Weather or Not to Send Kids Outside

Originally published 4/06/2011 at explorelongtheway.com

Many adults remember playing outdoors as kids no matter what the weather was; in fact, the way they tell it, their parents insisted on it. Drizzle or downpour, sun or snow, kids played outdoors. The ironic thing is that the topic of playing outside as kids comes up when people start commenting on how today’s kids stay indoors because their parents insist on it.

Now, theoretically, some of those outdoor-playing children of the past are the present-day parents with the deer-in-the-headlights look when they hear that their child will be walking through more than an inch of snow or going outside during a light rain.

So, what happened to the outdoor-playing children of the past to turn them into weather-wary parents of the present? In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv cites evidence to the benefits of being outdoors along with data supporting the increasing unlikelihood of finding children enjoying the outdoors. Yet, if children have a place to go outside – whether it is the schoolyard or the backyard – why do many adults use weather to stop them at the door? Current outdoor clothing seems more apt for the weather than what I wore thirty-plus years ago as a kid. Still, as a child, I was entrenched in a variety of weather-appropriate outerwear.

However, I have seen kids come to outdoor field trips without hats, gloves, and no more than a sweatshirt when there was two feet of snow on the ground. During rainy days at summer camp – a nature camp, mind you, numerous children wouldn’t arrive with a raincoat and they would insist that they didn’t even own such a garment.

I’m thinking that some kids don’t have things to wear outdoors so they don’t go outside and their parents don’t buy them outerwear because their kids don’t go outdoors. Will the child who runs from vehicle to building when it is raining ever become an adult who does more than move from one climate-controlled environment to the next? Will watching the nature channel on a rainy day replace laughing at bedraggled squirrels trying to twitch their tails dry and fluffy or pulling earthworms out of puddles and moving them to the drier soil beneath the shrubs. Can you love nature when you don’t even know it?