Nature Play Week

The Hon. J.M. GAZZOLA (15:34): I would like to draw the Council's attention to Nature Play Week, commencing this Saturday the 27^th. Nature Play Week is an excellent initiative not only of the South Australian government, but of parents, educators, and researchers around the world. Recent statistics highlight a disturbing nature play deficit in our younger citizens, including 5 per cent of Australian children who never play outdoors. I find that statistic alarming and cannot imagine a childhood without long afternoons hunting for tadpoles, building treehouses or digging up handfuls of worms in one's parents' garden.

Less than 4 per cent of Australian children have unrestricted opportunities to play outside. A quarter of Australian children are overweight or obese, and outdoor recreation time has been cut from 73 per cent to just 13 per cent in one generation. How can this be when we have such a breathtaking array of countryside for our children to explore?

Over the past decade there has been a growing trend for developers to build larger houses on smaller blocks. Backyards have shrunk considerably, been landscaped to within an inch, or simply rejigged into mum and dad's alfresco for the outdoor kitchen and pizza oven while the kids sit inside, clocking up screen time. The quarter-acre block of old is now valued only for its redevelopment potential.

Apprehensive parents and a risk-averse culture have contributed significantly towards the downturn in unstructured outdoor play over the past 24 years, but researchers are now finding that this cottonwool approach is in fact detrimental to children's development and that some teenagers of this generation are turning to more reckless behaviour to feed their natural requirement for greater sensation and risk. What if this turns into a problem for even younger children as the sterility of the modern playground and lack of yard space leave them little opportunity to stretch their boundaries?

On any given weekend the huge adventure playground at Port Noarlunga is teeming with families of children racing through the wooden fort, climbing, balancing, negotiating game rules and narrowly avoiding collisions. Fantastic, sir! These life skills will come in handy when they get their licence and start negotiating peak-hour traffic. There will be a small assortment of 'helicopter parents' hovering, but even they will eventually leave their kids to be kids and go and grab a coffee.

Researcher, Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early-childhood education at Queen Maud University College in Trondheim, wrote her masters dissertation on young teens and their need for sensation and risk. In 2011 she published a paper called Children's Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences. Sandseter concluded that children have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement. This does not mean that what they do has to be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk that scares them, a fear which they are then able to overcome. This paper identifies six types of risky play:

exploring heights;

handling dangerous tools;

being near dangerous elements;

rough and tumble play, wrestling, play fighting; and

speed.

It is the last point that Sandseter feels is 'the most important for the children', namely, exploring on one's own. Of children she says, 'When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, the consequences of their decisions, it's a thrilling experience.' Sandseter turns to evolutionary psychology to measure the effect of missing out on those experiences in childhood.

Historically, children's instinctive need to take risks have been crucial to survival. They would have needed to flee from danger, defend themselves from harm and function independently. It is quite possible for these scenarios to take place in a modern setting to a much lesser degree in the western world. That is how children process fears and practise decision-making. If children are not exposed to these types of challenges in order to work through their fear, this fear can turn into a phobia.

Unstructured outdoor play goes a long way towards safely meeting this instinctive need in children, and I have been extremely pleased to see how much exposure organisations like Nature Play SA have been getting in the local press. I have brought the attention of my staff to a list published by Nature Play SA: '51 things to do before you're 12', although I am pleased to say that Narrah and Tiffany's children have already ticked off many of the activities.

I am also greatly encouraged by the efforts of many of our local schools and kindergartens to provide beautiful outdoor areas for their charges. Places like Grove Kindergarten have led the way with nature play and recently added an impressive 'insect hotel' to their already impressive grounds. Brighton Primary School has strongly embraced outdoor education, Felixstowe Community School has a unique hand-made chicken run, Christies Beach High School has an indigenous medicine garden and, most recently, Sheidow Park School has a newly-built sensory nature trail.

South Australian children have many reasons to feel proud of their schools, kindergartens and child-care centres. So many are working to bring awareness to children that they can live as part of this beautiful land, take ownership of its care, and help them realise they are not, in fact, separate from it. I commend the Minister for the Environment for spearheading the nature play movement, and invite you to promote nature play principles at every opportunity.