Nurturing Happy Campers

Outdoor interest and confidence lay the foundation for a life of outdoor engagement, and spending time in the tranquility of nature has well-established implications for a person’s social, emotional, cognitive, and physical health and formation of values.

For example, studies show that:

• Exposure to greenspaces restores people’s attention and improves cognitive functioning.

• Spending time outdoors reduces people’s cortisol, a stress-inducing hormone, and lowers blood pressure.

• Learning new skills in nature increases people’s self-confidence.

• Outdoor recreational experiences in early childhood strongly and positively influence people’s environmental attitudes, values, and behaviors, with experiences like hiking and camping cultivating a sense of responsibility for nature.

• Children from families living in poverty are 3 times more likely, on average, to experience depression, anxiety, and poor coping skills. They are are also significantly less likely to have a summer camp experience (7% compared to 34% of more affluent families.
  
  

During the pandemic, adolescent girl mental health and well-being suffered. Since 2019, emergency rooms across the country saw a 51% increase in adolescent girls admitted for self harm. Decades of research has concluded that contact with nature is associated with increases in happiness, subjective well-being, positive affect, positive social interactions and a sense of meaning and purpose in life, as well as decreases in mental distress (Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 7, 2019). Outdoor programs can help soothe our young people's anxiety, depression, and sense of loneliness.