Connecting Children with Nature

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- Hi, Sanford Smith here from PennState Cooperative Extension.

Today, I want to talk about encouraging kids to love and appreciate the outdoors, nature and especially forests.

You know, most people who have this love and appreciation as an adult will tell you it was someone in their youth that influenced them, an adult such as a parent, almost always it's a parent, but it can be a grandparent or a teacher or a club leader, a scout leader or something like that.

But also they say there was a special place in their childhood that they spent a lot of time in the outdoors, and this is equally important.

What's interesting is that this love and appreciation for the outdoors almost always develops between the ages of like 3 and 4, and 10.

So when you're very young, when an adult works with you and influences you in the outdoors, gives you those opportunities, this is going to last a lifetime for most kids.

Now here's some tips, three different tips I wanna give you today.

The first is you need to get kids outdoors spending lots of time, just in a non-structured way, exploring the outdoors.

It can be in a fence row, it could be at a camp, it could be at a farm, it could be anywhere, but get them into natural areas.

Get kids looking and exploring and having fun in a contact kind of way, don't discourage them from getting their feet dirty or their hands dirty.

Also, I encourage them to connect with plants and critters.

They don't have to worry about, you know, if they pick up something, they should let it go and not be destructive, but they can also just learn a lot by having close contact.

This is the kind of activity that you want to encourage and you want to do this repeatedly at different times of the year, in different times of the day even, so that kids learn an area and all the kind of natural things in that area.

It's a great way to encourage them.

Lots of time for a child might mean an hour or two.

Also, you wanna encourage them to play with the best toys, things like sticks and string and dirt balls and rocks and leaves and anything they find out there that they can use their imagination with to just play and explore.

The next tip I wanna give you is you need to model an interest and a love for the outdoors too.

If you're afraid or if you're concerned all the time about someone getting dirty or falling down, it's going to kind of rub off on the kids.

So it's important that your values and your attitudes are worth catching, that you're a lifelong learner when it comes to the outdoors and you demonstrate and model this to young people.

And lastly, I want to tell you that it's best if you can custom tailor some of the experiences for kids when they're out there.

so that you can encourage them to explore some of their interests.

Some kids might be much more interested in plants and trees, others might be interested in wildlife.

So try to organize things, just in a non-formal way, to help them explore.

For example, if they're interested in birds they could use binoculars.

If they're interested in watching for deer they can learn to sit quietly in the forest in maybe a hidden kind of way, under a under a blanket or something.

There's all sorts of ways that you can encourage and kind of custom tailor experiences for kids to match their interests.

So these have been a few thoughts about how to encourage the very young, kids between the ages of 3 and 4, and 10 years old to develop a lifelong appreciation for the outdoors.

Thank you very much for listening.