Saying playing outside leads to protecting nature implies they take effort from the norm.<p>I prefer to look at playing outdoors and caring about nature as normal, so I'd restate it as "<i>Keeping children indoors too much leads them to harm the environment more as adults.</i>"<p>Anyone can define "normal" for themselves how they want. I find this perspective leads to going outside more and caring more about the environment.
There is also a misconception of what "nature" is. Mega-city-dwellers going for a walk to a park and throwing their empty-soda-can in a bin, think they are "doing nature good".<p>If they take a step back and look around they will notice that this human-made "nature" which consumes massive amounts of water, to sustain the defined/controlled (human-made) beauty, and think to themselves "oh nature is perfect, oh how well I am protecting it!".<p>I don't know many city-dwellers that actually go for a hike on a real mountain to be in/with nature (and not some 5-star-hotel-private-beach or human-made green path).
Anecdotally, it worked for me. My parents did not have the money to purchase even a computer; the TV which we had was limited to 20 channels. So I ended up spending a lot of time outside, playing outdoors, exploring nooks and crannies of our mixed urban neighborhood. What made an immense impact on me was just how polluted with trash/garbage a lot of the city was (Mumbai, India). So there was no need for a teacher to tell me to not litter; I could see what effect cumulative littering had on the environment.
My buddies and I used to play outdoors whenever the weather allowed as kids. My mom would literally kick me out if I stayed inside on a nice day.<p>These days, when I walk through the streets of my neighborhood, I don't ever see any kids play outside, even on the sunniest of days.<p>In parts I see that one of the reason for that may be that a lot of the open space we used to have as kids have been built on since. There was an empty lot to both sides of my parents house in my childhood with trees on them that we used to climb all the time, surrounded by a wire mesh fence that was used as our soccer goal. This space is gone, and I wouldn't even know where kids should even play in my parents' street.<p>But then, there's also a playground close to my grandparents' house that was always inhabited by children back in the day. It got renovated a couple of years ago and is arguably much nice today than it was, yet I <i>never</i> see anyone there.<p>Of course, the families that live in that areas had kids at around the same time that my parents did, so it wouldn't be surprising if not a lot of children lived in that area today. Perhaps I will have to wait another generation before younger families move in that area again?<p>But there are parts of the town where I live that are less old and where I know that young families live there. Still, no kids in the street, as far as I can see.
Source study<p><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/australian-journal-of-environmental-education/article/div-classtitleexploring-the-relations-between-childhood-experiences-in-nature-and-young-adults-environmental-attitudes-and-behavioursdiv/029FC630519229DA5744DBFC257C0EA1" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/australian-journal-o...</a><p>I don't find this surprising. If you have a closer connection to something, you tend to value it more.
"The correlations between expressed views about caring for the environment and environmentally friendly actions were surprising, however, as actions did not necessarily align with beliefs."
I almost never played outside, and I didn't even grow up around "nature" — in garbage-plagued cities, in fact, but maybe that has made me want to protect nature anyway.