“Let’s go outside” took on new importance for families during the pandemic. Supervised school recess and organized sports were canceled in many places leaving parents fully in charge of the children’s physical activity. Backyards, driveways, and parks became safer gathering places than meeting indoors, making “going outside” a social benefit in addition to a physical one.
In this episode, Dr. Lindsay Malloy talks with Dr. Genevieve Dunton, a psychologist who studies physical activity and nutrition, and Dr. Mariela Alfonzo, an urban design and behavior researcher, to understand how the time we spend in green spaces impacts our mental, physical, and social wellbeing.
Listen in to hear how the pandemic has affected children’s outdoor time, what inequities exist in who has access to outdoor spaces, how parents can advocate for community green spaces, and advice on how parents can incorporate more outdoor time into their family’s day-to-day activities.
Included in this episode about being outdoors:
- How has the pandemic impacted children’s outdoor time?
- What are aspects of our physical environment that make families more or less likely to spend time outside?
- What does the research say about the mental health benefits to children of being outdoors?
- What can parents do to encourage more equitable outdoor spaces in their community?
- How can parents encourage more outdoor times for their families?
Meet Our Guest Experts:
Genevieve Dunton, Ph.D., MPH is a Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences and Psychology at the University of Southern California. She earned a doctorate in Health Psychology from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master of Public Health from the University of Southern California. Dr. Dunton received post-doctoral training in physical activity, nutrition, and cancer prevention from the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Dunton´s research examines health behaviors related to chronic disease risk in children and adults, with a focus on physical activity and nutrition. She is the Director of the USC REACH (Real-Time Eating Activity and Children’s Health) Lab, whose goals are to develop, test, and apply real-time data capture methodologies and applications, using smartphones and wearable sensors, to better understand the effects of psychological, social, and environmental factors on eating and physical activity. She is the PI on numerous studies funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, author of over 170 peer-reviewed publications, and past Chair of the American Public Health Association Physical Activity Section. Dr. Dunton is also past Chair of the National Physical Activity Plan Public Health Sector Committee and a past member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Implementation of Physical Activity Surveillance Strategies.
Bridging the worlds of academia, practice, and entrepreneurship, Dr. Mariela Alfonzo is an internationally renowned thought-leader and speaker, with 20+ years of experience on the nexus between urban design, behavior, and the quadruple-bottom line. For over two decades, her work has focused on quantifying how the micro-scale aspects of the built environment affect our behaviors, perceptions, and decisions, and in turn, how these impact health, broadly defined to include physical, social, environmental, and fiscal health, to more effectively advocate for better, more spatially equitable urban design. Dr. Alfonzo is the Founder and CEO of State of Place, an AI-driven urban design software startup that helps city-makers make more effective, cost-efficient, and transparent design, planning, and development decisions, which maximize social, health, environmental, and economic value, build community trust, and drive consensus. State of Place helps city-makers harness the power of their street-level urban design data, predictive analytics, and scenario modeling and forecasting tools to create more livable, equitable, sustainable, and economically thriving places. Additionally, in 2014, Dr. Alfonzo was named one of Urban Land Institute's 40 under 40 best young land-use professionals around the globe; is a New Cities Foundation Placemaking Fellow; is a Fulbright Scholar; and a Research Professor at NYU Tandon's School of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in urban planning from UC Irvine, as well as a Masters in Urban Planning, and a BA from the University of Miami in psychology and architecture.
