Spend as much time in nature as possible when you're caring for a baby or toddler

Spending time in green or blue spaces is not only good for your little one's sleep, it's good for your own body and mind!

Regularly spending time outdoors in a green or blue space helps make days with a baby or toddler more enjoyable, and the family's sleep more manageable. The natural environment dials babies and toddlers down, which helps with sleep both day and night.

You could experiment with this for yourself. You don't have to spend a fixed amount of time in nature though - just aim to be in a green or blue space with your baby or toddler as often as you can!

As environmental crises devastate the planet, there is building awareness of the importance of the natural world for a human being's mental health and wellbeing. Today, doctors and other health professionals prescribe 'nature therapy'. This is because regularly spending time outdoors in a green or blue space improves both mental and physical health.

Here are the ways that time spent in green or blue spaces is good for you and your little one. Green or blue spaces

• Anchor us in the present moment (which improves mental health). Your own and your little one's attention is surprisingly easily held by the plants and birds and insects and creatures, by the rocks, hills, water, wind. It's as if we don't need to make an effort! Sometimes people refer to this as 'biophilia', an innate human love of nature and other living things. By actively drawing us into the present moment, the natural environment gives us rest from busy thoughts

• Downregulate our emotions (which improves mental health)

• Expose us to Vitamin D (which supports immune and physical health)

• Keep us physically active (which supports physical and mental health)

• Support social connection, if you are meeting up with others there (which supports mental health)

• Provide rich sensory motor nourishment for your little one, so that your time together is easier and more enjoyable (which supports your mental health).

Some ideas for connecting with the natural environment when you're caring for a baby or toddler

• Are you a gardener? It only takes a tiny pot of soil on the kitchen bench or patio to put a seed in - then you've become a gardener!

• You could join a local community garden and show up (without expecting to do much gardening - there's time for that later. Most gardeners enjoy having women or carers with babies and toddlers in their midst.)

• You could join a local creek or land restoration group. (Same comment as with the previous idea.)

• You could start birdwatching, download a bird app, and play birdsongs for your baby or toddler.

• You could begin to identify frog calls, by downloading the Frog ID app if you're in Australia or something similar elsewhere, and play frog calls for your baby or toddler.

• You could gather leaves and other objects to make art. Or you could just gather leaves and sticks and stones to admire them and put them in the house somewhere (to be intermittently enjoyed and destroyed by little exploring fingers).

It's possible to remain connected to the natural world in urban environments

You don't need to have a national park or a beach at the end of your street to enjoy the natural environment. My daughter is raising her children in New York City (NYC), one of the most densely populated metropolises in the world, yet she spent a lot of time in green spaces when she had babies - and still does now that the children are older, too.

NYC courtyards and gardens are diminutive, but often lovingly tended. My daughter's pot plants are compactly placed on the fire escape landings or in window boxes outside the apartment windows (since she doesn't have a patio). Since they were babies, my NYC grandchildren have been keen observers of squirrels and northern cardinals and other living things, mostly through the glass of apartment windows. The nearby park, though covered in asphalt, is sheltered by honeylocust and maple trees. They live in a pedestrian culture, walking the streets under the maples and plane trees past other people's tiny densely planted gardens and hedges all day long, even through the snow (which the children love) - to the shops, to kindy, to school, to music class, to the park, to friends.

A reflection on finding green and blue spaces from my own memories of caring for little children

I think back on those days when I was caring for a baby or toddler or both, and on the many hours I spent with them in back yards, either our own or someone else's. I remember long hours spent in parks chatting with other parents amongst all that following around and bending over and lifting up of a toddler - or just standing there allowing a baby to gaze at the older children playing.

I remember how I lugged them in carriers, backpacks, strollers along local walking tracks, frequenting urban creeks and whatever parks we could get to. Sometimes this was social, in the company of other women with small children, or the children's father. Sometimes it was just me and the kids.

I didn't let the weather stop me (unless it was really bad). I walked wherever I could. Walking helped fill in the days, to be honest. When I walked, I was caring for my body, caring for my babies (because they loved it), and enjoying the environment in which I lived: enough reason to live a day, I told myself bravely.

It's almost like I was preparing, tending the soil, lying fallow for a time, gearing up for the rest of life ahead of me. It was just a few years, and the days seemed so slow (and sometimes unbearably boring). But I'm grateful that my children remain deeply connected to me, still, and I like to believe that some of this is because of the simple physicality of those early days, wandering through the streets and parks and backyards of our life together. Of learning how not to be bored, by paying attention to life's small things. I got very social with other women in the area who were primary carers of babies. I grew veggies. (I haven't really pulled this off again, not since those years.) My toddlers loved mucking around in the dirt, planting things, pulling out weeds. Not that they knew the difference between things to plant and things to pull out but who cared, I shoved the ones I meant to keep back in and patted the soil hopefully. Good-enough gardening.

Still, today, spending time in nature is very important to me. I try to walk or run by Maiwa, the Brisbane River, every day. Contact with the natural world reminds me that I am just one small part of an unimaginably vast universe (or series of universes), and that the great powers of life play up through my body and soul in ways that I am often unable to control. I'm reminded that everything about being alive is vastly bigger than me, and yet also infiniteismally more detailed. I am one tiny little node - me and my babies were just one tiny little node - in the great and mysterious web of life. All I can say is that time in green or blue spaces reminds me that even though I live in the midst of so much mystery, somehow I belong, and it’s all going to be alright.

I've got much better at remembering this as I've got older. I hope you get the hang of it quicker than I did.

Selected references

Britton E, Kindermann G, Domegan C, Carlin C. Blue care: a systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. Health Promotion International. 2020;35:50-69.

Ivers R, Astell-Burt T. Nature Px: nature prescribing in general practice. Australian Journal of General Practice. 2023;53(4):183-187.

Nguyen P, Rahimi-Ardabili H, Feng X, Astell-Burt T. Nature prescriptions: a scoping review with a nested meta-analysis. medRxiv. 2022:doi:10.1101/2022.1103.1123.22272674.

Thomas T, Aggar C, Baker J, Massey D, Thomas M, D'Appio D, et al. Social prescribing of nature therapy for adults with mental illness living in the community: a scoping review of peer-reviewed international evidence. Frontiers in Psychology. 2022;13:1041675 doi: 1041610.1043389/fpsyg.1042022.1041675.

Walker-Mao C, Sachs AL, Wilson JW. Systematic review of nature-based interventions for perintal depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Maternal and Child Health. 2024:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-10024-03989-10991.

Recommended resources, acknowledgements, and selected references for the articles in the Caring for you section of The Possums Sleep Program are found here, including selected research evaluations of both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Compassion-focused Therapy in the perinatal period.