Despite the heaps of laundry you may have, your massive grocery list, or even the pending spring cleaning, put it all aside and indulge in “take a walk in the park day”, a national campaign to get people outside and enjoying their natural surroundings.

With the first signs of spring showing, this is a perfect excuse to get yourself and your kids outside enjoying the scenery. Visit your local park or green belt and immerse yourself in the color, splendor and relaxation of the great outdoors. With no agenda in mind, let your kids explore the beauty and magnificence of Mother Nature. From the smallest flower pushing its way to the glowing sun, to the calling of the birds returning from their trip south, the outdoors is a cornucopia of visual, sensory and auditory delights.

Since kids just love being active, a trip to the park requires little, if any, planning. Just show up and let them loose. They will find their own way to drink in the freshness and greatness that comes from being outside.

March 30th is “take your parents to the playground day” so put aside your excuses and wear your grubby clothes so you can take your kids to the playground and really play yourself. Build a sand castle, ride down the slide, climb the monkey bars and teeter on the teeter-totter. It is the perfect opportunity to let that kid in you really have some fun. (Besides, they never had playgrounds this cool when we were kids, so try out the new ergonomic play-yards and ultra-modern-lite swing apparatuses and show your kids you can play with the best of them.)

When asked what they remember most fondly about their childhood, people often mention those times of relaxed and spontaneous play. Not huge, monumental occasions, just simple, stress-free, uncomplicated interaction, where the most important thing is that they were together and had fun.

Spoil yourself and your kids, and get outdoors this week.

Standing on my soapbox,

JB

Just to prove our point:

According to this article, psychologists Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan designed two experiments to test how interactions with nature and urban environments would affect attention and memory processes. First, a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge memory and attention. The volunteers then took a walk in either a park or in downtown Ann Arbor. After the walk, volunteers returned to the lab and were retested on the task. In the second experiment, after volunteers completed the task, instead of going out for a walk, they simply viewed either nature photographs or photographs of urban environments and then repeated the task.

The results were quite interesting. In the first experiment, performance on the memory and attention task greatly improved following the walk in the park, but did not improve for volunteers who walked downtown. And it is not just being outside that is beneficial for mental functions—the group who viewed the nature photographs performed much better on the retest than the group who looked at city scenes.
The authors suggest that urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret. Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from requiring effort, are often experienced as restful. Thus being in the context of nature is effortless, permitting us to replenish our capacity to attend and thus having a restorative effect on our mental abilities.