Our Story

Welcome to 1000 Hours Outside!

Here you’ll find inspiration and information to help you set aside screens and get outside. Nature play aids children is every area of development. If you want your child to thrive academically, socially, emotionally, and physically you have to build time into your life to spend outdoors.

1000 Hours Outside is a global movement designed for any age child (or adult) and any environment. Join the journey and watch your life transform before your eyes. Nature holds tremendous power for each and every one of us at any age or stage.

We track a lot of things these days - steps, calories, budgets, frequent flyer miles etc - why not track something so beneficial to our children as well? There are so many things that compete for our time so it's easy for something like this to get back-burnered. We found that if we spread these 4-6 hour chunks out over a few days (shooting for roughly 20 hours a week) it would take us to averaging about 1,000 hours of outside activity a year. That seems insane, maybe - we get it. But did you know the average American child spends 1,200 hours a year in front of screens? Now THAT seems insane to us, but hey, we get it - parenting is hard and sometimes those screens 'seem' like such a welcome reprieve from the chaos. We certainly are not militant about it and we don't take a 'no screens ever or you will surely die' approach either. But we would, quite vehemently, argue that nature- big, beautiful, bountiful nature - is the absolute and very BEST reprieve for you and your children. Honestly, they don't even compare!

So we hope you enjoy this blog, our thoughts, pictures and words of encouragement; as that's precisely it's intent: to encourage families to try to at least match (and hopefully one day far surpass!) the average amount of screen time a child will be immersed in every year, by immersing yourselves in the most high def screen imaginable - the great outdoors.

Cheers,
Ginny

Ginny Yurich, founder

Hi! I'm Ginny. My husband Josh and I are parents to five children ages 12 and under and we reside in Southeast Michigan. Throughout our journey of parenthood we have consistently seen city, county, and state parks, as well as trails, campsites, and nature-scapes in general, nearly devoid of children most of the time. About five years ago we started to ask ourselves a simple question: Why? With so much natural beauty all around us (even though we take it for granted at times) it seemed counterintuitive that so many outdoor spaces were just empty.

With that question of “why” still unanswered, we did some research and read that striving for a goal of 4-6 hours of outside time within a day (what!?!?) was an ideal amount of time for children to spend, well, outside. This seemed excessive to us and quite frankly, way too long - most children's activities are at most an hour (like a library program) and, many times, much less. BUT, we tried it. And you know what? We have not looked back. Our greatest times as a family, and my most successful times mothering almost exclusively point back to these fully immersive nature days. In time, we began to find that there is benefit upon benefit to this wonderful time outside.