Where and How Children Are Moving

Welcome back to Outside Health. The tagline for this blog is, “Exploring how play and connection to nature can make it easier for children to grow up healthy.” Before diving deeper into the specifics of play and nature I’d like to focus on where they overlap, which is the idea of movement.

Improving the quality and quantity of children’s early movements is one of the most important ways we can make life better for children and families. This is because of the power of everyday movements, particularly movements related to play that increase our connection with the natural world, to help build healthy resilient brains and bodies that are primed for lifelong learning, health, and well-being.

Unfortunately, children’s options for moving have been decreasing over recent generations. Today, more families live in cities and in areas with fewer green spaces and less biologic diversity. Children’s time has become increasingly structured and more of children’s activities are adult-directed. Many play areas have been made less exciting and many previously common childhood activities have been limited or eliminated in the name of safety. More of children’s activities take place inside and involve sedentary time in front of screens. The result is changing social norms around children’s play and connection to the natural world. Today children often have less outdoor time, less unstructured time, less complex and creative play, less autonomy and risk taking, more rules and restrictions, more sedentary time, and many children (and adults) are becoming disconnected from the natural world.

Over this same time a variety of educators, therapists, physicians, scientists, and other professionals have been raising concerns that children are struggling with aspects of development that used to come more easily. This makes sense because movement plays a role in almost every aspect of healthy growth and development:

• Motor development: Infants first develop gross motor skills like core strength and control over large muscle groups which allows later development of fine motor skills including the ability to fasten buttons and zippers and hold a pencil. The best practice is repeated opportunities to explore full body movements every day, starting at birth.
• Sensory development: Senses allow us to interpret and respond to the information that our body gathers about the world around us. Natural environments are uniquely suited to sensory development including distance vision. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, we also have a series of internal senses. The internal senses (like proprioception and vestibular sense) require ongoing stimulation from a variety of movements like pushing, pulling, climbing, lifting, rolling, swinging, spinning, and hanging upside down.
• Executive function and self-regulation: These skills include working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control that allow us to pay attention, plan, keep track of what we are doing, and regulate impulses and emotions. Though this process begins at birth, children’s brains are specifically adapted to develop executive function and self-regulation between ages 3-5 when they have opportunities to direct their own behaviour, interact with other children, and to learn and test their own limits during play.
• Immune system development: Where children are moving also matters for our immune system. Exposure to a wide variety of large and small organisms is required for optimal development. Without diverse early exposures, such as from natural environments with healthy ecosystems, or with excessive antimicrobial hygiene, our immune system may not be as well suited to balance healthy and harmful organisms, chronic inflammation can occur, and a wide variety of allergic and other health problems become more likely.

These four examples barely scratch the surface of the complexity of child development but illustrate some of the broad and interconnected effects of children’s early movements. A child who falls behind in any one of these areas won’t necessarily appear unwell or receive a specific diagnosis but may have a harder time with other aspects of physical, social, emotional, and/or cognitive development. In fact, almost all of today’s common childhood challenges can be linked directly or indirectly to aspects of development affected by where and how children are moving. These include anxiety, stress, depression and other mental health challenges, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, allergies, asthma, autoimmune conditions, behavioural problems, changes in physical and social development, difficulties with school readiness, learning, and academic performance, nearsightedness, and obesity and metabolic problems. Future posts will explore these connections.

It is important to state that focusing on movement is not the only thing we need to do to make life better for children and families. Movement alone can not prevent or treat all the conditions listed above, and many other critically important factors (including nutrition, poverty, equity, adverse experiences) are beyond the scope of this post. Also, I am not intending to draw connections (either positive or negative) between any one child’s early movements and their well-being. To understand one child’s development, it is important to consider individual, family, social, and community factors. But for today’s children as a group, the benefits of enhancing early movement are undeniable.

Compared to traditional health interventions, and to other critically important issues facing young people today, finding ways to enhance the quality and quantity of children’s early movements through play and connection to nature is relatively safe, affordable, accessible (able to take place in communities and reach diverse populations), can address population inequities, and has the potential to be massively effective because so many different children stand to benefit for so many different reasons. Perhaps most importantly, enhancing children’s play and connection to nature is realistically achievable in the short term because so many different people are already working on aspects of the solution.

If we truly wish to make it easier for children to grow up healthy, we cannot afford to ignore the power of movement. Science is clear that children will naturally choose activities and movements that match their developmental needs, if they are given the chance. Our role as adults is to create the physical spaces (including natural environments) and build relationships that give children the time and freedom to explore and play every day. Through actions like this we can literally build the conditions for learning, health, and well-being into our communities.

I hope that this post has given readers some food for thought. As always, I welcome comments below or by email at outsidehealth@gmail.com.