Outdoor Play Means More Than a Joyful Time

Spending time outdoors is a crucial part of healthy growth and development. Improving your child’s health and well-being might be as simple as sending him outside to play.

Playing outside is one of the greatest joys of childhood, but it serves a larger purpose than just being a way to have a good time.  As a natural and compelling activity, outdoor play promotes cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being, offering the necessary conditions for children to thrive and learn.

Outdoor play encompasses physical, emotional and cognitive benefits. The outdoor environment offers unique stimulus that capture children’s attention and interest, and countless possibilities for play. When children play outside, they are most likely running, leaping, skipping. At the same time they are more likely to be talking, socializing and laughing.

Physical benefits

Playing outside is a good way for your child to get some exercise. With one out of three children overweight or obese, being active is critically important for the health of children, and playing outside gives them plenty of opportunities to be active. Children who don’t get enough exercise are at an increased risk for heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.

Mental and emotional benefits

Playing outside give children free time to pursue activities they enjoy, which makes them happy and less stressed. Taking a break to play outside give children an increased focus in the classroom and can reduce behavior problems as well. Regularly spending time outside can lower children’s risks of anxiety and depression too.

Cognitive benefits

Spending time outside allows children to discover new things and make sense of the world around them as well. Playing improves children’s memory, thinking skills and ability to learn. Playing outside improves gross motor skills, which increases abilities to process and remember new information. Playing also enables children to block outside information that might distract them from learning new things on their own and in the classroom.

Additionally, children can begin to experience independence. Playing outdoors gives the children an opportunity to explore, and investigate and develop their inquisitive minds on their own. Creative skills are enhanced. Children can create dramatic play outdoors with very little material. Most important it gives the child the freedom for unstructured play.

The Learning Center for Kids provides children with safe supervised outdoor play during school time, Winter, Spring and Summer camps.