While kids at most schools may be stuck home on a snow day, preschoolers at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Nature Preschool learn a little about gravity. Photo courtesy Chicago Botanic Garden

The Nature of Learning: Why Kids Need to Get Outside More

Being in nature boosts performance and physical and mental health. So why are most school kids cooped up?

Those glorious days of free-range youth, when we ran through forests or fields after school and spent weekends and summers outside by parental decree, are long gone, replaced by all-day activity scheduling and the lure of social media and video games. Fading, too, is the connection with nature that’s been ingrained in the human psyche and biology throughout time. In just a generation or two, we’ve pulled tots and adolescents away from the natural world, helicoptered them safely inside the house or locked them up in windowless daycare centers and concrete classrooms, all the while robbing them of the very nature of childhood being.

Meanwhile, 20 percent of US school children are obese, triple the figure from the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Children are designed, by nature, to play often in physically vigorous ways,” says Peter Gray, author of “Free to Learn” (Basic Books). “That is how they develop fit bodies and the capacity for graceful, well-coordinated movement. “Over the past several decades, children’s opportunities to play freely and vigorously have been greatly reduced, and over this same period their physical fitness has declined.”

One reason, Gray points out: About three-quarters of U.S. kids age 3 to 5 are in some sort of daycare or preschool, and on average 70 percent or more of their time there is sedentary.

Several early-learning schools around the country are trying to change all this, for both the academic and physical benefits.

The number of nature-based preschools and so-called “forest kindergartens” jumped 66 percent year-over-year to 250 in 2017, the most recent year for which formal data is available from the Natural Start Alliance, an advocacy group for nature-based learning. Those schools were serving about 10,000 students. The figure has grown since, said Emilian Geczi, director of the alliance. Nearly 400 schools now belong to his organization, “and the real number is likely much higher.”