Last Family Day long weekend – sledding with my family in Alberta on a beautiful sunny day!

It is amazing how quickly change can happen. This time last year I spent Family Day long weekend in Alberta visiting family. It was a beautiful sunny weekend, and we spent the weekend walking around the neighborhood, playing at the parks, and sledding down the one big hill in the community. If only we would have known that just a few weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic would hit the world and the world would enter a period of isolation. The profound effects on the mental and physical health of citizens worldwide would become more prevalent and we would start rethinking our build environments.

After the first few weeks of being isolated at home it was becoming clear that not only my mental and physical health were beginning to suffer, but my children were much more sensitive to the effects of being cut off from the world. Our backyard garden, local playgrounds and trails became our place of refuge and demonstrated the risks involved in not engaging in outdoor play.

The lockdown pushed our family to live a sedentary life in front of screens for a few weeks; in that short amount of time, I noticed my children were becoming increasingly unhappy and their suffering was becoming profoundly more acute. The pandemic brought light to the importance that playgrounds play in children’s lives.

The playgrounds were not the same and we had to be creative about how to play in these spaces safely. I could see the shift in the state of their mental health change for the better once we started to explore our community and spent more time amongst nature. Many parents found the playgrounds to be the perfect place for engaging in distanced social interaction. Parks have become more than just a place for children to play, they are also a place for physical and mental wellbeing; proving that our community parks are more important than many of us realized.

This weekend has given me time to reflect on what really matters…

There is a longstanding shortage of funding for community parks which have become an essential amenity since the COVID-19 outbreak and without these parks, where do children go to play? Parks create a sense of community and opportunities for freedom and social interaction that is essential for good health. Now is the time to start showing the government the importance of investing more into the creation of child friendly cities. The webinars, research, and articles I am reviewing for this internship are showing me different ways that we can get children more involved in urban planning that will create an inclusive and healthy community for all.  Children really are the future!

– Missy