The Importance of Outdoor Play for Children’s Development
by Blog Contributor | July 2, 2024 | Childhood Learning | 0 Comments
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Parents want nothing more than to keep their children safe. They may prefer to keep them where it’s safest, but studies have proven the importance of outdoor play.
Children are filled with energy. To consume this and likewise help build skills necessary for their development, they’re encouraged to play.
The word already appears tiring to parents and observing adults. After all, play is a time when children are free to do whatever it is they want with the energy they have under their parents’ attention. They run, climb, and some may even throw themselves around, and parents are responsible for ensuring they’re guarded and safe. Play involves light, moderate, or vigorous physical activities that keep them entertained and often extremely rowdy.
From this definition alone, it’s no wonder why play can be deemed exhausting to the sitters.
But Freedom and Play Is Essential to Their Growth
The importance of outdoor play is often deliberately overlooked because of what it requires from adults. It’s not only the children’s energy that gets consumed. Adults keeping a close eye on them and ensuring they’re safe also spend their energy. This is why more children end up gluing their eyes to their devices, bodies stuck to one place. This limits their movements, giving adults more time to rest.
While this alternative is ideal for adults, it can be harmful to children’s development.
It not only suppresses their energy but also stunts their creativity and imagination. Limiting children from playing outdoors prevents them from unlocking their potential as early as childhood.
Regardless of age, having a sense of autonomy and freedom is essential. To children, exploring the world is their initial exposure to where they’ll be growing up and who they’ll be interacting with. This is the most significant importance of outdoor play. It teaches them the basic skills necessary to thrive in “the real world,” molding them to be healthy adults.
By letting children be, adults teach them to be resilient, responsible, and self-reliant.
Relishing the Importance of Outdoor Play
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In her books about cranberry bog adventures, author Teressa L. Diggs highlights the importance of outdoor play and exploration for children. If not for allowing the protagonists to wander around, they wouldn’t have found and satisfied the integral source of their curiosity.
While this benefit may seem primarily shallow as it only revolves around personal satisfaction, this is only the tip to what outdoor play offers. Letting children run free and explore can be frightening on top of taxing to adults. But playing rough and dirty is critical to their development.
If you’re interested in how the story plays out, check Teressa L. Diggs’ books here.
Exploration Widens Their Perception
Children develop a limited sense of reality and the world when they’re stuck in their rooms and yards. One of the basic importance of outdoor play is that it teaches children that there’s more to the world than what meets their eyes. Through exploration, they begin to understand how things work, how people operate, and why the world is how it is.
Children are natural explorers, and allowing them to maximize this nature is critical. Experience is a crucial part of their development. What better way to access this than by allowing them to play outside?
Activities Expands Their Vocabularies
Children develop not only their strength, endurance, and stamina but also their stamina when they play outside. Instead, they also build their vocabulary and grasp of the language. Children aren’t born with the natural proficiency in communication. They have to explore and interact with the world to develop this.
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The importance of outdoor play is reflected in how much growth children experience. The more they’re allowed outside, the better they can scout through their curiosities and learn to express themselves verbally and precisely.
Exploration Develops Their Instincts
When children are allowed to explore, they’re able to understand more of themselves—their strengths and limitations. Their experiences also serve as a means to learn self-regulation and habits that boost their sense of self and what they like and dislike. One of the importance of outdoor play revolves around helping children establish a concrete identity and understand themselves better.
Interactions Promote Social and Emotional Growth
Outdoor play isn’t limited to letting children out into the yard. Instead, it means bringing them to public playgrounds and areas that are visited by many. This allows them to form relationships with those outside their families, developing their social skills. They will also be susceptible to conflicts or clashes, which will then teach them how to manage their emotions and reactions.
Hence, children won’t only enjoy the physical benefits that come with it. Instead, they will also be introduced to the social and emotional benefits of outdoor play. Letting children out and interact with others develops traits that will be necessary for when they’ll be connecting with others in the future.
At the end of the day, children benefit more when they aren’t restricted. While parents may want to bubblewrap their toddlers, letting them go would still be the best way to keep them safe.
