Children And Outdoor Time

Vinitha Ramchandani is consulting editor with the Economic and Political Weekly. She is also an author and curriculum-planner. Vinitha, a mother of two, conducts storytelling and creative writing workshops for children.

- Vinitha Ramchandani

Not only are our kids being raised indoors, they are also being confined to even smaller indoor spaces. Parents pay heavily for children to clamber through purple, rubber tunnels and slide through blue plastic slides. In schools, playgrounds have become a rarity. In today’s world when we say “summer camp” it usually means sending your kids to a place where a set of activities has been curated for kids in one place —usually indoors. While taking my book Vriksha from school to school I realized that most kids had not touched a tree. Parents who attended the session had themselves touched a tree trunk after a long time. I strongly feel that we need to weave in the outdoors in our schools and our homes. Read on.

The shift to indoor play spaces

We’ve become a sedentary society. Not only are our kids being raised indoors, they are also being confined to even smaller indoor spaces. Our generation of adults grew up playing in the outside. Our schools had massive grounds attached to it. When we got home, we flung our school bags and ran out to play. We didn’t need props. We had the outdoors and we devised games. We may or may not have had huge wide spaces to play at home, but playing ball, or hide and seek, or hopscotch or jumping rope were always in the open. As a fellow parent summarised, “We had a playroom growing up, it was called the outside.”

The schools our kids go to no longer have the luxury of playgrounds. We live in mad metros and that if there is space then we have to, have to, enclose it. The new landscape of childhood is the indoors.

Within the span of a few decades the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically, say Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods. In the introduction to the book he says: