The 1000 Hours Challenge 2022 - as of 56 hours 18 minutes!

 by Laura Burden

As of mid February, many new year’s resolutions tend to peter away. However, one I am determined to stick to this year is our attempt at the 1000 Hours Challenge. 

The challenge was started by an American mother, Ginny Yurich, five years ago. The premise is to try to match the amount of screen time the average child has per year (estimated to be 1200 hours per annum in the USA; the British estimate varies between studies but is either a little lower or comparable) with outdoor time. Yurich was initially inspired by the educational philosophy and writings of Charlotte Mason, a British educator writing in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of Mason’s teachings was that young children should be outdoors 4-5 hours a day in good weather and 1-2 hours on cold winter days.

Even before the advent of COVID-19, a collective anxiety was emerging about children/young people and the outdoors. In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv makes a compelling case for the link between children today being “nature deficit” and the rise of attention issues, obesity and mental health conditions in the young; Robert MacFarlane, in The Lost Words, seeks to restore simple nouns such as “bluebell” and “wren” to the vocabulary of children; in Kith, the Riddle of the Childscape, Jay Griffiths explores at length what is taken from children when access to the outdoors and freedom is limited; in Toxic Childhood, Sue Palmer has researched the effects of lack of exercise and sleep deprivation. In 1999 a new term was coined - “plant blindness” -  putting a name to an increasing human tendency to ignore the plants that surround us and to be unable to name them. The consensus among most experts seems to be that a healthy amount of screen time, whilst possible, is an elusive balance to find in the modern world and that children who spend more time outdoors have better mental health, better eyesight, better physical health, better resilience and are, simply, happier.

But where does this leave me - or any parents in the UK in urban environments, both parents in full time intense working schedules, houses to clean and maintain, dark and cold winters and local childcare settings with small squares of astroturf rather than grass?

The 1000 hours challenge exists to nudge outdoors those who cherish outside life but find it hard to carve out the time  - even in short snatches and even if it means the local city park rather than in nature. In an ideal world, perhaps childhood should still be the experience my own parents had in the 1950s/60s  - of little traffic, fewer alarming headlines relating to injured or abducted children, less emphasis on schoolwork and greater access to nature on the doorstep. However, we do not live in an ideal world and if you monitor something and document it, you are more likely to prioritise it.

The 1000 Hours Challenge 1000 Hours Outside - Join the Challenge encourages participants to log time outside, either using a pretty paper tracker that is coloured in or by starting a timer on an app each time a family heads out. Technically you should only count hours towards the challenge if you are outdoors and exposed to the weather, with no shelter, but some families adapt their own goal.

The 1000 Hours Challenge has become a global community. What started as a challenge mostly aimed at American families home-schooling their children has become something taken on globally, including single adults realising the benefit of outdoor time as work schedules become increasingly intensive and screen-based. Through social media, people from Canada, the USA, India and the Balkans all connect over a shared goal. It’s possible for a family in the UK to be inspired by those in Alaska freezing coloured water in blocks to build igloos and look enviously at those in Florida spending hours on the beach in January. It also, however, builds connections in real life. In a UK 1000 hours chat I mentioned that, when Portsmouth nurseries had closed suddenly for Storm Eunice, all our older boys’ outdoor gear had been left there - within minutes, a lady who turned out to live two streets away and had children a similar age to mine had messaged and offered to lend us some wellies.

As a family, we have been challenged to get our hours in so far in 2022. Covid isolation left us housebound and an hour in a cold walled garden a day was probably what was realistic under those circumstances. We went into the garden for 20 minutes when Storm Eunice hit and beat a hasty retreat. However, we’ve also had some lovely visits out - Arundel Wetland Centre, Mottisfont, Birdworld, Staunton Farm and, closer to home, the Historic Dockyard and our allotment.

Are we going to hit 1000 hours? 

It’s most unlikely. We’d have to complete an average of 2.7 hours a day. British standards for pre-schoolers at nurseries is that they must have an hour outside a day, which I count, but everything else has to be fitted in after school, light levels and toddler tiredness permitting, or at weekends and holidays. Some Saturdays and Sundays we can spend hours happily in the woods or Southsea Beach but on others, owing to teacher workload, weather or life admin, being outside all day is not realistic. However, my wife and I feel that we have made outdoor time more of a priority for our family because the process of logging the hours has helped to focus our minds. 1000 hours may be a reach - but creating more chances of happy memories of free play outdoors is worth it, even if we technically “fail”. As the 1000 hours blog states, “Childhood is finite at just shy of 9.5 million minutes. We only get one shot at it.” The concerns many experts are voicing about children’s nature and sunlight deficiency are, arguably, also true of adults in the post -pandemic world.