A walk in the park could help your ADHD child
For children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anything that requires concentration – for example, homework – can be difficult. Now new research suggests that a simple, inexpensive remedy may be the great outdoors.
A study conducted at the University of Illinois shows that children with ADHD demonstrate greater attention after a 20-minute walk in a park than after a similar walk in a downtown area or a residential neighborhood. Researchers took children on walks in three different settings – one especially ‘green’ and two less ‘green’ – and kept everything about the walks as similar as possible. Some children took the ‘green’ walk first; others took it second or last.
After each walk, the children’s attention span was tested by having them listen to a list of numbers are said aloud and then recite them backwards. “We compared each child’s performance to their own performance on different walks,’ says study co-author Faber Taylor, “and when we compared the scores for the walks in different environments, we found that after the walk in the park children generally concentrated better than they did after a walk in the downtown area or the neighborhood area. The greenest space was best at improving attention after exposure.”
What this particular study tells us is that the physical environment matters, says fellow study author Frances E. Kuo. “We don’t know what it is about the park that seems to improve attention, but the study tells us that even though everything else was the same – who the child was with, the levels of noise, the length of time, the time of day, whether the child was on medication – if we kept everything else the same, we just changed the environment, we still saw a measurable difference in children’s symptoms.”
During the walks, all of the children were un-medicated – those participants who normally took medications to control their ADHD symptoms stayed off their medications on the days of the walks. Interestingly, Faber Taylor and Kuo found that a ‘dose of nature’ may be as helpful – at least for a while – as a dose of stimulants. “We calculated the size of the effect in our study and compared it to the size of effects in a recent medication study,” says Faber Taylor, “and we were surprised to see that the dose of nature had effects the same size or even larger than the dose of medication.” What remains to be seen is how long the effects of a dose of nature last.
“Some of the previous survey research suggests a relationship between children who regularly play in green spaces and how severe their symptoms are. Children who have regular exposure to green spaces have milder symptoms overall. So that's hinting that there may be a persistent effect,” says Kuo. She adds that while there are hints that the regular doses of nature work long term – that you can expose a child to the same green outdoor settings day after day and still get a benefit – the science isn’t advanced enough to give parents a strict formula: “We can’t say for sure, ‘two hours of outdoor play will get you this many days of good behavior’ but we can say it’s worth trying, and we can say that as little as 20 minutes of outdoor exposure could potentially buy you an afternoon or a couple of hours to get homework done.”
Faber Taylor believes it would be easy to add a dose of nature to a child’s routine. “I could imagine parents hearing about this research and immediately applying it – just trying it out – taking their child to the park either when their child’s symptoms are exacerbated or as a regular routine. It’s not that hard to incorporate, especially if they have a green backyard or if they can get to a neighborhood park. Again, we can’t say for sure that it would work for any given child but there’s probably very little risk involved in encouraging your child to play outdoors and seeing if their symptoms improve.”
She also says that the benefits of a dose of nature don’t apply just to children with ADHD. “We all experience times when we’re mentally fatigued – times when we’re less able to focus and do tasks and get easily distracted. The evidence suggests that natural settings can benefit everyone, even children (and adults) who haven’t been diagnosed with ADHD.”
The study is published in a recent issue of the
Journal of Attention Disorders.