Children Playing Outdoors Requires Leadership: 3 Suggestions

Children need to play outdoors. Virtually everyone agrees. The question is, “How do we effectively encourage children to play outdoors?” As is so many times the case, the word “leadership,” answers the question.

Dr. Mohler from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary recently published an article with the title, Have Our Children Forgotten How to Play Outdoors? Mohler interacts extensively with a book by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder, which raises concerns about the small amount of time children are playing outside. Mohler writes:

In reality, many children have almost no contact with nature. They play indoors, focusing on electronic screens that produce an artificial experience. They are surrounded by creature comforts and watched over by anxious parents who are afraid that violent criminals are lurking behind every green tree. “Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature,” Louv observes. “That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities.”

Read the rest from Dr. Mohler here.

But “parental whining” is not going to solve the problem of children not playing outdoors.

Unfortunately, too many times our response as parents to children’s tendency to watch television or play video games is to talk about how much better we were as children and how awful things are today. It is certainly the case that most of us played outside more when we were growing up. My mother used to kick us out the door to several hundred acres of our farm and tell us not to come in unless we were bleeding to death. In response, we fell in the creek, trapped frogs, and looked for rabbits.

But it really doesn’t help the situation for us to go on and on about the wonder of the good old days as though we grew up with Laura Ingalls Wilder on the banks of Plum Creek. Instead, we need to show our children how playing outside can be wonderful.

Leadership Suggestions for Children Playing Outdoors

Plant Something – Show your children the wonder of life. Plant a tree. Plant a flower. Put in a garden. My daughter and I have had a great time this summer with her pumpkin patch. (You can see all our pumpkin posts). Marybeth’s pumpkins continue to grow. We survived some sort of plague that turned many leaves brown. We dusted to battle beetles. And now (as you can see from the picture above) we have the joy of seeing small, green pumpkins appear on the vine. That is Marybeth’s hand in the picture.

Our garden motivates my little girl to play outdoors often. She waters. She watches the garden. She dusts for bugs. But it required a real investment on our part as parents.

Encourage Children to Lead – When our older three children were elementary age, they played for hours and hours outside: street hockey, baseball, kick the can, leaf forts, they did it all (that’s an old picture of them playing street hockey to the right).

I would love to take all the credit. But the central reason that they did so well played outdoors is that one of our neighborhood kids was a very effective leader. He  was able to motivate and organize all the other kids. I can’t tell you how many times he knocked on our door to invite our children (who were younger) to come out and play. The more I look back on it, the more I realize that he was a gifted leader even as a child.

For our part, we tried to encourage our neighbor in his leadership. We bought hockey sticks for street hockey. Let them ruin our grass with a slip and slide and various other games and fed them cookies.

If you have young children, have you identified the child in your family or neighborhood who can effectively mobilize the other children?

Dam Something – Children love to play in creeks and water. And I still like doing it. So show them how much fun it can be to dam up the creek.

One of the real highlights of our sabbatical in Switzerland (more sabbatical pictures here) was building a dam together in a Swiss Mountain stream. Not only did it offer the opportunity for the obligatory dam jokes . . . this is the best dam thing we have built etc . . . But (no joke), the Swiss water authority came by to see if we were unduly messing with the natural flow of water in the Alps. We were honored. We told them, “That’s what you get for being neutral. We’re from America: the home of the Hoover dam.” Okay, not really. We didn’t stick around when they were inspecting. But it makes for a good story.

Of course, you have to put parameters around the video games – – -or ban them period. But if we want our children to play outdoors, we need to give them a vision for doing so.