how the world works. This becomes a building block for the stage where one object can stand for another, which is how a play structure becomes a pirate ship. In the third stage, children develop further their use of language and other symbolic codes, which rides on what they learned in the previous two stages.
Jen:
Doris Bergen, Professor Emerita at Miami University, was at the forefront of research on technology and play until her recent retirement, and was concerned that if children don't get enough time in that first stage of active physical play because they were sedentary, spending time with technology, then they won't be able to develop the cognitive structures they need to fully engage in the subsequent levels. Another view on the technology topic comes from theorists who say that things in a child's environment have inherent qualities that say how they can be used. These qualities are grouped into categories.
Transparency, challenge, and accessibility. Transparency is about whether you can immediately see what to do with an object when you see it. Children don't need to be trained on how to use a ball because its shape suggests what they should do with it.
Transparent objects may have more than one use. A child could run down a hill, or slide down it, or they could stir up a muddy puddle with a stick, or they could jump in the muddy puddle. Technology may have different levels of transparency as well.
Anyone who has witnessed a two-year-old manipulating apps on an iPhone knows they can find their way around if they need to, but many technology-based tools come with specific instructions because they can only be played with in one very restrictive way. The second category, challenge, is about how many different possible ways there are to play with an item. Blocks, clay, and water can all be played with in many different ways.
Jen:
Some outdoor toys like slides and swings are minimally challenging for children, so they make their own challenges by standing up on the swing, or jumping off it, or going down the slide on their stomachs or head first. Indoors, children may combine elements of different kinds of toys to increase their challenge, but it's difficult to change the challenge level of a technological toy because they're designed to do one specific thing. When a toy is transparent and easy to figure out, it's usually a one-finger kind of operation, not a whole-body experience.
Further, the child doesn't get to ask their own questions and find problems they want to solve. They're presented with a problem that the technology designer created. The third category, accessibility, is about whether the item invites interactions with other people, even though I'm not exactly sure what accessibility has to do with interactions.
Many things that are found and played with outdoors invite or require more than one person's participation, which learning theorists like Lev Vygotsky think is critical to children's development. And if his name sounds familiar, he was behind concepts like scaffolding, which we covered a long time ago on the show, and his work also underlies much of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. We did an episode on that too.
Jen:
Some technological toys invite cooperation, but this often happens virtually, and when two children in the same room want to play with a technological toy, one often has to play while the other watches and waits, and probably agitates for his turn. Researchers who have studied children's interactions with technological toys invariably seem to find that the amount and quality of interactions with parents or other children is more limited than when what's called the target child plays with a non-technological toy. This finding has been replicated across a variety of toys and situations.
For example, children playing with a fire truck toy spent most of their time trying to figure out what the toy was supposed to do, and when they went beyond this, their play was fairly routinized. When parents and children interact with a talking book, most parental speech becomes about the function of the book rather than the content of the story. And when they play with a fancy shape sorter toy, parents use less spatial language and less variety of language than when they played with a non-technology enabled toy.
Technologists are in the process of trying to bridge these worlds by designing virtual worlds in which we can go for a walk in the woods. Although journalist Florence Williams found herself getting more motion sick than relaxed when she tried it out, a sensation apparently experienced by around 30% of people trying it, which sounds a bit rough to me. Other researchers have developed sensory tiles that light up when stepped on and which can be installed in playgrounds.
Picture the Dance Dance Revolution video game from the 80s but without the screen. These researchers are excited about the, quote, body brain interplay that, quote, promotes children's physical play and experimentation. Although once again the games that can be played with these tiles are ones that have been designed by the researchers rather than the children.
And the children might get more out of a flat area of open dirt and a stick that they could use to draw a hopscotch court. I've yet to see technology enabled play equipment that conclusively provides more benefits than just playing outdoors with natural materials. So let's talk about some of those benefits of outdoor play because it turns out there are a lot of them.
Jen:
Many studies have looked at the relationship between play and cognition or how the child thinks. There are two main arms of this research, looking at impacts on creativity and executive function. Taking a brief look at creativity first, the biggest study on that front looked at the scores for more than two hundred seventy-two thousand children between kindergarten and 12th grade on a test of creative thinking.
The children were from all over the US although no data was available on socioeconomic status. The major finding from that work was that there has been a decline in children's creativity between nineteen ninety and two thousand eleven. We can't be sure of the reasons for this but researchers speculate that the focus in schools on a narrow range of academic abilities and reduced time for play, including outdoor play, may be partly to blame.
The other aspect of cognition that's been well studied is called executive function which is the set of skills that controls where we put our attention and how we use that attention. Executive function development is critical for children because it has a strong relationship with the control that we exert over ourselves in situations like paying attention to the teacher, staying focused in the classroom when Johnny is poking you with a pencil and sticking with a task even when you don't enjoy it. It also has a role in factors beyond school like obesity, criminal activity and drug use.
