Top Health Concerns for Australian Parents

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I’ve been reading a couple of research studies lately on health concerns for parents and nature engagement statistics for Australia and they seem to go hand in hand.

In the last blog I shared how the result of the Royal Children’s Hospital Health Poll found that the biggest concern for parents was too much screen time for their children. Other health concerns for children aged 6-12 included lack of physical activity, followed by internet safety, bullying and stress and/or anxiety.

We set up Educated by Nature as a social enterprise last year to tackle some of these issues, including building resilience among young people. Daniel and I had been teaching in a primary school class together and we were alarmed at the rate of increase in anxiety among our students in the last decade.

We found that anxiety decreased when we took our class into natural spaces. It also gave us a forum to work with children on their relationships and conflicts, therefore reducing bullying. We believe that there is a link between unbalanced screen time, lack of physical exercise, diet and anxiety and that most of these issues can be improved by spending more time in nature.

This is what excites us most about our KIN Village school holiday program. It is such a chilled out, yet exciting day. Kids get to hang out with other kids, doing what they love to do and all supervised so they are safe while their parents are at work (or taking a break). We have expanded our venues for the January holidays and they now include Swanbourne and Gwelup as well as Crawley.

Trudi Bennett

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