Children benefit from exploring outdoors
At Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Michigan’s eastern Upper Peninsula, families can explore 42 miles of shore, examine incredibly colored rocks, spot shy animals, learn why the cliffs look painted and bodysurf down a former log slide.
In the late 19th century, lumberjacks slid logs by wooden chute down this steep incline, to be loaded on schooners waiting on Lake Superior. Speeding logs sometimes generated enough friction that the dry chute caught fire. The chute’s long gone, but the sand slide offers fun for all ages.
After stripping the forests of timber, companies defaulted on taxes and the lands became government-owned, explains park heritage education chief Gregg Bruff during a Lakeshore tour. “What we see today is second- and third-growth forest.” Bruff notes that another incredible formation was dubbed “Miners Castle” in 1770 by English explorers.
Like many parks, Pictured Rocks offers free natural science and cultural heritage education programs. And what better family exercise than hiking around woods, waterfalls, streams and monolithic perched dunes?
Catching the thunder of the film “Where the Wild Things Are,” the National Wildlife Federation has started Be Out There, a campaign to get families to spend more time outdoors — including a daily Green Hour. The goal: to enhance health, happiness, and connection to animals, plants and other elements of the natural world.
Research indicates that time outside can improve children’s physical, mental and emotional health as well as classroom performance. Ashleigh Poff, education coordinator at NWF’s Reston office, shared an array of statistics:
» Exposure to natural settings after school and on weekends may be “widely effective” in reducing attention deficit symptoms in children (University of Illinois).
» Sufficient outdoor time improves overall health of children while lengthening attention spans, diminishing aggressiveness and improving test scores (NWF data).
» Children who spend more daytime outside tend to have better distance vision (2008 “Optometry and Vision Science” journal reports).
» Children spend half as much time outside as they did 20 years ago, according to a University of Michigan study. Over the past 20 years, Centers for Disease Control data indicates obesity among children ages 6 to 11 more than doubled to 17 percent. The number of clinically obese adolescents ages 12 to 19 more than tripled, to 17.6 percent.
» The average American child spends more than six hours a day staring at some kind of electronic screen (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation).
Back in the 1940s, forester and conservationist Aldo Leopold suggested in “A Sand County Almanac” that we cultivate a “land ethic.” He defined land as not a commodity but “a community to which we belong” and conservation as “a state of harmony between men and land.” He observed that chopping wood teaches where heat comes from; that bird-watching provides entertainment not found in theaters. Outdoor time puts children in touch with the circle of life, from seed-spreading animals to plants that provide food and shelter. Adults rediscover what Leopold called “the essentials” of life.
For sharing a sense of wonder, there’s no greater bargain than the great outdoors.
Reach Robin Tierney at [email protected].
