The question of health is important and has been subjected to a lot of research. Playgrounds are important for us. If you leave kids on their own to engage in a natural space with trees and rolling hills and boulders and the things we recall as nature, they'll be there for just over an hour. An hour and four minutes seems to be average. If you send them to a plastic and steel space, one of those post-and-platform things, then they're there for 19 to 22 minutes, so the amount of time that they engage is significantly increased in nature.
ParticipAction is one of our partners, and ParticipAction has now realized that it's not just field sports or organized sport that makes a difference to the health of our kids; it's this unstructured play. These are the spaces we're talking about, because that's where they play.
Active Healthy Kids Canada just last year designated nature as one of the main predicators of the health of our children. It is one of the simpliest, easiest, cheapest ways to make a difference in the health of our children.
If you look at a standard playground or standard green space or even these paved spaces, the children engaging in physical activity are predominantly the A-type kids. About 40% of the kids are getting more than 80% of the physical activity levels. If you make this shift and they spend time in nature, all of a sudden it levels off, so the children you most want to learn about nurturing, those aggressive king-of-the-castle kids, are the ones who actually start to calm down, and the ones on the sidelines who aren't participating normally—the ones with high obesity rates, disabilities, cultural biases, social collaboration problems, phobias—are the ones whose activity levels exponentially increase.
Even though the activities are the same in both, these natural spaces provide us with the opportunity to hit the ones we most want to engage.