WHY KIDS NEED TO GO OUTSIDE
“You kids go outside and play — it’s good for you”: It turns out that your mom was onto something.
As a child, I loved pedaling my bike around the neighborhood, playing hide and seek, sledding down snow-covered hills and encountering squirrels and rabbits in the woods behind our house in Indiana. These activities helped me establish a connection to the natural world. It was a wondrous time in my Baby Boomer life — pre-smart phones, pre-tablets, pre-laptops.
Fast-forward to today. A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation uncovered a disturbing trend concerning youth and technology. Experts call them the M2 Generation — highly tech-savvy children ages 8 to 18 whose lives seem to revolve around electronic media: computers, music, mobile devices, video games and television.
The survey notes that students devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to entertainment media each day, or more than 53 hours a week. Fifty-three hours a week! And because kids often use more than one medium at a time, they manage to pack a whopping 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those seven and a half hours.
But isn’t it a good thing for kids to be adept at technology? Yes and no. Computer skills are extremely important in school and down the line, but electronic-media saturation is another story. High media-device use appears to have an adverse effect on a child’s academic performance.
Almost half of the children in the survey who were considered “heavy” users had grades of mostly Cs or lower, compared to less than 25 percent of children considered “light” users. Behavioral issues were also more common among “heavy” media users.
So what role does nature play in all of this? Talk to my friend Jaime González, Conservation Education Director for the Katy Prairie
Conservancy, and he’ll tell you just how crucial it is for kids to unplug from technology and open their eyes to nature. Engage in nature, and good things can happen — kids may even get smarter.
Jaime interacts with children and teens in four school districts around Houston, teaching them about all things prairie. History, biodiversity, cowboy culture, environmental threats, wildlife: He covers it all. But he doesn’t just lecture students – he helps them experience prairies firsthand. And they don’t have to leave their urban settings to visit a prairie.
Jaime and committed volunteers, such as Texas Master Naturalist Ahlene Shong, bring “prairies to the people” by establishing pocket prairies in public spaces including MD Anderson Cancer Center and Hermann Park, and on 15 elementary, middle and high school campuses. Ahlene, a former teacher, is the driving force behind Kolter Elementary School’s pocket prairie in Meyerland.
“It’s magical to watch what happens when students at our Prairie Builder Schools realize they are planting grasses and wildflowers which will provide critical habitat for migratory birds and pollinators, such as bees and butterflies,” says Jaime. “As they start to participate in these living classrooms, the increase in their level of engagement and thirst for learning is dramatic.”
Jaime pointed me to a research roundup by the nonprofit Texas
Children in Nature and sponsored
by the Texas Parks & Wildlife
Department. The website puts forth compelling research from academics around the country about why having time for unstructured, creative play in nature is critical to the wellbeing of our children.
The studies cited show that nature is important to children’s development — intellectually, emotionally, socially, spiritually and physically. As children spend more time on technology and less time with nature, there are negative consequences for their health and intellectual development. Especially beneficial are school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free-play areas, habitat for wildlife, walking trails and gardens, such as those at the Prairie Builder Schools. More fascinating findings, via Texas Children in Nature, show that
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