The National Wildlife Federation was in town this weekend for a summit to advance a national policy agenda to connect children with the outdoors. Basically, kids spend a lot less time outside these days, and there are measurable effects of this change in behavior. For example, from the Be Out There web page:
Children who play outside are more physically active, more creative in their play, less aggressive and show better concentration. (Burdette and Whitaker, 2005; Ginsburg et al., 2007)
Sixty minutes of daily unstructured free play is essential to children’s physical and mental health. (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2008)
The most direct route to caring for the environment as an adult is participating in “wild nature activities” before the age of 11. (Wells and Lekies, 2006)
There’s a lot more information available at BeOutThere.org. This is something I struggle with, as I’m not much of an outdoorsman. I want to encourage healthy behaviors in my kids, though, and the best way to do that is by example, so I try to do what I can. Anyway, part of this movement is policy-oriented, as there are many things that can be done at the state and federal level to positively affect children’s daily lives. To get a feel for some of that, I had a brief conversation with Allen Cooper, who has been working for the past 18 months to help establish the Texas Partnership for Children in Nature. The Partnership was formed at the request of a bipartisan group of state legislators by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Texas Department of Agriculture, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the Texas Education Agency. Right now this partnership is working on a strategic plan to bring nature experiences into the daily lives of the 6.7 million children in Texas. Here’s what we talked about:
The Partnership will be presenting its report in December, just in time for the next legislative session. I’ll be watching to see what they come up with.