The benefits of outdoor play sessions for young families in Bradford
Adele Adams, Project Manager of Better Start Bradford’s Better Place project, looks at how their outdoor play sessions helped a young local family.
Better Start Bradford’s Better Place project makes improvements to parks and outdoor spaces in the local area, with the aim of providing a healthier and happier environment for expectant parents, babies, young children and families. They also run lots of outdoor play events and sessions across the area for families in local parks with activities that include arts and crafts, nature discovery, outdoor games, and nature-based play.
Playing outside is important for children’s learning and development and is an exciting sensory experience for babies and toddlers. Babies enjoy the exciting visuals on offer and toddlers love the chance to explore different spaces and touch natural objects.(1)
Spending time outdoors helps keep children be fit and healthy, reduces anxiety, and helps them to discover the natural environment. Encouraging children to run, jump, climb and chase ensures good physical fitness, as well as helping with a child’s stability, bone density, and muscle development. Staying healthy from a young age can help prevent future problems too.(2)
To find out firsthand the benefits of outdoor play sessions, local mum Charlotte was interviewed during a Better Place and Forest School Play Session at Peel Park in Bradford, making wooden hedgehogs with her two daughters in January 2024.
Charlotte’s outdoor play story
“My daughter, Safiyyah, was only three months old when lockdown hit. For the next 15 months of her life, we had no access to any stay and play groups or activities. As soon as we were able to, I went along to a story and rhyme time session at the Womenzone Community Centre and found out about Better Start Bradford activities and their outdoor play sessions with their Better Place project.
We started going to the outdoor play sessions with Better Place and the Forest School Play project at Bradford Moor Park. Saffiyah was very shy at first as she has no cousins and was not used to groups, but she soon got used to being around other children and loved it. At this time, I was also pregnant with my second daughter and it was great to start getting to know other mums and building up a network of friendship and support.
When you have two young children, it can sometimes feel overwhelming and daunting getting out and about, especially in the colder months, but knowing that there is an organised activity with friendly faces gives me the motivation to take the children outside to have lots of fun.
I also feel a real sense of community when I am at the Better Place and Forest School Play sessions at Bradford Moor and Peel Park, not only through the friends I have made, but also the staff that lead the sessions as they are so friendly.
My daughters love messy play activities and will spend ages interacting with foam or jelly in the mud kitchen – they never want it to end! The sessions also give us lots of low and no-cost ideas for activities to do at home. For example, we collected lots of natural resources like leaves, twigs, flowers and pinecones and spent ages making nature faces – an activity which is completely free and so much fun!
I love the fact there is so much open-ended play in nature to encourage the imaginations of my daughters, they loved playing a hide and seek game the other day where objects were hidden around the park and they had to find them and bring them back to make a matching pair on the mat.
Some of my friends with children don’t have a garden, so getting out to the park is a really great way for them to experience the nature and greenery that they don’t have at home. As a mum, these sessions are essential for my well-being too – sometimes I don’t have an adult conversation for days until I go to an outdoor play session.
Thanks to these play activities, I am outdoors with my children more than I ever would have been, especially in the colder months. I am always prepared for the weather and have spare clothes, wellies and waterproofs packed. I even have a stock of sand toys to use whenever we come across a Better Place sandpit!”
As you can see from Charlotte’s experience, she and her family really benefitted from being outdoors. Spending time in green spaces or bringing nature into your everyday life is great for babies, children, and adults. It has many benefits such as building essential physical fitness, providing a break from daily routines, helping to reduce anxiety and stress, providing a dose of vitamin D, and supporting emotional and social skills. (3)
At Better Place we encompass all the outdoors has to offer in our outdoor play and activity sessions to benefit children and their parents all year round. All sessions are run in local parks and community greenspaces in the Better Start Bradford area which are easily accessible.
The future of Better Place
To continue developing outdoor spaces for the benefit of families with 0-3s, Better Place have successfully secured a £47,000 grant from Natural England. They will be using this to develop and deliver the 'Nurture Naturelets' project, which will create 52 micro nature sites for families with young children to enjoy across the Better Start Bradford Better Place capital sites.
They will also provide family habitat kits for their gardens/yards. Habitat kits are a mixture of bug hotels, shrubs to attract pollinating insects, bird boxes and hedgehog boxes. Nurture Naturelets will be supported by a campaign and activities, encouraging families with young children to connect with nature locally.
The project will also evaluate to what extent different activities improve people’s connection to nature, and what benefits their participation in the project has had for nature and people. It will also provide an analysis of the conditions required to enable capacity-building for long term engagement in local green spaces for this age group.
The aim is to build an exemplar case study for capacity-building in communities to increase the number of visits and access to local green spaces for a diverse range of families and young children. Nature Naturelets will start in June 2024 and complete in March the following year.
About Better Place
The Better Place project is a Better Start Bradford project that is being delivered in collaboration with Bradford Council, Bradford Trident, Groundwork UK, Public Health, voluntary and community sector groups and local people.
About A Better Start
A Better Start is a ten-year (2015-2025), £215 million programme set-up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.
Five A Better Start partnerships based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham and Southend are supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life. Working with local parents, the A Better Start partnerships are developing and testing ways to improve their children’s diet and nutrition, social and emotional development, and speech, language and communication.
The work of the programme is grounded in scientific evidence and research. A Better Start is place-based and enabling systems change. It aims to improve the way that organisations work together and with families to shift attitudes and spending towards preventing problems that can start in early life. It is one of five major programmes set up by The National Lottery Community Fund to test and learn from new approaches to designing services which aim to make people’s lives healthier and happier
The National Children’s Bureau is coordinating an ambitious programme of shared learning for A Better Start, disseminating the partnerships’ experiences in creating innovative services far and wide, so that others working in early childhood development or place-based systems change can benefit.
Sign-up to join our mailing list
Visit the A Better Start website to find out more.