Let Children Roam  Free Everyone agrees that playing outside keeps children thinner. The loss of opportunities for outdoor play is one of the main causes of childhood obesity. What is more remarkable is the growing evidence that children's mental health and emotional well-being are enhanced by contact with the outdoors, and that the restorative  effect appears to be strongest in natural settings. Researchers are convinced of the depth of the connection between children's well-being and the environment, claiming that contact with nature may be as important to children as good nutrition and adequate sleep. But now children seem to get less touch with outdoor activities. The root causes of the dramatic loss of children's freedom lie in changes to the very fabric of their lives over the last 30 years or so. The growth in road traffic, alongside poor town planning and shifts in the make-up and daily rhythms of families and communities, have left children with fewer outdoor places to go. These changes coincided with the "culture of fear": a generalized anxiety about all imaginary kinds of threats, even though children are statistically safer from harm now than at any point in human history. These physical, economic and social changes and fears have been made use of by manufactures and advertisers, whose products and messages both reinforce the logic of keeping children virtual prisoners, and force us to compensate them in the only way our cash-rich, time-poor society seems to know: by spending money on them. Government must bear some of the blame for keeping children prisoners indoor, through their promotion of planning policies that favour cars over communities and profit over people. The real planning crimes lie in housing companies occupying attractive parks and green spaces, and in town plans that force families to depend largely on their cars. There is no doubt that traffic danger, unlike stranger danger, is a real threat to children and a constant worry for parents.  Around 100 child pedestrians  are killed every year, a figure that puts the UK near the bottom of Europe's child road safety league. It is no surprise that figures show a steady fall in children walking or cycling over the last twenty years, to the extent that while over 90% of children own a bicycle, just 2% cycle to school. Also, 30% of children aged eight to ten never play outside without an adult watching over them. In a single generation, the "home habitat" of a typical eight-year-old----the area in which children are able to travel on their own- has shrunk to one-ninth of its former size. Health experts have even created a new word, "obesogenic", to describe those aspects of our lives that make us fat, and top of the list is the design of streets, towns and cities. Playing outside is just as important as   _   .
dieting to lose weight releasing emotions getting enough sleep exercising the mind