The tension isn't indoors versus outdoors. It's places built around consuming versus places for just being.
I'm writing this from a little beach by a river in Ticino. The kids are building a sand construction. I just went for a swim, and I feel like my heart rate has slowed down. I feel very, very, very grateful for my surroundings. It's warm. I'm going to get something fresh from the bakery.
Yesterday we went to the Lido in Locarno, the public pool. It was very, very stimulating. Overstimulating for me, I would argue. Lots of people everywhere, very little shade, lots of hard surfaces. It was still good. We were fundamentally outside, and the view was absolutely stunning. But it's in stark contrast to today.
Both days were outside. Only one of them slowed my heart rate.
At the end of the day, it's got nothing to do with gear. The tension isn't whether you buy the mats or not.
I think the main tension is between going to a play centre or a shopping centre, and going to a place that has less prescription around consuming and more context for just being. It's not which kind of outside. It's about putting yourself in contexts where you're not consuming stimulation, not consuming man-made, constructed vehicles for consumption.
And when you're overstimulated, which you are most of the time when you have small children, your natural inclination is to consume. Consume media. Consume alcohol if you need to unwind. Consume food, consume online shopping, consume hard-surfaced environments that offer a packaged way of interacting with them.
So the same way you'd intuitively look for open-ended toys these days, look for open-ended environments. And if you go to the same open-ended place every time, that will be, by the way, your third place, from a sociological point of view. There's a certain kind of beauty to that, especially if you start to know the same places and meet the same faces, even if it's just the people serving at the cafe in the park. That has huge social value.
I didn't always know this. At the beginning I only went to the crowded places. I probably didn't have the energy to see other places. Once I started to discover softer places, it was a real revelation for me. But it took that discovery.
When we first had children, we lived near the Stadtgärtnerei, the city nursery in Zurich. That's one of the first places where I realised we were enveloped by plants. There were birds running around, it was a garden outside, and it changed across the year. It was a little treasure chest for a sunny day, and particularly for a cold day. They had the worst coffee in the world for one franc, and that coffee was a lifesaver when you were in there. It was social too. You meet other families in quite close proximity because the little pathways were small. And it was really magical for the kids, because there are two separate levels, and it had exotic birds, kind of pirate vibes.
I'd take that over a play place any day. As a result of those kinds of places, the boys never really had to go to the play centre. I mean, we did spend time in Coop restaurants in their play corners, and I was glad of them. But not my vibe.
It's the same contrast at home. We usually go to our local pool, which has a very big open-air pool, and it's great. But we also sometimes go to a more natural, lake-based pool halfway across the lake. And the way the kids play there is totally different.
The first option is the ready-made pool: lots of concrete, slippy surfaces, and lots of people we know from school, which obviously has its plus sides and its other side in terms of the demands put on you. The other place is natural. It's got everything you need, the toilets and the showers and a restaurant, but there's no built pool. It's a natural jetty with a little beach. It's almost impossible for them to injure themselves there. There are no hard surfaces. It's just gentle, soft.
And they tend to stay in one area. I think small tends to catch their imagination, and suddenly they just play within a two or three metre radius. At the bigger man-made pool they're constantly moving on from one thing to the next, probably because they're encouraged by their friends, so they're apparently bouncing around and you're basically never sitting.
When we go to the nature-based setting, we just sit and talk to each other and watch the kids, and we can observe small nuances in what they're doing. The radius is smaller. The whole thing is much more enjoyable for everyone, much more restful visually, less chaotic. These kinds of contexts should be beneficial for everyone, not just for the child.
It turns out there's a name for this. Environmental psychologists call them restorative environments: places where your attention gets to recover because nothing in them is demanding it. They talk about soft fascination, the kind of gentle interest that holds you without asking anything back. Nature is their classic example. The natural pool has it. The big pool, for me, doesn't.
I like a mix of everything in moderation, including moderation. I don't like to be pure granola beige mum, because the world doesn't work like that, and I know the other places give my son great joy. Yesterday, at that overstimulating pool, we went on the water slides together. He said it was wild, and it was. That playfulness is also one of my values. We just did wild things together until he had had enough.
Could I live only on that side? I can survive it for a period of time, knowingly. It's fine. But am I thriving? No. There are activators in that setting that activate other kinds of playfulness and interaction, and that's fun too. The place where we are today is just much closer to who I am and my value system.
I remember hearing an interview on a personal-finance podcast, with a man who buys nonstop toys for his kids, causing chaos in the household. He said he's overly generous with his kids because as a child he really coveted Castle Grayskull, the castle from He-Man. There's a toy version of it. It was on the Santa list, and it never showed up, and it was much harder for parents in those days to track things down. So now he showers his kids.
There's a generational lag in that. He's solving for a problem that doesn't exist any more. The child who didn't get Castle Grayskull is still suffering, but now under the weight of the junk in his house. If he were kinder to himself, he'd shift the focus.
Our generation didn't have access to the things we wanted. But our kids' generation has access to almost everything, and in their lifetime that's only going to get more extreme.
There's a famous story about the other side of that. After Joseph Heller died, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short poem about him for The New Yorker. It opens with the words true story. The two of them were at a party on Shelter Island, given by a billionaire, and Vonnegut asked Heller how it felt to know that their host had probably made more money yesterday than Catch-22 had earned in its entire history. Heller said he had something the host could never have: the knowledge that he'd got enough.
So what I'm trying to teach my kids is a sense of enoughness. I like my kids engaging with fresh things from the bakery and sand castles for as long as possible. I hope that enoughness gets baked into their minds: you don't have to fly somewhere with stress and buy loads of things, and you don't have to build loads of expectations around what a good time is. That's why I frequently go into nature with them, so that it's in their wiring to seek that out, for all the goodness it brings, but also so they don't think it takes much to be content.
When spending time together, everyone counts. You're allowed to choose something that is attractive to you. You don't need to put your child first at every juncture. Nobody is more important than the other, but equally, you do not need to suffer to spend time outside with your child. There are ways forward, and you may not find them all at once, but that's okay. Trial and error, and listen to what suits you best. The things I'm describing are what's relevant to me, they're not hard and fast rules. We have permission to seek out how we feel best out in the world with our family.
The bakery is still there, and I said I'd go. None of this takes much. Fresh things from the bakery, sand castles, a place with nothing to sell you. And whatever shape it takes, you will never regret going outside.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169-182. doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Vonnegut, K. (2005). Joe Heller. The New Yorker, 16 May 2005. Reprinted at The Marginalian.
Kate
