Close your eyes.
Well, don’t actually close your eyes because then you can’t read this.
Let me try this again.
Keep your eyes open, but take a moment to picture your favorite childhood memory.
Do you have it?
Was it outside?
The director of my son’s preschool asked us to do this exercise as we began the orientation meeting. “Was it outside?” she asked. About 95% of us parents raised our hands.
“Was it on an iPad?” she asked.
Most of us chuckled. We got the point. The annoying chick in the corner whined, “iPads didn’t exist when we were kids.”
She didn’t get the point.
But I digress…..
Most of us have memories of riding bikes until the streetlights came on. Or camping with family. Or falling so hard on your purple rollerblades that you still have a scar that retinol can’t touch.
My favorite memory is sitting on the roof of my grandparents’ house to watch the 4th of July fireworks. It felt so daring, so dangerous, and so fun!
I guarantee that not a single person reading this post closed her eyes and pictured the time she watched “Thundercats” for six hours whilst eating Froot Loops mixed with Lucky Charms. Now don’t get me wrong, that would have been a pretty great reality at the age of eight, but it’s not exactly memorable. One of the amazing things about getting outside is that it’s always different. And that’s what makes it memorable.
How to make more memories (hint: get out!)
“Our brain is trying to preserve energy when it can. And what we know is that if any memory is similar, it is stored as one memory in our head when we look back at things,” says Dr. Mike Rucker Ph.D on the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.
Did I read that right!? If you do the same thing again and again you’ll save only ONE memory of that activity? Yep.
So when you think back to watching Saturday morning cartoons, you have that ONE memory of sitting in your sweet 90s gaming chair, trying to be quiet while your parents slept in, and watching any number of hilarious, but usually racist and misogynistic shows that passed as children’s entertainment.
You don’t have 427 different memories of the 427 Saturdays that you spent doing that. You have one. Possibly two.
“When your life is overly habituated,” states Dr. Rucker, “you’re not doing things that create new memories. When you’re looking back at the timeline of your life, if you’ve just done the same thing, you’re like ‘oh, I did that thing.’ And then that’s it. [But] if you’re doing all of these amazing things…. If you’ve encoded all of these rich memories, now you look back and you can spend days and days and days of all the things that you’ve done in your life, and it seems like your life was even longer than it was.”
It’s science!
Your brain is the most efficient supercomputer in the Universe and knows that you don’t need that junk bogging down your processor.
Oliver Hardt, an assistant professor of psychology at McGill University, explains to Time Magazine that forgetting is actually key to human survival. If you didn’t forget “You would have an endless amount of useless stuff accumulating there constantly…. And each time you want to think about something”—something key to your survival, such as the location of food or the signs of an approaching predator—“all these memories would pop up that are completely meaningless and that make it hard for you to actually do the job of predicting what is next.”
Forget what you had for breakfast, you need more important memories like how to get out baby poop from cashmere, or the time that male stripper played Pictionary in your college dorm room. Right?
The point is that your child will have essentially one memory of “I sat around and played Minecraft on my iPad.” Every hour they do that will bleed into one.
But they will have separate memories of the time they went to the water park, the time they built the fort in grandma’s back yard, the time they roller skated in the driveway, the time they roller skated alone to the pizza shop, the time they roller skated by the ocean…… You get the point.
Aside from being good for you in a zillion different ways, going outside will actually garner you more memories. So get out and make some new memories!
More good stuff:
Here’s tons of ideas on how to entertain your kids without screens.
If you need ideas on what to do, checkout our post “When Your Kid Doesn’t Know How To Play Outside.”
If you’re having trouble getting your kids off the screen, read our post “Should I Light My Child’s iPad On Fire or Grind it in the Garbage Disposal? Asking for a Friend…”
Need more info on the benefits of outdoor play? I love the podcast 1000 Hours Outside! You can check it out here. We use the 1000 Hours Outside app to track our time outside.
Thanks for visiting ScreenLessPlayMore.com
