Welcome to the Outside Health Blog

Welcome to the Outside Health blog. I believe the key to making life better for all of us is to make it easier for children to grow up healthy. The name Outside Health has two different meanings. The first is how being outside and connecting with the natural world can enhance lifelong learning, health, and well-being. The second is the fact that many of the solutions to today’s great health challenges actually lie outside our traditional health care system. Both of these meanings will be explored in more detail below.

I am a pediatrician with education and experience in public health and community recreation, a year-round hiker and backpacker, and an advocate for play and nature in communities. I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast. Like many of my peers, I spent much of my early years outside, often barefoot, climbing trees, playing with water, building treehouses and forts, and with increasing independence to explore. My first jobs were as a swimming instructor and day camp counsellor. Long before medical school, the field of recreation taught me how communities have the power to shape the lives of people who live in them. Through work on a variety of research projects I learned about injury prevention and evidence-based preventive health care. I was drawn to medical training to explore the factors that build health and resilience, and after becoming a pediatrician I was able to expand that knowledge through a master’s degree in public health concentrating on family and community health.

Each of these three fields – recreation, pediatrics, and public health – contributes to my understanding of what it means to be healthy and how we can create the conditions that best support health. I have had the opportunity to consider how pediatricians can address health issues in both general pediatric and sub-specialty settings, and to gain insight into health policy development at the provincial level. In recent years I have focused on gathering information about child development, play, and connection to the natural world from fields including social sciences and education, in addition to health.

I have come to understand that though we can identify significant progress in making life better for families over recent decades, these achievements have combined with changing social norms around things like urbanization, technology, and fear, to paradoxically make it harder for today’s children to grow up healthy. In particular, many of the things we have done to help keep children safe are actually doing harm in other ways. The fact that it has become too hard to grow up healthy can be seen in large numbers of children and youth struggling with challenges including anxiety, stress, depression, and other mental health challenges, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, allergies, asthma, autoimmune conditions, behavioural problems, changes in physical development, difficulties with school readiness, learning, and academic performance, nearsightedness, and obesity and metabolic problems. And even more children are struggling in subtler ways with aspects of growth and development that used to come more easily. The thing that keeps me up at night is that it does not have to be this way. The science of early child development tells us what we need to do.

At the same time that we are advocating for children and families to receive the services required to meet their individual needs, we must work collectively to make changes at the population level. Success will require us to come together across a wide variety of sectors and find novel ways to embed what we know about the science of healthy growth and development directly into our communities. I believe an important aspect of this work is finding ways to combine more specialist level knowledge that traditionally exists within academic settings (with physicians and other professionals) with the kinds of dialogue and collaborations that traditionally happen at the community level. The goal is that more of our children’s daily physical experiences and social interactions allow them to naturally optimize their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development, so that growing up healthy can become easier again.

My aim for this blog is to spark a conversation about what growing up healthy actually means:

• A conversation that starts by acknowledging the uncomfortable reality that the experience of childhood today is too often not allowing children to optimize aspects of their physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development, with the result that they are not reaching their full potential in adulthood;
• A conversation that uses the science of child development to show how children’s earliest experiences connect to lifelong learning, health, and well-being;
• A conversation that considers how whole communities can help children build healthy resilient brains and bodies;
• A conversation that demonstrates that it is absolutely within our collective power to make it easier for children to grow up healthy;
• And most importantly, a conversation that aims to inspire by clearly showing how we can each harness our individual power to be part of the solution.

Whether or not you are a parent or someone who works with children directly, we are all members of communities that include children. The work that we do, the things that we ask of our governments, our relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and other community members, and the ways that we share public spaces all contribute to shaping the experiences of children growing up around us. This is how we each hold some of the power to find solutions. And this is where I am inspired by the work of so many who are already taking up pieces of this challenge.

Upcoming posts will provide the rationale for these ideas and outline the areas where I believe we need to act to have the greatest impact in the short term. For today’s children and youth, there has never been a more important time to take the next step. My next post will explore how children’s early movement is connected to lifelong learning, health, and well-being.

I welcome your comments below or by email at outsidehealth@gmail.com.