Gardening Improves a Child's Well-Being & Fitness

Gardening's a wonderful way for children to get moderate-to-high intensity physical activity & to encourage healthier lifestyles for youth. Children can harvest a vast range of benefits from digging, raking, & weeding.

Henry David Thoreau notably criticized modern civilization in Walden on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness from one another & their connection to Nature. Gardening's a terrific way to reconnect. Thoreau claimed that the average man in a civilized society's less wealthy, in practice, than one in an agrarian, farming society. He believed that another benefit of gardening's that it gives each gardener a sense of self-sufficiency or 'self-reliance' by facilitating the ability to fulfill one's basic needs. Thoreau's friend & neighbor in Concord, MA, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also advocated self-reliance & loved to garden. Emerson said, "When I go into the garden with a spade, & dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration & health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands." Having children involved in the process of growing vegetables improves fitness, increases the odds of them eating healthier foods, provides the reward of growing something, & gives young people a sense of self-reliance. If you're a parent or caregiver trying to provide a wide range of rewarding physical activities for a child, gardening can be an excellent source of high-to-moderate physical activity for children & improve well-being.