One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun — which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
-Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
What once came easily to people in different cultures now requires decisions, intentional steps, habit-forming, and goal-making.
So it is with children playing outdoors. Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, her description of playing house under tree branches with her sister sounds remarkably like many sisters playing house in many different ages. Wandering around outside, the girls find things that they use as props in a game of reenacting their family’s daily activities in the household. What could be more natural? There’s nothing natural about it anymore apparently.
Now, the idea of going outside for no particular reason is strange and uncomfortable for many of us. Trapped in our electronically efficient but often filthy and lonely houses, we forget about stepping outside for a breath of fresh air. Yet, most people can recognize that there is something that can only be described as “magic” about time outside. There are, no doubt, studies that attest to the physical and mental benefits of being in the great outdoors, but you don’t need someone else to explain it to you. The experience, if you let yourself have it, speaks for itself.
Watching healthy children outside attests to it, too. There’s something mysteriously calming and nurturing about being in dirt and finding weird bugs. For the sensitive child, there is sometimes an astonishing difference in demeanor, concentration, ability to socially engage after 90 minutes in front of the television and 90 minutes spent outside. Going outside also breaks up the tedium of domesticity and gives a pause to petty argument and the friction of family life.
We know it is good, but when do we find the time to do it? That is where Ginny Yurich offers a marvelous suggestion. Ginny runs the organization 1000 Hours Outside. The goal of the initiative is to encourage families to get children outside for 1000 hours a year. When parents first hear that ideally their children should spend more than three hours outside a day the reaction is often confusion, quickly followed by guilt and shame at the impossibility of ever achieving this metric of excellence.
And yet, as Yurich presents, aiming for roughly 20 hours outside a week can be quite manageable. With deliberate chunks of time outside here and there in the week, the hours accumulate and by the end of the year, the child has been outside for 1000 hours.
The goal seems ludicrous to some people. These might be the same people who assume that the 1000 books before kindergarten means 1000 different books, not realizing that reading “Good Night Moon” 463 times counts as 463 books toward you 1000 book goal. It is not as insane as it looks at first blush. The 1000 hours outside may seem ambitious, but it is attainable. Especially when you consider, as Yurich notes, that the average American tyke spend 1,200 hours a year looking at an electronic screen.
The nice, round number of 1000, roughly three hours a day, offers a nice benchmark. It’s hard to imagine hundreds of hours, but it is easy to imaging spending an hour outside after breakfast and remembering to get outside for a couple hours in the cool of the evening. There are, of course, glorious days in most climates. Those days when the air is inviting all day long. At such times, spending six or eight hours outside in a day is easy. Realizing this compensates for the days when the air quality is unsafe or the weather is foul (though, according to the Germans, there is no such as bad weather, only bad clothes).
One of the other benefits of the 1000-hour goal is prompting the discovery of activities we generally do indoors that can be delightfully brought outside. Meals, sometimes all of them, can be taken in the fresh air. Books can be read aloud in the shade of a tree. Coloring and painting work nicely outside for most children of moderate impulse control. The three-hour-a-day goal can nudge you for the door when you wouldn’t otherwise consider it.
Ever idealistic to our detriment, we tend to think that “being outside” must involve informative nature study and world-renowned trails. Not so! As it turns out, there is outside all over the place: patches of grass, scraps of garden, playgrounds surrounded by trees. Even suburbanites can avail themselves of the outdoors. In an era of constant air-conditioning and manicured, unused yards, going outside your own home will quickly introduce you to the neighbors who also spend time outside.
No, it doesn’t need to be pristine and perfect to be magical. Any wooded trail will do for rejuvenating. And beware the wasted energy of weather jealousy. It can be easy in the damp heat of a southern summer to envy the cool evenings of a northern coastal town. And yet, that southern swamp will feel fabulous in mid-February while the great north struggles under the remaining month-and-a-half of snow. Your day in the sun will come; pay no attention to the virtues of other places if it poisons your appreciation for your own backyard.
Whatever the evolutionary roots, the scientific data, the anecdotal support: simply trust that going out of doors is good for you and your kids. Sometimes it is not for us to wonder why but simply to do. As Yurich recounts, “Our greatest times as a family, and my most successful times mothering almost exclusively point back to these fully immersive nature days.”
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