Children are Outdoors Less than Prison Inmates

A recent Facebook prowl pulled my attention to an article written in The Guardian about the amount of time children spend outdoors. The title, “Three Quarters of U.K. Children Spend Less Time Outdoors Than Prison Inmates”caught me completely off guard.

I thought, there is no way that can be accurate. Poorly conducted study, perhaps?

Unfortunately, that was not the case. This study has been the topic of articles from Time, Yale Environment, and many other credible sources citing the same numbers. In fact, an international campaign dubbed “Free the Kids-Dirt is Good” has been created around this alarming statistic.

‘Free the Kids’ filmed a short video at the Wabash Maximum Security Prison located in Indiana, USA to show just how piercing this information should be to parents and educators around the world. Inmates at any prison in the United States are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time daily (one hour in the U.K.).

Three out of every four children will spend less than an hour outside each day.

One fifth of the surveyed families reported that children do not play outside at all on a given day.

The study also found that one in nine children had not set foot in a park, forest, beach or any other natural environmental within the last year.

This is craziness, people!

I had to take a step back: I was privileged to grow up in a safe, rural environment where playtime was encouraged and my elementary school had an ‘outdoor classroom’ option even though we rarely used it. This is not the situation for a vast number of our young ones, and many parents have tightened the safety net surrounding their children’s free time.

Reasons Why Kids are Spending Less Time Outdoors:

A huge reason and the first reason we will discuss is screen time, screen time, screen time. We have heard it thousands of times, but it doesn’t seem like much has been done to control the issue. The survey concluded that 74% of children ages five to twelve spent less than an hour outdoors, however those same children spend two to three hours or more per day on electronic media. See graphic from Nature of Americans below. One study on children ages two to five recorded a whopping 32 hours of screen time in an average week. That is almost the amount of time you spend at your full time job.

Outdoor safety was another serious concern that many adults expressed as a deterrent from spending time outside or feeling comfortable with their children out of the house alone. The results, broken down by race, show that over 50% of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian adults feel the outdoors is unsafe. Just over 30% of White Americans also feel uneasy about spending time outside. Please note that the US is now less than 50% ‘White American‘ with the majority of our country now called the “minorities”. While socioeconomic factors and population density play a significant role in outdoor safety, there is an obvious lack of resources that allow people to feel like they can relax and enjoy what nature has to offer. Additional graphic with the breakdown of these numbers below:

Finally (because I could go on about this for days, call me and find out I dare you), I want to leave you with the hope our children have. The survey team asked the eight to twelve year old age group if playing in the outdoors and nature had helped make them creative, happy, healthier, and smarter as they grew up. Their responses make my heart happy and show that if we can give them a way, they have the will. Children can embrace the intrinsic value of things far more comprehensively than most adults. One last graphic for your viewing pleasure:

Give a child a raw opportunity to love what God intended, and they will. Provide a child with a place to explore, and they will turn it upside down (often literally). Help a child experience the fullness and wonder of our natural environment, and healthy habits will begin to grow.

I cannot emphasize enough the need for kids to get muddy and feel at peace in a green space. For me, that was and always will be the woods. For the city folk, that might be a nice park or a bench along a river. Whatever it is, we should get creative together to find a way to help you and your family enjoy being outside again. Your environment is what you make of it, but please help get our kids involved with nature.

Stay tuned for more on this topic in the future because it is extremely important to me and the life I expect my family to live.

For now, if you are interested, click on The Nature of Americans to be taken to the homepage of this study. For the free two minute video, click Free the Kids to be directed to their homepage.