Studies suggest that today’s kids get an average of 4-7 minutes of unstructured time outside a day, while they spend 7-8 hours a day in front of screens.
With a youth mental health crisis also sweeping the nation (rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and diagnosed mental health disorders like ADHD are all at record highs), it’s not hard to imagine that the correlation between kids’ indoor confinement and their mental health struggles is more than a coincidence.
The mental health ramifications of too much screen time are easy to track, and are heavily studied. But the downstream effects of not enough time outside are equally startling. Free play and unstructured time are foundational to a child’s well-being, and in America, our kids aren’t getting it.
Seven minutes a day is barely enough time to begin to imagine the premise of a game or an imaginary adventure. Seven minutes a day is barely the amount of time it takes to walk back and forth from the bus stop. It’s not even long enough to go for a walk around the block.
Why Aren’t the Kids Outside?
The twenty-first century has provided us with a perfect storm of conditions keeping kids away from the outdoors: screens are alluring, the outside is ‘dangerous,’ and parents encourage their kids towards sedentary “for your own good” activities (math olympiad! French tutoring! after school clubs!).
Parents fear the dangers of the outdoors. In the modern world, everything from crime statistics to urban design itself lead parents to keep their kids on a short leash. Urban settings don’t have much room for free play; parks and playgrounds and other child-centric outdoor spaces are strangely sparse, as if urban designers wanted a world without kids in it. More apartment complexes are built with dog-washing stations than playgrounds.
The modern world seems to have been built by people who forgot what childhood is, and fears of crime keep parents nervous about letting their kids freely use the spaces that do exist.
But separate from kid-centric space or the lack thereof, kids are busy. Their days are consumed by ever-expanding school requirements, structured extracurricular activities, and of course the ever-present lure of screen time – to the point that even in suburban neighborhoods with big backyards, kids are barely ever venturing outside.
Which is how we end up with kids getting seven to eight hours of screen time a day, but only four to seven minutes of unstructured free time outside – the latter of which people of our grandparents’ generations couldn’t have even imagined.
The “unstructured” part is important – “time outside” in a blanket sense isn’t enough. Spending an hour on the field for soccer practice gives kids the benefit of fresh air and sunshine and physical movement, but it isn’t giving them the psychological benefits of free play.
Unstructured means time and space away from the rules and instructions of an adult. It exists fully in the wild and whimsical world of the child: free, unimpeded, child-directed, and often tinged with a heavy dose of imagination. There are no set goals of the kind that exist in PE class or a sports club. It’s pure and unfettered, and it’s a biologically hardwired need for children’s development.
Mental Health Crisis in Childhood
Parents worry about the dangers of the outside world, but what about the dangers of the on-screen world, where grooming and exploitation are common occurrences, where adults behind screens pose as other children and talk to young people too naive to know what to watch out for? What about the physical dangers of a sedentary life?
Seventy-seven percent of American youth ages 17-24 are ineligible for military service. Thirty-three percent of 17-24 year olds are ineligible due to obesity. Of the young people who meet the weight requirements, another 25 percent don’t meet the physical fitness standards. Other physical conditions and mental health disorders are also leading causes of ineligibility.
The poor health of America’s youth has many factors – poor diet, exposure to environmental toxins, a rise in chronic conditions, and countless other variables. But with 30 percent of elementary schools no longer requiring daily recess, and 28 states without any requirements around recess at all, neither schools nor parents are consistently defending kids’ free outdoor time.
And what about the psychological dangers of not getting time outside to play?
Twenty percent of American adolescents ages 12-17 report experiencing symptoms of anxiety in the past two weeks, while 18 percent of adolescents report symptoms of depression. Forty percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. In 2023, the CDC found that 9 percent of adolescents had attempted suicide.
Of course, not all of this traces back to time spent outside, nor lack of it. But as we’re depriving kids of a fundamental part of their development, such a deficit might be at least partially to blame for the negative outcomes that follow.
Kids Need Free Play Outdoors
As researcher and psychologist Peter Gray says, “Children are designed, by nature, to play and explore on their own, independently of adults.” Gray is a fierce defender of kids’ physiological and psychological need for play, and his book Free to Learn makes the case for the importance of self-directed time for a child’s development, with ripple effects into everything from academic performance to life outcomes.
Gray isn’t alone. As Lenore Skenazy argues in her book Free Range Kids, children need exactly what the term “free range” suggests – the ability to run wild and be free, not cooped up in the cages created by four walls and an adult’s supervision. Skenazy made national headlines after letting her 10-year-old ride the New York City subway home alone (unstructured and unsupervised outdoor time at its finest). Those headlines weren’t the good kind. Reporters were quick to title her “America’s worst mom,” and a media feeding frenzy followed (an unwatched child, normal mere decades prior, had become a scandal).
And yet, Skenazy was giving her son what so many others suffer for want of: freedom.
Letting your kids have outdoor time doesn’t require something as radical as giving them free range of New York City. Most parents would understandably balk at that. But there’s a wide swath of options between “wander New York City alone” and “have no time outside at all,” and frustratingly few find themselves in that median.
Even programs that give kids time outside – things like private schools with on-campus gardens, forest schools, or homeschool groups focused on time in nature – are considered frivolous, peculiar, and radical, respectively.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a minimum of 30-60 minutes of outdoor free play for children two and under. The CDC suggests a minimum of three hours of unstructured and vigorous free play for preschoolers (ages 3-5), with at least an hour of that time being spent outdoors, and at least an hour of vigorous physical activity (preferably outdoors) for school-aged children (ages 6-17).
These are all recommended baselines from some of America’s most mainstream health authorities. Many independent psychologists, developmental experts, and education researchers would consider those numbers to be the bare minimum.
Charlotte Mason, the nineteenth-century British educator whose methodology is still used today by large swaths of homeschoolers, argued that children should spend four to six hours a day outside whenever possible: “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.”
Mason didn’t see outdoor time as “recess,” but as a fundamental part of a child’s education in its own right. For the early years, she considered it even more important than formal instruction, helping children develop their attentiveness, wonder, and observational skills. She advocated nature walks, observations of weather patterns and wildlife, keeping a nature journal, and long uninterrupted swaths of free play.
This unstructured playtime is part of the whimsy of childhood, but it also plays a critical role. Free play supports kids’ cognitive development, imagination, and executive function. Physical activity develops strength, coordination, and motor skills, and is shown to reduce anxiety. Studies suggest exposure to the microbiome of the dirt leads to a strengthened immune system, and can decrease stress. Exposure to natural sunlight supports a child’s natural circadian rhythm.
And of course, exposure to sunlight also improves vitamin D levels – the lack of which can cause everything from fatigue and a weakened immune system to, you guessed it, anxiety and depression.
Our kids are struggling, physically and psychologically, for want of time for free play and time outdoors. That fresh air and freedom, no matter how basic it seems, is fundamental to their health and success, as necessary to their health (if not their survival) as air and water.
Our parents and grandparents knew this by intuition; our forebears never considered it could even be a question, but our culture has slowly let it erode to become only the tiniest fraction of our kids’ lives.
Free play and time outdoors is indivisible from health and success. If we want to raise a healthy, happy, and thriving generation, then their outdoor time is a resource we must defend.