“Inside Kids Cannot Possibly Get the Exercise They Need.”
Unpacking the conservative Christian ideology embedded in 1000 Hours Outside.
When lockdown hit in 2020, A., a mom of two who lives near me in New York’s Hudson Valley, had a five-year-old and two-year-old. “My kids are very physical,” she says. “We were living in a townhouse with no yard and every playground around us had shut down. My children were literally bouncing off the walls.” And making holes in them. A. didn’t want to destroy their rental, plus her next door neighbor complained constantly about the kids’ noise. “If my kids knocked over a Magnatile tower, he’d be banging on the walls and calling the landlord,” she recalls. In desperation, A. declared them all “feral woodsmen” and made a rule that they weren’t allowed indoors between 10am and 5pm. “I was like, ‘I need to make Being Outside my new job,’” A. says. “I approached it like a job, and it definitely felt like one.”
Every morning A. made the same peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, put the same Goldfish crackers in baggies, filled all the reusable water bottles and packed it all up with the same juice boxes, Clif bars, diapers, changes of clothes and assorted other gear. Then she would drive herself and the kids off to various hiking trails. Our part of the Hudson Valley has a lot of beautiful hiking, but also: Trails were the only place to go. “We just kind of existed out there,” she recalls. She would hike with her toddler on her back and her backpack of snacks and diapers on her front until her five-year-old got tired of walking. Then they’d play Uno or A. would unpack some action figures and matchbox cars to entertain them. “We dug holes. Beat trees with sticks. There were idyllic moments like mud pie sand tadpoles and the whole Hudson Valley spread beneath us at the triumphant peak of Popolopen Torne,” A. says. “But there was also a lot of just sitting around literally waiting for the sun to move through the sky.”
A. didn’t invent her outdoor lockdown lifestyle. She was executing the vision of 1000 Hours Outside, an Instagram account with over 669,000 followers, a blog, and “a movement to reclaim childhood, reconnect families and live a fuller life,” all started in 2013 by Ginny Yurich, a homeschooling mother of five in Michigan. Before Covid, A. was loosely aware of 1000 Hours Outside, but classified it as the same kind of “aspirational parenting” as cute bento box lunches. “It seemed like if I were able to get my shit together enough, that would be the kind of thing I would strive to do,” she says. But once lockdown began, she joined the official Facebook group and started to dig in. “It was very, very attractive to think that maybe if I just gave my kids more ‘wild,’ it would fix something,” she explains, remembering the allure of 1000 Hour catchphrases like “the wild calms the child!” “It was attractive to think there was a solution that was within my reach at all.”
If you are a millennial parent of a certain demographic—maybe especially if you hail from a very nature-y place, where everyone camps and rock climbs and wears fleece, like the Hudson Valley or Colorado or California—you have likely seen some #1000hoursoutside content, either directly from Yurich, or from a mom you know, cheerfully setting some 2024 Family Intentions. That intention is exactly what it sounds like: To spend 1,000 hours outside per calendar year. Yes, that is over 41 entire days. Or if you average it out over 365 days, 2.7 hours outside per day, every day — no matter the weather, no matter your work schedule or school schedule, or health status. Of course Yurich doesn’t expect people to spend nearly three hours outside every day, or to pack up their families for a camping trip that lasts as long as Noah lived on the ark and Jesus wandered the forests. Instead, she teaches families to track their time using elaborate coloring page-style charts or an app, and to plan for days when they can spend four to six hours outside, to make up for the days when they have to do less.
A. chafed against the tracking expectation almost immediately: It was hard enough just getting outside every day with her kids and all their gear, she didn’t need to come home and color in worksheets too. Then she started to realize just how many 1000 Hours Outside fans were also homeschoolers like Yurich. “The message became: Actually, all the systemic problems of American parenting can be solved by YOU, Mama,” A. says. “Just quit your job, stop having any needs or wants of your own, and never, ever, ever, stop striving to reach external metrics of achievement.”
This attitude isn’t just a vibe A. was getting from a few judgy commenters; it’s baked into the movement’s entire ethos. We talked about 1000 Hours Outside on the most recent Indulgence Gospel because several of you asked: Wait, is this a diet? And the answer is a clear yes, as I explained on that episode. But when you all began sharing your own 1000 Hours experiences in the comments, I realized the whole phenomenon was a much bigger story and started to dig in. And I learned 1000 Hours Outside is not just a diet—it’s also conservative Christian propaganda masquerading as a trendy parenting philosophy.