Many kids love spending time outdoors. For schoolchildren, it’s the best place to enjoy their time off from school. It’s also the perfect venue for riding bikes, playing ball with friends, and engaging in free play. On the other hand, babies and toddlers find delight in exploring natural elements, such as plants, animals, and insects. Even in the earliest stage of their life, small children indulge in free movement and exploration as they spend time outdoors.
However, allowing your kids to play outside your home may not be as easy or convenient if you don’t have a public park, a playground, or a free play space where you live. This problem is quite common for those who reside in highly urbanized areas with few green public spaces available. As a result, many kids opt to stay home and play non-physical games.
Children need a variety of activities where they can learn and grow, and spending time playing outdoors is equally important. They need regular exercise to care for their health and well-being. Aside from this, exposure to fresh air and sunlight is beneficial for growing children.
To help your kids stay active at home, you can consider taking the outdoors to your backyard by installing artificial grass. You can then design it the way you want to make it a play area that your kids would love. If you’d like to know how an artificial grass play area can be beneficial for the young members of your household, here are some points you’ll find insightful:
1. It Encourages Free Play And Exploration
Many children love to run, roll, jump, and make sounds. It’s their way of expressing their thoughts and feelings, and they use their active imagination while engaging in free play. Apart from physical exercise, free play is a mentally stimulating experience for kids. However, these movements and sounds may become too disruptive when done indoors. Hence, children may feel less inclined to engage in free and imaginative play as they spend time at home.
Children learn to be cautious of their surroundings as they grow up, especially inside the household. They become aware of activities that are allowed and not allowed according to the house rules, especially if their indoor play area has space restrictions. Most of the time, the only game options allowed indoors are those that kids can play safely in the living room or the bedroom. Because of this, more and more kids nowadays spend so much screen time and play non-physical games on their gadgets, such as tablets.
Artificial playground grass can serve as a dedicated space for physical activities for your child. It encourages kids to move around as they like while playing games they love. Moreover, you’ll be able to keep your home clean and orderly while preventing accidents or damage. With a better environment, your kids will want to stay active even while at home.
2. It Allocates Dedicated Space For Physical Exercise
If you want to encourage your child to engage in physical exercise, you can start by creating a dedicated space for them in the comfort of your own home. For instance, you can find indoor and outdoor areas spacious enough for movements, like hopping, jumping, or lying down. Then you can install an artificial grass patch that will serve as its base.
The artificial grass will help make the activity corner more comfortable and visually appealing for your child. It can serve as an added safety cushion as well to offset the impact of falls if any. You can even place an exercise mat on top of the grass for added comfort, especially for activities that require lying down. This way, your child can quickly move and change positions while following exercise routines as needed.
With a cozy and appealing activity area, your child’s exercise session will look and feel like playing a game, which will make it a more exciting and memorable activity to partake in.
3. It Enhances Your Outdoor Living Space
Spending time in your outdoor living space can be an effective way to make your kids stay active too. There are many fun games and activities that they can try in your backyard, and many of them are physical games that involve running, jumping, and other movements.
Here are some examples of fun outdoor activities that your children can do at home:
- Pitching a tent or building a fort
- Participating in a scavenger hunt and other activities that require exploration
- Playing outdoor games, like hopscotch, hide and seek, or dodgeball
- Cooking camp favorites, like S’mores and hotdogs
- Picking flowers and fruits
- Playing with pets
- Tending to plants
To make these activities more interesting, you’ll need to make your backyard, patio, or garden more livable and comfortable for your children. One way to do this is by enhancing the green space in your backyard. For instance, you can add more plants, shrubs, and trees to provide shade and greenery. Consider adding pollinators, edible plants, and fruit trees for more variety as well.
Furthermore, installing artificial grass can enhance your green space in a cost-effective and low-maintenance way. It’s because you can easily maintain its appearance without the need for mowing, watering, or fertilizing. On top of that, adding artificial grass to ground areas with less coverage will make your backyard more visually appealing and offer more space for activities.
4. It Allows Kids To Appreciate Nature
Being closer to nature allows children to use their imaginations and think of ways to have fun and explore their surroundings. As kids are naturally curious, they’re inclined to take an interest in the various elements of nature, such as flowers, plants, trees, and animals, among others. You can also take the opportunity to teach younger children about the different things that they discover so that they’ll learn to appreciate nature early on.
On the other hand, spending more time in the garden or the backyard may help divert their attention from gadgets, toys, and television. They’ll be able to focus more on what they can do with playmates or other family members. Overuse of gadgets may be an unhealthy habit that can be harmful to children, and this is why encouraging them to spend time with nature will be an ideal alternative.
5. It Promotes Interaction
Experts believe that interaction and socialization are essential in developing a child’s personality and character. So, parents are encouraged to let the children participate in group activities that allow them to mingle with others. Your little one will benefit from building relationships with same-aged children outside of school within the extended family and the community. These interactions happen mainly by meeting other kids in playgrounds, parks, and other outdoor play spaces.
Many parents opt to host playdates at home when venue options are limited. However, it can be inconvenient or uncomfortable to have other children over if you have limited space indoors. In this case, having a play area covered with artificial grass outdoors will be an ideal solution.
Even with space restrictions, a green patch on your outdoor living space can still serve as a safe and comfortable play area where everyone is free to roam around and interact with one another. With a great space like this, you’ll be able to host small gatherings in your home where your child can make new friends and create wonderful memories with their peers.
6. It Supports Relaxation
After engaging in physical activities, your children will need enough time for rest and recreation, so they’ll be able to regain their energy and do things that they enjoy. Having a good balance of activities will help children develop good habits for a healthy lifestyle as they grow older.
Your artificial grass area can also be helpful for this purpose after playtime. For instance, it can be used as a sitting area in your outdoor space where your children can enjoy some quiet time for relaxation. As they take a break from studies and house chores, they can read a book, play with their pet, or just lie on the grass and enjoy their free time. Instead of watching TV or playing with gadgets, they can discover other activities that can be more interesting and stimulating.
While walking barefoot, your kids will enjoy the relaxing texture of the artificial grass too. Many users find the surface similar to walking on a natural grass pitch. This contact with natural texture is believed to benefit your health and wellness and feature relaxing properties. Thus, the play area becomes a comfortable leisure space where your children can recharge healthily.
Conclusion
Because of the proliferation of gadgets in recent years, the younger generation spends less time on physical activities, which can be detrimental to physical and mental wellness. Heavy screen time can hinder growth and development and affect their ability to learn and cope with emotions.
Therefore, to promote the health and development of children, parents and guardians need to think of ways to encourage them to be more physically active even while at home. When they stay active, children will learn the importance of exercise and physical activities and live a healthy and balanced lifestyle as they grow up.