We don't exactly understand the mechanism through which play benefits executive function, partly because play takes so many forms that it can be difficult to understand the relationship and partly because the gold standard for experimental studies requires a highly controlled situation that doesn't really reflect how children actually play. This means you're likely to end up with a finding that if children play in this highly contrived way then they experience X benefit but no children actually really would play like that. Studies that don't follow an experimental design often find a benefit from outdoor play as well.
One recent one found a positive relationship between time spent outdoors in preschool and children's working memory as well as an inverse relationship between time spent outdoors and inattention hyperactivity symptoms. But because these kinds of studies aren't experimental we can't be sure that it's the time spent outdoors that causes the effects. What does seem to be clear from the collective research is that executive function is very malleable in childhood.
Jen:
If children are supported in developing their executive function then this development will likely occur but if children don't get that support then their executive function development will be hampered. There are a number of ways of providing that support including through specific social and emotional learning interventions in school that can be moderately effective. But other researchers argue that rather than training children to develop executive function skills it would be much cheaper and just as effective to enhance the quality of their play by providing more and better opportunities for outdoor play which have a host of other potential benefits as well.
Researchers think that play supports executive function development because play makes heavy cognitive demands on the brain as the child sets a goal and then works towards it. That making complex motor movements also requires a lot of cognitive load and the exercise creates physiological changes in the brain. I should caveat though that a lot of this research involves play where the researcher says now go and run around for 10 minutes and then we'll give you a test rather than the kind where the children play freely.
Yet another benefit of outdoor play is the affordances that it offers for children to develop social and emotional skills. I found a textbook on the benefits of forest schools that tantalized me with a statement from a teacher at a forest school in Denmark who said that quote we are one of three institutions that feed into the local school. The teachers there are all very happy with our children.
They say all the pupils are socially more advanced and the most ready to learn. I confess that I was a bit disappointed to find that the source for that statement cited in a textbook was none other than an article in the British newspaper The Times. Hardly a model of peer-reviewed research but in the course of research for this episode I was lucky enough to find corroborating evidence for that statement.
Most of our indoor environments are highly controlled by adults. Home is controlled by parents and school is controlled by teachers. We might say that school exists for the benefit of the children but really children have very little say over what they learn and how they learn it.
By contrast outdoor spaces have a more ambiguous identity with nobody fully in control which allows children to try on different ways of being and experience agency which is the idea that you have some power to affect the outcomes of your own life. Because adults don't exert so much control over outdoor environments children get a chance to try and solve problems for themselves to see what effects are successful and how they might need to modify their approach next time. They get to practice negotiation and socially cohesive behaviors which as the preschool teacher in Denmark noticed gets them labeled socially advanced once they get to school.
Jen:
I do think it's ironic that it's in adults stepping back and allowing children to do their own thing that children learn a key skill that makes them ready for learning later in life and that this is more effective than children spending more time with adults being forced to sit still and memorize things like letters and numbers. We do have to acknowledge though that children do sometimes use this freedom for nefarious purposes. One group of researchers in England had children wear little felt bags containing audio recorders around their necks as a way of capturing children's interactions without the presence of adults causing the children to change their behavior.
One boy was playing with a dollhouse near others who were engaged in boisterous play and another child began to taunt this boy with homophobic slurs which were unobserved by adults a situation that's obviously undesirable. On the flip side playing outdoors gives children a chance to create cohesive playgroups on the basis of shared interests rather than because a child looks like them which is how young children tend to judge whether or not people are like them and thus make good playmates. Research does indicate that rather than spend more time on academic activities to promote our children's outcomes in school it would actually be better to spend less time on these activities and more time outdoors playing doubly especially in preschool settings which are nominally preparing children to succeed in school but which may actually by focusing on academic activities rather than on play be hampering children's executive function development.
Richard Louv has a lot to say about the relationship between academic outcomes and being outdoors. In his book Last Child in the Woods he cites a report that was published in two thousand two called Closing the Achievement Gap Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning which was the summary of a decade-long working group consisting of the education agencies from 12 states in the US which studied the benefits of using the environment as an integrating context for learning. This is also known as place-based learning and it's basically the idea that children find it really interesting to learn more about what's around them.
You don't have to convince a child to be interested in the local park or woods or wetland because they're inherently drawn to these places. Children lose interest in science over the course of their school careers because they don't see how science has any meaning in their lives. When they learn about dry concepts like leverage from a textbook they have no use for the information and don't retain it.
Jen:
But when they need to learn about leverage and mass and pulleys to get some materials across a stream because they've volunteered to help local park managers build a trail they figure it out pretty quickly and they retain that information. And it's not just physics. Students in the classrooms that were piloting place-based learning performed better on standardized tests in reading, writing, math and social studies.
