National Wildlife Federation Recommends New Year’s Resolution to Get Kids Outside
January 5, 2010, by eugenebMy daughter, Casey, 7, was quite candid about her New Year’s Resolution this year: “Eat more bacon, and go to more warm places like Hawaii.”
Okay, so she has an affinity for pork and the utterance was made during a below-zero cold snap here in Steamboat Springs. It doesn’t sound like that bad of one to me.
But the National Wildlife Federation has a better one for kids and parents that doesn’t involve pork products. It is recommending a resolution recapturing an essential part of childhood — outdoor play. By making the 2010 Be Out There Resolution to spend more time outside in 2010, Americans will resolve that it’s good for their families and fun to get kids outdoors. 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 www.beoutthere.org/resolution. This is one time out kids will actually enjoy (and feel free to reward them with bacon).
Let Them Eat Bacon: The reward for going on a mid-winter hut trip.
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