"Australian kids spend less than two hours a day outside— which is less than our maximum security prisoners"
How scary is that heading? I have just found this article "Benefits of Outdoor Play" saved on my computer. Giving me cause to reflect on how grateful I am that we were able to home educate our children with loads of outdoor play and consequently loads of outdoor learning.
If getting your kids outside is important, we just may have some equipment to help them to be active and creatively engaged in your yard-space ever how small it might be. The love of the outdoors doesn't need loads of equipment but just the right equipment for your childs interests and energy levels. Our team of lovely play experts will be able to guide you by age, interests and your available yard size.
Please read the article and click through to the Nature Play WA or Early Childhood Australia Websites for more ideas to engage your kids outside in 2023.
Benefits of outdoor play
- Written by Griffin Longley - CEO of Nature Play WA
We all know childhood has changed. Mostly we know it in the casual way that we know petrol prices go up before the holidays; that apples don’t taste like apples anymore; and that 90 per cent of all new movies are written by a computer called Byron that is chained up in a Hollywood basement.
We talk about how we used to walk 10 kilometres to school while peeling a bag of spuds with one hand and fighting off the Jones boys with the other. How kids don’t know how to make their own fun anymore and about the days when a bag of marbles, a slingshot and a farthing were all that a kid could hope for in the whole wide world.
But for all the nostalgic remastering of our memories, we rarely take the time to think through what the changes in childhood really are and what they might mean for the generations living through them.
So what has changed?
Kid’s faces are blue with the flickering light of a screen more than ever before, we know that. We know that most of the digital games they are locked into warrant the name of ‘play’ to about the same extent that colouring-in warrants the name of ‘art’—the creative work was outsourced to a bean-bag bedecked studio full of hipster 20-year-olds with tattoos, skinny arms and playful eyes. Or to Byron.
We know that our parks are largely empty of the mobs of kids that turned bins into wickets, trees into forts, ovals into tennis ball war zones and the shrubs into cubbies just one generation ago.
You don’t need to have grown up on Cloud Street, or in the pages of a Ginger Meggs comic strip, to know that. But you might not know that research shows us that modern Australian kids spend less than two hours a day outside—which is less than our maximum security prisoners. Think about that for a moment.
More than 22 hours of every day inside.
It is no wonder that less than one in five Australian kids climb trees these days. Or that the vast majority of Australian kids get less than one hour of physical activity a day; this is a key piece in the complex puzzle that has led to nearly a quarter of Australian kids being overweight or obese and 14 per cent diagnosed with a mental health disorder.
We are living through the biggest change in the experience of childhood in history.
The unstructured, childdriven, social, outdoor play that has been the mainstay of childhood throughout history and the fundamental way that our children exercise, interact, experiment and interpret the world around them is becoming a rarity. And that is too big a part of our human inheritance for us to afford to lose.
The reasons for this shift are many and complex. It is a far bigger change than just the arrival of digital entertainment. Technology is not the enemy, imbalance is the enemy.
The factors include that modern parents, educators and carers, have come to be marinated in fear in a way that past generations simply weren’t. The culture of litigation and its bed-mate, risk aversion, has become entrenched. We are increasingly focused on measurable, assessable outcomes from children.
Family structures have changed; residential blocks have shrunk and given away the backyard in the process; our roads are busier; and our idea of what good parenting and good teaching looks like has changed.
And on it goes.
There are a great many modern realities, and fictions, conspiring against the kind of free-range childhood that has for so long before now been defined by that great slogan of parenthood—‘go outside and make sure you are home by dark’. So many, that simple nostalgia or concerted table thumping will never overcome them.
The great challenge is to find twenty first century ways for twenty-first century children to experience more of the imaginative space, the physical freedoms, the dirty-footed wonder and the grazed-knee confidence of a full childhood.
We can’t turn the clock back to 1975, nor would we want to. At Nature Play WA (a Western Australian not-for-profit in partnership with the Department of Sport and Recreation) we are working on ways to thread some of that play (nature play) back into modern life.
We have developed a passport program through our website that delivers hundreds of activity ideas to kids, families and schools; and we are developing a toolkit and workshop program for early childhood education and care centres, schools and local governments interested in developing play spaces that encourage nature play and much more.
You can find out more about our efforts at natureplaywa.org.au. But creating modern childhoods that maintain the human inheritance of nature play will take a community-wide effort. And the first step is to individually, and collectively, recognise and reassert the value of letting kids get dirty, fall over and build a cubby out of sticks.
Griffin Longley Chief Executive Officer, Nature Play WA
Home - Nature Play WA
www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au
