It was a telling commentary on the times four years ago when Liz Baird came up with the idea for Take A Child Outside Week. The simple notion that you needed to dedicate a week to encouraging kids to go outside and play would have been preposterous just a decade earlier. Yet with the proliferation of video games and parents increasingly fearful of threats real and perceived, kids were staying inside — and being kept inside — in record numbers. The dilemma was chronicled by author and advocate Richard Louv in his 2005 bestseller, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” an account of how our kids had gone from being weaned in the wild to garrisoned in the great room in less than a generation.
Category Archives: Fun stuff
In New Jersey, life’s a (more active) beach
It looked like a North Carolina beach except for one thing: The people were moving.
We just got back from five days at Brigantine Beach, which sits just north of Atlantic City, N.J., though the gulf between the two couldn’t be greater. Atlantic City is all about glitz and gambling, Brigantine Beach is about kicking back — and kicking in.
DIY: Planning a backyard rec room
Spence March has long been concerned over whether his kids are getting enough exercise. Four years ago, he enrolled them in a running program. And being a good dad and realizing that kids pay more attention if you practice what you preach, he enrolled with them. It was a good experience for all, but March wasn’t content to let it be a one-time event.
Celebrate the weekend at an N.C. State Park
In honor of Celebrate North Carolina State Parks weekend, which is this weekend, we cull our recommendations from this weekend’s State Park offerings.
Coast
1. Ever see “Little Shop of Horrors” (either the 1960 Roger Korman original or the 1986 Frank Oz remake)? A man-eating plant! How outlandish, you likely thought.
Climbing the walls of our backyard playground
A couple weeks ago I mentioned a report from the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA that found, among other things, that middle class American families have spacious backyards that they rarely use. This got me reminiscing about those halcyon days of my youth on South Boston Court when we did everything from play the World Series and Super Bowl (which hadn’t been invented yet) to tight rope and play endless games of hide-n-seek without leaving the block. And that got me to thinking about our own backyard today and how underutilized it is. Which spurred us to do some updating over the past couple of weeks.