Explore the Research Behind Nature‑Based Childhood
Families often tell us they feel the difference when their children spend meaningful time outdoors—calmer afternoons, deeper curiosity, more confidence. This page gathers a small selection of articles and studies to help explain why.
While we’re sharing only a handful of resources here, they represent just a glimpse of a much larger body of evidence. In
Google Scholar alone, parents can find over two million research papers exploring the benefits of nature for children’s learning, regulation, social development, and overall well‑being.
Whether you’re new to nature‑based education or ready to dive deeper, these curated readings offer a clear, evidence‑informed window into the many ways nature supports school‑age children.
Could Exposure to Everyday Green Spaces Help Treat ADHD? Evidence from Children's Play Settings
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The purpose of this research was to conduct a systematic review examining the impacts of nature play on the health and developmental outcomes of children aged 2–12 years. From the modest body of evidence identified (n = 16) the findings suggest that nature play may positively impact upon aspects of children’s health and development, particularly PA and cognitive development. One of the more significant findings to emerge from this review was in regard to PA outcomes. Physical activity, when comparing nature play to traditional outdoor play spaces, was shown to offer similar PA outcomes. The importance of this finding supports current claims that engaging in outdoor play is more effective in increasing PA in children in both contexts. Notably, these findings also suggest that nature play positively impacts upon children’s cognitive development, particularly in affording imaginative play. These findings together may suggest that the behaviours children engage in outdoors may be an important characteristic when comparing nature play and traditional play spaces.
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In this systematic review, we summarised and evaluated the evidence for benefits of immersive nature-experience on children and adolescents' mental, physical and social health. We identified 84 publications that met the inclusion criteria. Conditional support for benefits of diverse immersive nature-experience was found for self-esteem, self-efficacy, resilience and academic and cognitive performance. Correlational research evidenced higher levels of physical activity in natural environments
The main result of our study is that the children in the forest class show a steady decline of cortisol during the school day which was not observable in the control group. This is in accordance with a healthy child’s diurnal rhythm, and its statistically significant decline of cortisol from morning to noon. This effect is constant over the school year. The children in the classroom setting did not show this effect on either measurement day. However, our data gave no empirical hints to explain that interesting phenomenon. Despite the mentioned limitations of the current study, the cortisol data are consistent and valid. Further, the data supports the conclusion that outdoor education had a positive effect on stress responses in children in our intervention group, in contrast to indoor teaching in the control group. These novel findings, interesting as they are, only represent a first step towards a deeper understanding of the “stress in school” phenomenon measured with biological parameters.
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Relation Between the School Environment and the Children's Behaviour
The aim of this study was to investigate the behavioural outcomes in outdoor education compared with the traditional indoor school condition. 12 children were observed intensively during three days with outdoor education and four days with the indoor condition. Results showed that different organization of the educational environment affected the children’s behaviour in various ways, such as levels of physical activity, concentration, being at ease in the situation, verbal and motor agitation, emotional expressions and communication. Outdoor education influenced behavioural changes in a positive direction. During outdoor education, there were only minor differences between leisure time and pedagogical time, with the most desired result in leisure time. In classroom, the difference was enormous, with the most desired results in leisure time.
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Effects of an outdoor education intervention on the mental health of schoolchildren.
The results point towards a small but non-significant improvement in mental health at the experimental school while adjusting for demographics. However, this effect was significantly moderated by gender: boys generally fared better than girls at the intervention school, relative to the reference school. The results indicate that it may be important to address gender issues when educational programmes are implemented in schools.
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