What is it about?
Time spent outdoors offers a unique mix of benefits. Exposure to natural light helps regulate sleep and circadian rhythms, and more time outdoors in childhood is linked to a lower risk of short-sightedness. Outdoor time is also a major source of daily physical activity: young people spend only about 13% of their time outside, but nearly 30% of their physical activity happens there. Studies suggest that young people’s leisure behaviors have undergone a major change, including a decline in outdoor play and in moving around the neighborhood on their own. Population-wide evidence, however, has been limited. Using time-diary data from over 14,000 American 15- to 19-year-olds collected between 2003 and 2023, this study shows a marked decline in outdoor time among boys. Around 2010, boys spent more than 60 minutes outdoors on an average day; by 2023, less than 40. The drop accelerated following the COVID-19 pandemic. Girls’ outdoor time stayed low and fairly stable, so by the end the long-standing gap between boys and girls had disappeared. Over the same years, computer-based leisure, such as gaming, rose sharply. Boys who spent the most time on it were less likely to go outside at all, and spent less time there when they did.
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Why is it important?
Habits formed in adolescence tend to persist into adulthood, and the trend we observe today may shape young Americans’ physical and mental health in the years ahead. This is a particular concern for boys. Males need more physical activity than females to gain similar cardiovascular benefits. Because so much of young people’s daily physical activity happens outdoors, less time outside may mean less physical activity overall. Indoor exercise has not filled the gap: boys’ indoor physical activity did not increase over the period. Furthermore, spending time outdoors, particularly in nature, during childhood is linked to stronger pro-environmental attitudes in adulthood. Less time outdoors today may therefore affect not only young people’s health but also future support for environmental conservation efforts.
Perspectives
The decline in outdoor time is unlikely to have a single cause. It reflects broader changes in how young people spend their free time. The first is the rise of screen-based leisure. Time online rose sharply among American teenagers in just a decade, and our data show that boys who spend the most time on computer-based leisure spend the least time outside. But screens are only part of the story. “Hanging out” used to be a low-cost, low-effort activity open to almost everyone. Now it seems increasingly crowded out by other activities, and possibly by changes in parenting: children today spend less time outside without adult supervision. Places matter too. Many young people lack accessible “real-world” spaces to spend time in, and access to good-quality parks and green spaces is highly unequal. Reversing the trend therefore calls for a broader reflection on whether young people have somewhere worth going outside, and on how to bring them back outdoors.
Ewa Jarosz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Changes in American adolescents’ outdoor time over two decades, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2605134123.
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