They had fewer disciplinary problems in the classroom. They had increased enthusiasm for learning and greater pride and ownership in their learning accomplishments. With results like that it's hard to believe I had to learn about place-based learning in an obscure textbook that I happened to pick up while on my layover day in my backpacking trip at the Environmental Education Center in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State and not as an integral component of the master's in education that I'm about to finish.
In fact the concept has not been mentioned even once in any of my courses and each time I sneak in a mention of it my professor says great stuff and I get a great grade and I'm thinking why do I have to learn about this stuff in my own time and work it into my papers rather than it being the other way around. But the crux here of course is that it's not just about increasing the amount of time spent in the outdoors. I can't tell you to make sure your child spends 20 percent more time outside and all of a sudden they'll get better grades in school.
The report didn't just look at taking regular lessons outside they looked at a wholesale shift in how teaching and learning happen. In an ideal world teachers stop asking the questions, a radical concept I know, and then the students start asking them and when the students ask the questions they become invested in finding out the answers. This kind of learning can happen inside a classroom but it tends to work best when it happens in a place that students actually care about which tends to be outdoors where they can run around and get filthy and where learning looks about as far from a classroom environment as it's possible to get.
Jen:
The Closing the Achievement Gap report was published in two thousand two and aside from some gains in outdoor based education for preschoolers and a rise in the number of schoolyard gardens in which students get to spend an hour every few weeks, not much has changed. There is some debate over the type of access to the outdoors that parents and teachers can and should provide to children and what kinds of activities should be encouraged once they're there. One researcher in New Zealand followed a group of children at a preschool for six months on their weekly visits to a small local woodland.
Three of the group's teachers were very hands-off in their approach and waited for the children to come to the teachers with observations and interests and made no attempt to modify the natural environment. Another four of the teachers were much more hands-on and created new experiences for the children like a fire pit where marshmallows could be toasted, a bridge across the stream consisting of a rope to stand on and another one to hold on to. Imagine that happening in a preschool in the US.
These teachers directed the children's attention to the suitability of different sticks for marshmallow toasting and the way the tension on the ropes changed as the children crossed the bridge. The researchers didn't believe that either method was necessarily better than the other and indeed the children seemed to gain something different out of each type of experience. What parents might want to try and do is to find a balance between calling children's attention to things the parent finds interesting and allowing time for the children to follow their own interests and also just have free play time that might not seem particularly goal-oriented to adults.
Jen:
When children have ample time for self-directed learning activities in their indoor lives as well, there's certainly no harm in introducing ideas in the outdoor setting. Other researchers suggest though that when children spend a lot of time in environments where they don't get to choose what they do, it's especially valuable for children to use their time outdoors for self-directed rather than adult-directed play. Another thing that's implicit in the New Zealand study and that I hope to look into more in the future is the value of knowing one place deeply.
The children walk to the same piece of woodland every week with occasional visits to another woodland a bit further down the same road. I know that people like John Young who have written books about tracking wildlife and becoming really connected with nature advocate for deeply knowing a place by visiting it many, many times in all weathers and seasons. I assume there is value in knowing other places and how your special place fits in with other special places as well, although I don't yet have any research on that either way.
Jen:
So you're a parent and maybe you haven't spent so much time outside with your child beyond the traditional rubber floor playgrounds and maybe you'd like to think about doing something a bit differently. But maybe you're feeling kind of overwhelmed because you don't know much about the environment. Well, we have an entire episode coming up for you on exactly that topic in the very near future.
But in the meantime, I'd like to leave you with the findings of another recent study, which found that knowledge about the environment was actually only very weakly related to what researchers called ecological behavior. A far more powerful predictor was connectedness to nature, which was defined as the closeness and relationship between an individual and nature. What this means is that it doesn't matter if you as a parent can identify 20 bird species or if you can't tell a gull from a crow.
Jen:
It doesn't matter if you know which animals live where or why eucalyptus trees have that stringy bark or which plants are native species and which are invaders. It matters far more that you get outside and just have fun playing in mud and dragging kelp along a beach as my daughter loves to do, collecting leaves, noticing different things around you and wondering about things that interest you and supporting your child and wondering about things that interest him or her. If you and your child still want to know the answers to your questions when you get home, you can find a book at the library or look up answers online and maybe that will be the beginning of an investigation of trees or birds or who knows what.
You don't have to know everything about nature to enjoy it or for your child to get enormous benefits from being in it. Listeners sometimes write to me and ask me to summarize my episodes at the end in case they miss something important. The summary here is go outside, have fun, everything else will follow.
Jen:
Thanks so much for listening. As usual, the references for today's show can be found on my website at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash outdoor play. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Please subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes and sign up for our mailing list at yourparentingmojo.com to receive a free gift. Seven relationship-based strategies to support your children's development while making parenting just a little bit easier on you. For more respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive, we'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.