a must read for any human

seriously vital information in an age of poor connection with nature and the outside world

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Recommend!

Loved it! Enlightening look into alternative ways for kids to grow and learn. Every parent should read this!

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Informative and practical

Must read for all modern parents. Time have changed and as much as we remember how much we enjoyed the freedoms of our own childhood we don't really think about the impact the lack of such freedoms have on the kids of today. This book will change the way you look at your kids.

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Fantastic book

Reaffirms what I do for work, informative and certainly food for thought. Great to inform practice. Anyone who works with or has children should read this.

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Robotic

Great book and information that has positively affected how I parent but it sounds like it’s being read by a robot!

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2 people found this helpful

Slightly repetitive but necessary info

This book is an elaborate campaign for getting your kids to play free outside. I could summarize it with the sentence: “Have your kid play free in nature for 5-8 hours daily in order to integrate the senses and promote muscular and neurological development.”

There is quite some repetition in the book but it’s a worthy read nonetheless, especially the first part in where the author explains all about movement, sensory integration and development.

The latter part gives pointers on how to achieve all that outside play. Though I can’t escape the idea that the author’s amount of free play would only be possible for stay at home parents with big houses and gardens, who live nearby woods or mountains and all that.

Oh, and I must say I was surprised to find out there was an actual person doing the narrating because it sounded so computerized.

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Disappointed, couldn't bear to finish it

I had high hopes but as well as clearly having the mentality of "overdiagnosis" of things like autism and ADHD rather than just being more able to identify and support neurodiversity the awful sexism made me turn it off.
At the point they discussed the more frequent episodes of crying by children in classrooms they say something along the lines of it being even more concerning that many of the crying children are boys.
Apparently we are still holding the ridiculous idea that only girls should be allowed to cry, boys should obviously just repress their emotions. Never mind the worrying suicide rates of men clearly bottling up our emotions works.
I know there are lots of benefits to unstructured outdoor play but I couldn't sit through this awful bias to hear that.

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Highly repetitive

I saw this book recommended on a number of blogs and websites so had reasonably high expectations that it would provide some interesting information, reference specific scientific studies, offer practical suggestions, etc. Unfortunately, instead I found the book disorganised, highly repetitive, condescending, and many of the "practical" suggestions completely unrealistic for the vast majority of people.

Disorganised- the author likes to talk about a topic, throw in an unrelated point, go back to the previous topic, switch to a different topic, then add another point or two about the earlier topic.

Highly repetitive- she makes the same points over and over (and over and over) again throughout the book. I'm not talking about giving different examples that demonstrate the same principle in multiple ways; she just repeats the same words again and again.

Condescending- obviously there are times that an author will need to explain a technical term to make it more accessible to the average reader, but this author takes it to the extreme and explains EVERYTHING. For example, she felt it necessary to explain that the "flight" in fight or flight means run away. The tone throughout the whole book often made me feel like she thought her readers were complete idiots. This is made worse by the horrible, almost robotic narrator (I found reducing the playback speed slightly made it marginally more tolerable).

Many of the "practical suggestions" were things like if you are struggling to find time to let your kids play outside, try playing outside after school or on the weekends… gosh, I never would have thought of that on my own. The suggestions that weren't completely obvious were often completely impractical. After going on at length about how many schools and cities have removed merry go rounds because they are deemed too dangerous and fear being sued if a child got hurt she suggests building your own using tutorials from the internet. Or in the chapter about schools she states that children in urban schools can get out just as often as children in rural areas because they can walk to the local opera house… really? Time and time again she makes the assumption that everyone has ready access to huge gardens/yards and wooden areas where children have licence to roam free/build forts/etc. (often not the case in public spaces, national parks, etc.)

I wouldn't recommend wasting your time with this book.

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2 people found this helpful