Many will once again resolve to get organized or lose ten pounds in the new year, but National Wildlife Federation (NWF) is recommending a resolution with profound impacts because it recaptures an essential part of childhood, outdoor play. By making the 2010 Be Out There Resolution to spend more time outside in 2010, Americans will be making a resolution that’s both good for their families and fun to keep. Everyone who makes the 2010 Be Out There Resolution will receive the Know, Go and Grow Be Out There Toolkit with important facts, fun tips and interactive tools to help them keep the resolution.
Outdoor time significantly enhances children’s physical and mental well-being, but, sadly, today’s kids don’t get much. In the last two decades, childhood has moved indoors. While previous generations ran around in nature until called in for dinner, modern children spend only four to seven minutes outdoors per day. Research in the fields of public health, psychology, and medicine documents the toll an “indoor childhood” takes on kids. NWF launched the Be Out There movement (www.BeOutThere.org) to return to the nation’s children something they don’t even know they’ve lost, their connection to the natural world.
“To address childhood’s fundamental shift indoors, we are asking parents to make the 2010 Be Out There Resolution to Know, Go and Grow,” says National Wildlife Federation’s Vice President of Education, Kevin Coyle. “We want them to know and understand the importance of outdoor time; to go outside more with their kids and grow the Be Out There movement by spreading the word and inviting friends along.”
Children reap wide-ranging and numerous benefits when encouraged to interact with nature in an outdoor setting including better eyesight, enhanced physical fitness and less obesity, increased classroom preparedness and lower levels of stress and depression.
There’s a reason they call it the great outdoors™. NWF hopes parents will show their children what that reason is by making the 2010 Be Out There resolution at beoutthere.org/resolution. This is one Time Out kids will actually enjoy.
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A similar philosophy is expressed on "freerangekids.wordpress.com." Started by New York columnist Lenore Skenazy earlier this year, it's a wide ranging discussion on giving children the freedom we had when we were children. Inspired by the response to the blog, Lenore has published a book titled "Free Range Kids" which advises that so many of the "perils" that the media use to build viewership and readership are vastly overrated, and that children are more in danger from restrictions by over-worried parents and busybody neighbors than they are from the few perverts and scumbags in the real world.
Intriguing. I often wonder how kids who are stuck inside on the computer all day will turn out. I rode my bicycle everywhere and did all sorts of crazy things and I think I turned out OK. Hmmmmm
Mickie
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